Architecture and movement : the dynamic experience of buildings and landscapes [1. publ. ed.] 9780415725347, 0415725348, 9780415725354, 0415725356, 9781315764771, 1315764776

Table of contents :
Moving through buildings and landscapes : the designer's perspective --
Movement as experienced by the individual --
Movement as social and shared --
The representation of movement.

Citation preview

ARCHITECTURE AND MOVEMENT

The experience of movement, of moving through buildings, cities, landscapes and in everyday life, is the only involvement most individuals have with the built environment on a daily basis. User experience is so often neglected in architectural study and practice. Architecture and Movement tackles this complex subject for the first time, providing the wide range of perspectives needed to tackle this multidisciplinary topic. Organised in four parts, it: •

• • •

documents the architect’s, planner’s or designer’s approach, looking at how they have sought to deploy buildings as a promenade and how they have thought or written about it; concentrates on the individual’s experience, and particularly on the primacy of walking, which engages other senses besides the visual; engages with society and social rituals, and how mutually we define the spaces through which we move, both by laying out routes and boundaries and by celebrating thresholds; analyses how we deal with promenades that are not experienced directly but via other media, such as computer models, drawings, film and television.

The wide selection of contributors includes academics and practitioners, and they discuss cases from across the US, UK, Europe and Asia. By mingling such disparate voices in a carefully curated selection of chapters, the book enlarges the understanding of architects, architectural students, designers and planners, alerting them to the many and complex issues involved in the experience of movement. Peter Blundell Jones is a British architect, historian, academic and critic. Educated at the

Architectural Association School, London, he taught at the University of Cambridge and London South Bank University before becoming Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. He is a prolific author on architectural history and theory and he has written monographs on the work of Erik Gunnar Asplund, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring, Günter Behnisch, Peter Hübner and the Graz School. He contributed to and co-edited Routledge’s Architecture and Participation. Mark Meagher’s research and teaching focus on applications of digital software and devices

in design education, data visualisation and fabrication. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture.

DE LA WARR STAIR 1934–5

Mendelsohn was one of Germany’s most successful Modernist architects before the rise of Hitler, with several large urban buildings to his credit, and the De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill is his only public building in Britain, executed with the help of Serge Chermayeff. He sought to make the external massing of his buildings dynamic to sympathise with the flow of traffic along the street, and he also concerned himself with the experience of people moving through, which reached a peak of expression in his staircases. That at Bexhill is among the best. Long, horizontal terraces open to the sea, but you enter from the other side via a cross-hall. Immediately, the great semicircular stair is visible at the other end, with the sea view beyond, a vertical foil to the general horizontal emphasis. The stair serves as hinge in the plan, and its tower is the climax of the whole seafront. The flights cantilever in concrete from level to level, leaving a graceful sweep beneath which blends into the next floor. The whole stands within a drum of glass treated as an open cage, beyond which, after a narrow gap, terraces project as half-rings supported on four thin columns. Their lipped edges add delicacy, and their balustrades add a further layer. Hanging in the stair’s hollow centre is an elaborate, multi-stage light fitting, and below it a circular celebratory plaque on the floor. The rising balustrades are topped by a round rail that invites the grasp. People choose the stair over the added lift, appreciating its visual drama. The experience is enhanced in reality by one’s movement and binocular vision, which induce interplay in the layers. This stair received Mendelsohn’s most concentrated design effort, and the building is unthinkable without it. Peter Blundell Jones

De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on Sea, by Erich Mendlesohn and Serge Chermayeff, 1934–5, the main stair

Cover image

Source: Photography by Peter Blundell Jones

ARCHITECTURE AND MOVEMENT The dynamic experience of buildings and landscapes

Edited by Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Architecture and movement: the dynamic experience of buildings and landscapes/edited by Peter Blundell Jones, Mark Meagher. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Space (Architecture) – Psychological aspects. 2. Landscapes—Psychological aspects. 3. Walking – Psychological aspects. I. Blundell Jones, Peter, editor of compilation. II. Meagher, Mark, editor of compilation. NA2765.A73 2014 720 – dc23 2014015063 ISBN: 978-0-415-72534-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-72535-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76477-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

Contributors Acknowledgements

ix xii

Introduction Peter Blundell Jones

1

PART 1

Moving through buildings and landscapes: the designer’s perspective

9

1.0 Introduction to Part 1 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

11

1.1 The classical authors Peter Blundell Jones

19

1.2 Viollet-le-duc on the medieval cloister Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

23

1.3 Charles Garnier: Le théâtre, Chapter 4, Staircases Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

25

1.4 Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

35

1.5 Architectural promenades through the Villa Savoye Flora Samuel

44

vi

Contents

1.6 Gunnar Asplund: ‘pictures with marginal notes from the Gothenburg Art and Industry Exhibition’, 1923 Translated by Eva Berndtsson and Peter Blundell Jones

50

1.7 Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement John Sergeant

55

1.8 Hans Scharoun and movement: the Kassel Project 1952 Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

65

1.9 Move to the light David Lea

72

1.10 Odysseus and Kalypso – at home Peter Wilson

81

PART 2

Movement as experienced by the individual

91

2.0

Introduction to Part 2 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

93

2.1

The primacy of bodily experience Peter Blundell Jones

96

2.2

From health to pleasure: the landscape of walking Jan Woudstra

102

2.3

Architecture of walking Doina Petrescu

112

2.4

Soundscape and movement Jian Kang

121

2.5

From foot to vehicle Peter Blundell Jones

128

2.6

Moving round the ring road Stephen Walker

135

2.7

The geometry of moving bodies Alan Lewis

142

2.8

Pedestrians and traffic Ben Hamilton-Baillie

149

Contents vii

PART 3

Movement as social and shared

157

3.0

Introduction to Part 3 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

159

3.1

Space as a product of bodily movement: centre, path and threshold Peter Blundell Jones

164

3.2

Rievaulx and the Order of St Benedict Translated by Abbot Parry

172

3.3

Lucien Kroll: the door Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

177

3.4

The Japanese tea ceremony Lucy Block

178

3.5

The East Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty Peter Blundell Jones, Jianghua Wang and Bing Jiang

185

3.6

The automated gardens of Lunéville: from the self-moving landscape to the circuit walk Renata Tyszczuk

3.7

Lauriston School Ann Griffin

196

204

PART 4

The representation of movement

213

4.0

Introduction to Part 4 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

215

4.1

House construction among the Dong Derong Kong

220

4.2

Movement and the use of the sequential section by Enric Miralles and Mathur and da Cunha Kamni Gill

230

From models to movement? Reflections on some recent projects by Herzog & de Meuron Cornelia Tapparelli

239

4.3

viii Contents

4.4

Filmic Space: an encounter with Patrick Keiller Peter Blundell Jones

244

4.5

Diasporic experience and the need for topological methods Nishat Awan

251

4.6

Open design: thoughts on software and the representation of movement Mark Meagher

4.7

258

The matter of movement Phil Ayres

266

Conclusion Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

277

Bibliography Index

287 295

CONTRIBUTORS

Nishat Awan is co-author of the 2011 book Spatial Agency: Other ways of doing architecture. She is currently a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. Phil Ayres is an architect, researcher and educator. He joined the ranks at CITA (Centre for Information Technology and Architecture, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen) in 2009, after a decade of teaching and research at the Bartlett School of Architecture, in London, and completing his PhD in Denmark at the Aarhus School of Architecture. He has also been a partner of sixteen*(makers) since 1998. He is author of the 2012 book, Persistent Modelling: Extending the role of architectural representation. Lucy Block completed her MA studies at the University of Sheffield in 2011 and was

subsequently nominated for the President’s Medal Dissertation Award. She is currently practising with McDowell+Benedetti, an award winning architectural practice based in Central London. Peter Blundell Jones is a British architect, historian, academic and critic; he holds the position of Professor at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. Kamni Gill is a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield Department of Landscape and a practising

landscape architect, with numerous built designs for residential and public spaces in France, Switzerland and the United States. Before starting her own practice, she worked with Hargreaves Associates, Gregory Lombardi Design and the Bioengineering Group. Her design work has been published in Azure, Landscape Architecture and Landscape Australia. Ann Griffin is a Director at Meadowcroft Griffin Architects in London, an award-winning

architectural, urban and landscape design practice based in Kentish Town, London. Ben Hamilton-Baillie is an architect, urban designer and movement specialist from Bristol,

United Kingdom. He is the director of his own company, Hamilton-Baillie Associates Ltd, where he provides consultancy advice on traffic and urban renewal.

x Contributors

Bing Jiang has just completed her PhD on Chinese gates and doors at Sheffield supervised

by Peter Blundell Jones. Jian Kang is Director of the Acoustics Group and Professor at the University of Sheffield

School of Architecture. He obtained his first degree and MSc from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Patrick Keiller is a British film-maker, writer and lecturer. His films include London (1994),

Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010). Derong Kong is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. David Lea is Principal at David Lea Architects and winner of a RIBA award in 2011 for his

Wales Institute for Sustainable Education (WISE). Alan Lewis is a Research Associate with the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. Mark Meagher is a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. He completed his MArch at Harvard University and his PhD at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Doina Petrescu is a Professor at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture and a

member and co-founder of the design cooperative aaa (atelier d’architecture autogéré). aaa’s work has recently been awarded the European Prize for Urban Public Space – Special Mention 2010 and the second place at the Prix Grand Public des Architectures contemporaines en Métropole Parisienne competition in 2010. Flora Samuel is Professor at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. She is an

internationally recognised expert on Le Corbusier and her previous books include Le Corbusier: Architect and feminist, Le Corbusier in Detail (nominated for the RIBA International Book of the Year award 2008), and Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade. John Sergeant is an architect, former Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge and Emeritus Fellow of Robinson College. Cornelia Tapparelli is a practising architect with the firm Kawamura Ganjavian and a

research and teaching assistant at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She has worked as an architect and researcher with Herzog & de Meuron and the Swiss Architecture Museum. Renata Tyszczuk is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Taught Masters

Programmes at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. She has an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Architecture and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She is a founding member of the Agency Research Centre at the School of Architecture and, together with Professor Doina Petrescu, is the founding editor of Field:, a journal of architecture.

Contributors xi

Stephen Walker is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Research at the University of Sheffield

School of Architecture. He trained as an architect and has worked for architectural and design practices in London and Madrid. He completed an MA in Architecture and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham, and a PhD at the University of Sheffield. Jianghua Wang is at Tianjin University in China and was a visiting fellow at Sheffield during

2012–13. Peter Wilson is a Principal of the distinguished international practice Bolles+Wilson, based

in Münster. In 2009, he received the President’s Prize from the Australian Institute of Architects. Jan Woudstra is Reader and the principal historian at the Department of Landscape,

University of Sheffield. He received his PhD from the Department of Geography of University College London.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The initial material for this book was the lecture series ‘On the Move’, with invited external speakers, held at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture in 2011, under the headship of Professor Flora Samuel, who was also among the speakers and has contributed a chapter. We thank the school and the university for providing resources for that event, and for supporting the subsequent gathering of material, which also included contributions from postgraduate students and the oral and written reactions of the senior students, at whom the series was aimed. Jan Woudstra of our Department of Landscape was involved from the start, helping to provide a broader view, and it was extended yet further by Kate Pahl from Education and Steve Pool and Richard Steadman-Jones from English. Oral lectures do not necessarily make book chapters, and print imposes severe limitations on visual material, and so not all contributions to the lecture series are included, but we thank Florian Kossak, Bing Jiang and Hui-Ju Chang for spirited contributions that enlivened the debate and helped us on our way. Our centre for East–West Studies and its seminar series embraced many discussions about traditional Chinese use of space and contrast with the West, and we thank two visiting scholars, Tan Gangyi and Wang Jianghua for enlightenment about this. We would like to thank colleagues and students in the Digital Design + Performance Group for their comments as the content of the book developed, particularly Chengzhi Peng, Tsung-Hsien Wang and Philip Langley; and David Gerber and Andrew Witt for their contributions of ideas at an early stage of this project. For help with redrawing illustrations we thank Diego Carrasco and Claire Blundell Jones, and, for use of their photographs, Tim Soar, Russell Light and Margherita Spiluttini. Myrtle O’Connor helped with the transcription of lectures, and School Photographer Peter Lathey with the recording of lectures and processing of visual material. For generous cooperation to reproduce material from their archives we thank the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Architekturmuseum of the Technische Universität Berlin, Swedish Museum of Architecture, Lucien Kroll, The King’s Fund, Manchester Libraries, Clem and Anne Louise Fisher, Herzog & de Meuron, and Mathur and da Cunha. Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

INTRODUCTION Architecture and the experience of movement Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 00.1

The whole town of Martel, Lot, France, as seen from the south east in 1972

One of the surviving gates, west side

FIGURE 00.2

FIGURE 00.3

Street in the centre of Martel, next to the Hotel de Ville

Source: All three photographs by Peter Blundell Jones

2 Peter Blundell Jones

The chief distinction of the little town of Martel in the Lot, France (Figures 00.1–00.3), is that, having been an important medieval centre, it saw centuries of relative neglect, so that its population by the mid twentieth century was smaller than it had been in the sixteenth.1 Therefore, the town has remained visible as an entity, with old roads leading to original gates, a central marketplace and chateau, tower houses that marked the skyline for prosperous merchants, and a huge church to welcome pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. You can buy postcards of the church and chateau, but the place is best appreciated on foot as an unfolding sequence of experience, in which transition from country to suburb to major and then minor streets is accompanied by progress across thresholds and through layers of fabric, major buildings playing an appropriately dominant role against a background of ordinary ones. Many, if not most, towns were like this before the twentieth century, and their perceived aesthetic merit was often recorded by artists from nearby hills, the towered skyline a matter of local pride. Their organic ordering went largely unrecognised, until Camillo Sitte began to theorise about it in the 1880s, just at the moment when town planning was starting up as a discipline. Simple though his theories were, they depended on the idea of the experience of movement, of how one was drawn to walk down a street by a landmark or by how the square at the end unfolded as an outdoor room (Figures 00.4 and 00.5). Although some of his followers used his principles in new work to great effect,2 the very title of Sitte’s book, Town Planning on Artistic Principles, led to it being relegated under the banner of the aesthetic, and that is more or less where it has remained.3 Meanwhile, cities grew remorselessly, methods of transport changed, and movement, both in cities and within buildings, became dominated by the mechanical disciplines of ‘circulation’, necessary to link the zoned functions famously declared in the Charter of Athens.4 On the street, motor vehicles took over, and traffic planning became the main priority, with one-way streets and ring roads making it necessary to head north to go south, or east to go west, in a counterintuitive way, so that, at the end of the twentieth century, satellite navigation arrived only just in time to save drivers from total confusion. Outside the city, crossing the country no longer meant moving from town to town, because most towns and villages were bypassed, and motorways followed direct routes despite the topography, so that the inherent logic and long tradition of what Le Corbusier had dismissed as ‘the donkey path’ was lost. In consequence, the landscape was deprived of its old coherence and experienced in an entirely new way.

FIGURE 00.4

Plan of the centre of San Gimignano, as presented by Sitte in his book Town Planning of Artistic Principles

FIGURES 00.5

Typical sketch from Sitte’s book, showing the effect of a tower in Bern

Introduction 3

At a smaller scale, experience within buildings changed in a parallel manner. As they grew bigger and more complicated, they were entered by labyrinths of blind corridors, and, as lifts anaesthetised all sense of vertical progression, way-finding became entirely a matter of signs and numbers, or, in desperate cases, of following painted lines on the floor or wall. It now seems ironic that these changes took place against a background of talk from leading architects, more explicit than ever before, about the experience of movement: talk about the excitement of four dimensions, about architectural promenades, about the thrills of flowing space. By contrast, precious little is recorded about the experience of movement in Vitruvius and his Renaissance followers, and yet concerns about sequence and progression are evident in many, if not most, buildings from antiquity and the Renaissance, and also in the so-called vernacular, and so perhaps the lack of discussion is not so much because it was ignored, as because it was taken for granted. Some of the worst experiences of movement in modern life occur at airports – surprisingly, in view of the priority necessarily given to circulation. This is perhaps because the considerable logistical problems tend to be dealt with in an entirely mechanical way, which fails to overcome the need to traverse considerable distances on foot. A particularly grim example is the long underground travelator linking terminals at Frankfurt (Figure 00.6), which offers circulation pure and simple, as if the rest of life has been put on hold. At the other end of the scale is the airport shopping mall, now designed to confuse: a deliberate labyrinth, breaking the rules of efficient circulation to trap anxious passengers hurrying towards their planes and to persuade them to part with their money (Figure 00.7). No wonder Jacques Tati took the airport as the main target for his satire on mechanised life, Playtime, or that Marc Augé has seen airports as the very epitome of the non-place.5 Whether one enjoys the promenade of the street, walking for pleasure in parks and gardens, or the ascent of the ramp in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the experience of movement through architecture and through the larger urban or natural landscape has too often been treated as an ‘aesthetic’ extra, which is perhaps why we put up so meekly with circulation pure and

FIGURE 00.6

FIGURE 00.7

Frankfurt airport, the underground travellator

Manchester Airport, sales labyrinth

4 Peter Blundell Jones

simple. Too often, the aesthetic is seen as opposed to the useful or purposeful, and yet life is not so easily subdivisible. It is vital to our well-being that we know where we are and where we are going, in both an immediate, literal sense and in a longer-term, metaphorical sense. How these two are connected, this book will gradually reveal.

The four parts This book is divided into four parts, to produce a shifting perspective for the reader. The first, revolving around what Le Corbusier called the ‘promenade architecturale’ (see Chapter 1.5), looks at movement through space as it has been conventionally discussed and interpreted by architects, planners and landscape architects. We offer a relatively short and highly selective survey of this potentially vast subject, with entries chosen for their variety and sensitivity. They reveal a long-standing concern for route and organisation, for progressions in space that are legible, enjoyable, memorable, and above all that make sense. Through their contrasts of place and period, these texts also reveal how much unfolding architectural spaces have to do with changing social habits and assumptions. But the designer as author is seldom dictator, and the inhabitants may not share his or her interpretation, or behave as expected. Besides, ordering and intentions may not be consistent, for the fabric of the city can be created by many anonymous hands, and so-called natural landscapes remain without an author. We ‘read’ all such places nonetheless, for, as with texts, paintings, music, films and other works of art, the environment always has a reader, whose role it is actively to construct an interpretation in finding his or her way, even when none was intended. The second part of this book therefore concerns this process of ‘reading’, and how this is bound up with walking or with other ways of traversing the territory. Critical theory has occasionally gone so far as to dismiss the author altogether, setting the entire responsibility with the reader, and the French Situationists, with their dérives, proved the point by walking routes wholly unintended by planners and unrelated to the inherited hierarchy of the city (see Chapter 2.3), finding unlikely byways and shortcuts, new experiences with new meanings. In this sense, the city is not so much ‘designed’ as ‘discovered’, and constantly rediscovered in different forms as read by the visitor or inhabitant. And movement does not have to be pedestrian, for, if reading of route first takes place on foot, it continues in different forms in the train, the car, the plane. These modern experiences of transition have become increasingly prominent, and walking, once taken for granted, has in many environments become more difficult and even impossible, so that making sense of places on foot as the original or primary experience can be said to have deteriorated. It is hardly surprising, then, that walking has simultaneously become something of a cult and has even been declared an art.6 Although this is helpful in drawing new attention to the experience, it could also add to its perceived distance from everyday life. We argue, in contrast, that walking remains essential: it is the basis of who and where we are, the means by which we gather and separate, by which we first traverse territories and give them definition. Our understanding of space begins with the body, and the body is the first geometer, journeys being also a primary metaphor for the construction of memory and narrative. The second part of the book ends by comparing walking with other forms of locomotion, with the nature of roads and how we perceive them, and with the role of senses other than the visual, such as hearing, including the haptic experience of the body in motion.

Introduction 5

Even if the active designer and the reader of spaces are both temporarily individuals, no individual exists in isolation. The third part of the book is about the social, and the way moving through space is shared through rituals, whether in the form of parades and pilgrimages or of our more numerous and mundane daily interactions, which can still be called ritualistic.7 The built environment is organised socially and is full of signals that carry the instructions for social conventions. At the start of Erving Goffman’s classic The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, he describes arrival at a Scottish croft and the preparation of the inhabitant before opening the door to greet the visitor – ‘to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’, as T.S. Eliot put it.8 This example is just Goffman’s introduction to a long series of entries that soon involves his foundational metaphor: frontstage versus backstage. In a restaurant, frontstage is the polite dining room, backstage the kitchen; in a garage, frontstage is the smart office where you pay money to a man in suit and tie, backstage is the workshop where men in greasy overalls disembowel your car. The metaphor can be applied to almost any building complex, differentiating front from back, formal from informal. There must be thresholds of some sort between these kinds of space, and further thresholds into the outside world, to mark divisions and transitions. Entering and leaving are not just physical acts but differentiations of territory, and also the basis of all our metaphors about inside and outside. Therefore, crossing thresholds is a fundamental experience and is tied up cross-culturally with what are metaphorically called rites of passage: birth, initiation, marriage and death.9 Even when thresholds are physical entities, their power and meaning are due to the rules under which they operate. The examples in Part 3 of this book are, therefore, about the relationship between space and social rules, about how buildings and landscapes frame rituals: rituals seen in the broad sense of shared and repeated human activities. Every society requires an established relationship between spaces and rules, with conventions that may be more local or more general. The final part of the book deals with movement by proxy. When we talk about or illustrate movement through space, we need to represent both space and time, through oral or written descriptions, drawings of different kinds, physical models, photography, film or computerised projections. Obviously, such media limit and condition what can be expressed and communicated, and some offer advantages in one direction, some in another. Texts are good for narrative, unfolding in time, but they stress singular experience and fail to describe spaces as drawings can. Maps are always highly selective, tending to prioritise the values of their makers and commissioners and following conventions that are necessarily in some ways exclusive. Plan and section drawings show the anatomy of a built environment but need to be read with some skill to put it back into three dimensions, even more to imagine a fourth. Film, at first, seems an ideal medium to transmit what is visible and, at the same time, to allow narrative sequence, but its angle of view is restricted, and it has developed its own set of convincing but deceptive, techniques of cutting and splicing to create imaginary place, aided by clever concoctions of sound that further encourage our suspension of disbelief. The conventions of plan and section have recently been somewhat subsumed in the computer by the three-dimensional model, which predicts the location of every part of a building design on cartesian coordinates with astonishing precision, and brings new efficiency and understanding to the processes of calculation and construction. However, although the model resides reliably in the circuits of the computer, magically available for specialists to work on, it has to be reduced to a visible form to be seen, normally on a two-dimensional

6 Peter Blundell Jones

screen. Plans and sections have, in consequence, become less iconic, while the computer flythrough, adding a fourth dimension, has gained in popularity. It leaves the imaginative skill required by drawings to one side, but gives the odd impression of not having one’s feet on the ground. It also plays into the hands of forms of perception developed and made familiar by the medium of television, creating a virtual world detached from our physical being and lacking all perceptual information apart from the visual, supplemented only sometimes by the auditory. A now rather old and familiar filmic convention illustrates this well: the transporter room of the Enterprise in Star Trek,10 which, as we soon deduce, allows Captain Kirk and his crew instantly to pass from spaceship to adjacent planet. What we generally do not ponder is why they need to go into the transporter room at all, given that they can be picked up from the planet at any point. And if the system works so well, why walk anywhere, and why bother to have doors on rooms? The implied loss of threshold and of self-propulsion here reveals the real passivity of the body as spectator watching the film, while the fizzing away of bodies on the screen is an efficient convention for a theatrical change of scene, avoiding the need for extensive and time-wasting footage about descent to the planet. The experience of movement through space, once seemingly natural, straightforward and inevitable, has been neglected or sidelined in much architecture and planning over the past century, because of the great technical and economic changes that have overtaken our civilisation. There has been a consequent sense of anomie and alienation, a rash of dystopias in the visual arts, and confusion for many about where to be and where to go. At the same time, in many forms of discourse, metaphorical space has taken over from bodily space as if the two were the same, but ‘political space’ does not mean a building or a landscape, and, when people say ‘don’t go there’ or ‘I’m not in a good place’, it is an idea rather than a location that they are avoiding, a state of mind that is troubled. A better understanding is, therefore, urgently needed, and also a shift away from the idea that the experience of movement in buildings or in landscapes might be ‘just an aesthetic issue’. We are by no means against beauty and attempts to increase its occurrence, but we deeply regret its relegation to the margin, to something extra, ‘subjective’, ‘personal’ or merely ‘a matter of taste’. The subjective is often shared, and even taste is a social thing, as Pierre Bourdieu effectively showed in Distinction:11 it is part of a shared reality. We try, in this book, to relate the experience of movement in architecture to larger and more fundamental questions about how we can understand the world, find our place in it and maintain our health and well-being.

Notes 1 Many places could have served: this one was chosen because it had been studied in detail by Peter Blundell Jones in the early 1970s, also the period of the photos. See ‘The country town’ in Cantacuzino 1975, pp. 41–9. 2 Theodor Fischer in Germany, for example, but also Raymond Unwin, planner of Letchworth. 3 See Collins 1965. 4 The Charter of Athens was the result of the CIAM meeting of 1933: the tenets can be found in Conrads 1970, pp. 137–45. 5 Augé 1995. 6 Richard Long and Hamish Fulton are obvious examples. Rebecca Solnit discusses this in her History of Walking (Solnit 2007); Geoff Nicholson’s book is called The Lost Art of Walking (Nicholson 2010). 7 The Random House Dictionary includes the morning coffee break and handshakes among rituals, and Mary Douglas, in Deciphering a Meal (Douglas 1975), made good case for considering meals in general as rituals.

Introduction 7

8 Goffman 1971, pp. 18–19. The T.S. Eliot quotation is from ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Eliot 1920. 9 See van Gennep 1960 (original 1908). 10 The US television and film science fiction series conceived by Gene Roddenberry in 1964 and first shown in 1966, which ran to 726 episodes (Wikipedia). 11 See Bourdieu 1984.

FIGURE 1.0.1

Villa Malaparte 1937, by Adalberto Libera, on the coast of the Italian island of Capri overlooking the Mediterranean, a site discussed by Peter Wilson in Chapter 1.10

Source: Photo Russell Light

PART 1

Moving through buildings and landscapes The designer’s perspective

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1.0 INTRODUCTION TO PART 1 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

We begin this book by looking at movement from the point of view of designers and their apologists, to reveal what they have said about it and what were their stated intentions. The contributions range from traditional works of theory intended to propagate ways of doing architecture to reflective statements by current practitioners, and for convenience we have placed them in chronological order. Being only a quarter of the book, this section can hardly be comprehensive: indeed, it reveals a potentially enormous field that could grow into an encyclopaedic work. Here, we can only dip into this ocean of material, choosing for variety of period and of approach, while also presenting some of the cast of the invited lecture series at Sheffield that first prompted us to undertake the book.1 An obvious start was the earliest book of theory and the foundation of the classical tradition: Vitruvius. In Chapter 1.1, he is considered, along with the writings of his Renaissance followers Alberti and Palladio. Remarkable here is a lack of discussion about the experience of movement, except in terms of the most basic convenience. There is, in contrast, vastly more on the orders and correct proportions. Yet, reading between the lines and adding the interpretations of modern classical scholars, one sees that progress through buildings and awareness of the visual sequences must have been essential. The reasons for the lack of discussion seem to have been twofold: first, that these books were dedicated to advice for the architect on how to achieve a building as a physical object, with all its symbolic and ornamental apparatus, and, second, that the standard building types and technology were relatively stable and well established, along with the habits that sustained them, and so the general sense of propriety in the ordering of spaces could mostly go unquestioned. Questions of route and progression must also have been important in medieval buildings, especially in the transitions from the profane to the sacred in Gothic cathedrals, and yet here there is even less specific theory, and one has to read between the lines of The Rule of St Benedict or examine the spatial arrangements from the plan of St Gall to deduce what must have been important.2 The greatest retrospective apologist for medieval architecture was Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc, whose ten-volume Dictionnaire Raisonné, with its wonderful engravings, though pragmatic and rational in tone, is still an essential gateway into that world,3 and we reproduce in translation in Chapter 1.2 his description of Cloître, Cloister. Its position

12 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

and squareness are well described, but not so much its essential centrality and echo of the paradise garden. When it comes to the contemplative role of the cloister as refuge from the world and centre of virtue, he resorts to quoting a medieval source, adding an inner sample of earlier history. The beginning of architecture as an academic subject, with attendant detailed theory, belongs to France and the eighteenth century, moving from the Académie Royale to the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Ecole Polytechnique.4 The courses at the Beaux Arts grew into a model of architectural education that prevailed worldwide, until the takeover by the modern movement about 60 years ago with its Bauhaus-based courses. The rise of architectural theory so engendered included ideas about movement explicitly described by the word marche, which was used as a critical term in judging the all-important Beaux Arts competition projects from at least 1828. Arthur Drexler explains: The word marche meant, literally, ‘spot where the foot is placed’, ‘action of placing one foot forward, then the other, to proceed in some direction’, as in the marching of troops. Figuratively, as a ‘manner of proceeding according to a certain order’, it was commonly used to denote the sequence of images in a poem or of action in a novel, the progress of a piece of music or of the moves in a game of chess. . . . It must have denoted the experience of the building under analysis imagined as if one were walking and looking down the principal enfilade. Marche did not mean the abstract layout of the plan, for which the Section d’Architecture used the term parti. Like marche, parti was derived from a common phrase, prendre parti (to take a stand). Parti designated the conceptual disposition . . . whether a theater foyer have a main staircase at the centre or two at the sides. The parti pertained to the architect, the marche to his design, so the Section d’Architecture could note, on the one hand the originality of a competitor’s parti and on the other the grandeur and simplicity of the project’s marche.5 Charles Garnier’s Opéra in Paris is one of the most important products of the Beaux Arts tradition and of Beaux Arts thinking. Built by imperial command, it was also one of the major monuments of its time, and it played a key role in Haussmann’s reorganisation of the city. It further marked the high point in the evolution of opera as a social art and ritual, becoming the international model for the building type. The compelling reason for including the building here is Garnier’s remarkable book Le théâtre, which describes its design and operation and the intentions behind it in great detail, starting with the entries and vestibules and moving on to the lobbies and stairs, before dealing with auditorium and stage. Readers will notice that as much attention is given to the experience of the crowd as to the performance they are coming to see, and that concern for convenience of circulation is more than balanced by an explicit desire to bring about the optimum social ritual. With our limited space, we have chosen as a sample in Chapter 1.3 about half of Chapter 4, Staircases, because the main stair is the very heart and centre of the building. In England of the same period, which had been enriched by the Empire and industry, both financial resources and architectural effort went into the country house, again an elaborate social organism providing stages for persons of various genders and classes to play out their roles.6 It was scrutinised at the end of the century by Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927), an attaché to the German Embassy from 1896, who went home to write the best and most detailed history of the period, Das englische Haus, in three volumes, published in 1903 and

Introduction to Part 1 13

1904.7 He admired particularly the architects of the Arts and Crafts Movement, presenting their honest simplicity as a nascent functionalism, and after his return he became an adviser to the Prussian government, and then he was the first president of the Deutsche Werkbund from 1910 to 1916. He was simultaneously the successful architect of several country houses in and around Berlin, following the principles established in his famous book, but drawing also on German vernacular and building methods.8 Another book, Wie baue ich mein Haus (How I build my house), published in 1917, was intended for the guidance of clients. It shows concern with room relationships, including how one moves from one room to another, and concentration on the social niceties of a society still dependent on servants. We include as Chapter 1.4 two short chapters, 12 and 13, from the middle of the book, about how the house is approached and about the circulation within it. With Chapter 1.5, we move on 12 years to the modern movement. Le Corbusier merits first place for his explicit description of the promenade architecturale and his exemplification of it in the Villa Savoye of 1929, perhaps his most famous work. Every architect knows the folded ramp at the heart of the house, which leads from the ground-floor entrance to the main rooms of the first floor, then into the outside air and on up to the roof and a framed view (see Figure 1.0.1):9 it engendered half a century of ramp fantasies from other architects. In everyday use, such a long ascent or descent might prove irksome, displacing inhabitants on to the staircase, but its dramatic effect imagined from drawings and photographs, the main means of its dissemination, is unforgettable. As well as demonstrating the conceptual rethink presented by the five points, the Villa Savoye as published represented the interior rather

FIGURE 1.0.1

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye 1929, on the upper ramp Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

14 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

than the façade as the essential architectural experience, prompting Sigfried Giedion to adopt it as an example of the fourth dimension.10 In our text in Chapter 1.5, Flora Samuel, who has already written a whole book about the promenade,11 sets Le Corbusier’s statements in the general context of his work and theory, adding layers of meaning, as well as noting some of the paradoxes. The Swedish modernist Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940) was born the same year as Le Corbusier and initiated a modernist revolution under his influence with the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930,12 but Asplund had already built his more classical Stockholm City Library of 1920–8, with one of the most powerful entry sequences in twentieth-century architecture (Figures 1.0.2–4).13 The building centres on a clerestory-lit circular drum that grows out of a larger cube, and it is entered by an axial staircase penetrating through several layers to the very centre, arriving in front of the librarian’s desk. Asplund had been interested in spatial

FIGURE 1.0.2

FIGURE 1.0.3

Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm City Library 1921–8: view on approach

Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm City Library 1921–8: view on the main stairs looking towards the great drum and librarian’s desk

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.0.4

Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm City Library 1921–8: Asplund’s interior perspective of the first project, confirming that this progression was a main concern Source: Asplund Archive, Swedish Museum of Architecture, Stockholm

Introduction to Part 1 15

sequences from the start of his career, and they occur throughout his work, especially at Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery, whose design he shared with Sigurd Lewerentz. However, this article of 1923 does not concern his own work: rather, it examines that of colleagues building at the Gothenburg Exhibition. His critique, written for Sweden’s leading architectural journal of the time, concentrates almost entirely on the effects of the spatial sequence. We make no suggestion of ‘influence’, for the Stockholm Library concept was already long determined. Rather, it is a case of common interests: Asplund was also, in this year, just completing Skandia Cinema, the work of his most dedicated to powers of illusion. It was Frank Lloyd Wright who brought into modern architecture the ‘breaking of the box’, drawing on his experiences of Japan and the shifting, overlapping spaces of traditional East Asian architecture. He also stressed, throughout his career, the great importance of adapting a building to its site and defining the approach, but it is surprising how little mention there is in his writings of the actual experience of movement within buildings.14 Perhaps, godlike, he envisaged the series of possible spatial relationships as a whole, taking it for granted that there was a choice of routes. Nonetheless, in Chapter 1.7, John Sergeant, the long-standing British historian of Wright’s work, finds plenty of progressions that must have been intended, showing how specific examples work.15 That the German modernist Hans Scharoun (1893–1972) was interested in the experience of movement through his buildings is evident from early in his work, with experiments in planning buildings to follow movement flow.16 If his floor plans for the design of a stock exchange in Königsberg of 1922 (Figure 1.0.5) reflect a somewhat literal functionalism, by 1932, with the building of the Schminke House at Löbau, he was using diagonal staircases to control movement in a visual manner and thinking predominantly in terms of experienced progressions of space (Figure 1.0.6).17 Under the Third Reich, he was restricted to designing private houses, which, perhaps because of the style restrictions, brought more concentration on routes and views and planning with skewed site lines. This work paved the way for a new public architecture post-war, which culminated in the famous Berlin Philharmonie of 1963 (Figure 1.0.7), with its extraordinarily fluid foyer dubbed by Frei Otto, ‘room of a thousand angles’, where people parade to see and be seen, and staircases demand exploration. The ideas realised in Berlin had developed through an earlier competition project for Kassel Theatre in 1952, in collaboration with Hermann Mattern, and we include as Chapter 1.8 part of Scharoun’s text describing the competition project. It reveals his concern with movement, not only inside but also outside the building, for the approach and relation to the city were part of the arriving audience’s unfolding visual, spatial and haptic experience, which continued through the foyer and into the auditorium. The last two chapters in this section derive from lectures by currently practising architects, invited to describe experiences of movement in their own buildings and in works of other architects that they have admired. David Lea, known for his 1980s buildings at Cirencester Agricultural College and the more recent Wales Institute for Sustainable Education (WISE), designed in partnership with Pat Borer, has long been a proponent of local, natural, lowenergy materials, but his work has also always shown a deep concern with site, route, view and the need to admit daylight to every room. In his lecture, he started off describing his experience of route in medieval, Renaissance and oriental examples and then presented a walk through the WISE building, discussing the spaces, views and light. A condensed version, with a reduced set of images, is included as Chapter 1.9.

16 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher FIGURE 1.0.5

Hans Scharoun, plan of Königsberg Stock Exchange, purchased competition project 1922; the flowing lines followed circulation Source: Scharoun Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

FIGURE 1.0.6

Hans Scharoun, plan of Schminke House 1932; the 26º angle shift due to the site became the inspiration for the diagonal stair, hallmark of all his later work Source: Scharoun Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

FIGURE 1.0.7

Hans Scharoun, foyer of the Philharmonie Concert Hall, Berlin, 1963 Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

Introduction to Part 1 17 FIGURE 1.0.8

Bolles+Wilson, Münster City Library, view into the alleyway aligned on old church spire Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

Peter Wilson, originally from Australia but educated at the Architectural Association in London, set up a practice in Germany with his wife, Julia Bolles. Bolles+Wilson made its name with Münster City Library, completed in 1993, a building greatly concerned with its urban context, even to the point of splitting the accommodation and creating a new pedestrian street that anchors it to the axis of the adjacent Lamberti church (Figure 1.0.8).18 Bolles and Wilson’s work has always been conceived around themes of space and movement, and, as with Lea, the exploitation of views and admission of daylight are managed wherever possible. In his lecture, Wilson spoke of these things in relation to several of their projects, reflecting on the considerable oeuvre so far produced, but, for his written contribution to this book, he reworked a particular strand of the lecture that tied together the Villa Malaparte, Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le Mépris that was shot there, the story of Homer’s Odyssey that lay behind it, a house by Bernard Rudofsky, author of the MOMA Exhibition Architecture without Architects, and various other things. He presents many layers of metaphor and overlapping themes, with a refrain about territorial displacement and exile, and life as a journey. Wilson shows us the experience of movement at larger scale and with a longer trajectory, and so Chapter 1.10 makes a fitting conclusion to this section.

Notes 1 An invited lecture series organised by Peter Blundell Jones was held at the Sheffield School of Architecture in 2011, including contributions from Flora Samuel, Florian Kossak, Steve Pool, Richard Steadman-Jones, Doina Petrescu, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, Jan Woudstra, Renata Tyszcuk, David Lea, Kate Pahl, Lucy Block, Hui-Ju Chang, Patrick Keiller and Peter Wilson. This was the same format as that which gave rise to our earlier book, Architecture and Participation (Blundell Jones et al. 2005), and we held such themed series over many years. Beside its educational value for the students, it allows concentrated discussion and exchange on the topic, and provides a good springboard for the more permanent record of a book. 2 An elaborate plan of the monastery of St Gall was preserved by accident when the back of the parchment it was drawn on was reused for a legal document. With no substantial buildings surviving, it has yielded crucial evidence about what a Carolingian monastery was like. The plan was known and discussed by Viollet-le-duc, but studied in much more detail in the mid twentieth century by Walter Horn and Ernest Born; see Horn and Born 1979. 3 Viollet-le-duc 1878. 4 An excellent general summary can be found in Saint 2008. 5 Drexler 1977, pp. 163, 185.

18 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

6 See Girouard 1993. 7 Published in German by Wassmuth, Berlin: first English edition edited by Dennis Sharp, The English House, Crosby Lockwood and Staples, 1979. 8 Julius Posener was the principal apologist for Muthesius and activist for the preservation of his houses in the 1960s and 1970s. He edited a catalogue in German, (Akademie der Künste 1977), in which he writes on the rules of the house on pp. 8–9, and made him a central figure in his book From Schinkel to the Bauhaus, Posener 1972. 9 For Peter Blundell Jones’s analysis, see Blundell Jones 2002, Chapter 7, which is entirely devoted to the Villa Savoye. 10 In Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion 1941. 11 Samuel 2010. 12 See Blundell Jones 2006, and also Rudberg 1999, devoted entirely to the Stockholm Exhibition. 13 Also arguably the source for Aalto’s entry sequence at the Viipuri Library; see Blundell Jones 2002, Chapter 8, pp. 123–37. 14 See, for example, The Natural House (Wright 1954), where it might have been expected. 15 Sergeant 1976. 16 See Blundell Jones 1995. 17 See Blundell Jones 1995, and also Flora Samuel and Peter Blundell Jones (2012) The making of architectural promenade: Villa Savoye and Schminke House, Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 108–24. 18 See Peter Blundell Jones (1994) Brought to book, The Architectural Review, February, pp. 41–50.

1.1 THE CLASSICAL AUTHORS Peter Blundell Jones

As the sole surviving general text from Roman times about how to make architecture, Vitruvius’s Ten Books of Architecture is an obvious starting point for this enquiry, particularly as it was also the model for Renaissance authors such as Alberti, Serlio and Palladio, whose books are definitive for the classical tradition. However, direct discussion of the experience of movement is surprisingly thin among these authors, especially Vitruvius himself, though the benefits of walking in the open air do make a bold appearance in the chapter on Colonnades and walks in Book V: The space in the middle, between the colonnades and open to the sky, ought to be embellished with green things; for walking in the open air is very healthy, particularly for the eyes, since the refined and rarefied air that comes from green things, finding its way in because of the physical exercise, gives a clean-cut image, and, by clearing away the gross humours from the eyes, leaves the sight clear and the image distinct. Besides, as the body gets warm with exercise in walking, this air, by sucking out the humours from the frame, diminished their superabundance, and disperses and thus reduces that superfluity which is more than the body can bear. . . . Therefore . . . there is no doubt that cities should be provided with the roomiest and most ornamented walks, laid out under the free and open sky.1 In his book, Walking in Roman Culture, Timothy O’Sullivan reveals that there is rather more to this than a casual health fad. The Romans considered it important to maintain the proportions of dry and humid in the body as part of gender identity.2 O’Sullivan also discusses at length the importance of walking and talking together for conversation, discussion and advice, and the significance in such a stratified society of the temporary equality between two men walking side by side. He cites Vitruvius’s advice that houses of noblemen should include atria, peristyles and spacious walkways, ‘because in their homes they provide both consultations on public affairs and private decisions and opinions’.3 However, for the most part, Vitruvius himself remains rather pragmatic in tone, as, for example, when advising on passage in and out of the theatre:

20 Peter Blundell Jones

The different entrances ought to be numerous and spacious, the upper not connected with the lower, but built in a continuous straight line from all parts of the house, without turnings, so that the people may not be crowded together when let out from shows, but may have separate exits from all parts without obstruction.4 And similarly: ‘colonnades must be constructed behind the scaena, so that when sudden showers interrupt plays, the people may have somewhere to retire from the theatre.’5 Vitruvius and his successors portray the practical business of being an architect as remarkably broad and all-encompassing, covering matters such as how to determine the quality of a site by examining the guts of animals, how to char the ends of wooden piles or how to build fortifications. However, when it comes to designing buildings, their primary concerns are with the orders and which to apply where, or the relative positions and proportions of rooms according to some numerical formulation convenient for reapplication. A general argument much repeated between them holds that the building should be like a body, well proportioned in its parts, and the use of whole-number proportions with a base of ten or twelve is evidently convenient for transferable prescriptions, whatever its proposed aesthetic advantages.6 But all the classical theorists give the impression that the content and purpose of buildings are well understood and not to be challenged, so that, when movement of persons is mentioned, it is usually, again, in a practical vein. This is Alberti on transitional spaces: Vestibules, halls and the like places of public reception in houses, ought to be like squares and other open places in cities: not in a remote private corner, but in the centre and the most public place, where all the other members may readily meet: for here all lobbies and staircases are to terminate; here you meet and receive your guests. Moreover, the houses should not have above one entrance, to the intent that nobody may come in, or any thing be carried out, without the knowledge of the porter.7 The final sentence reminds us that, in societies with servants, the gates are controlled by guardians, whom one first encounters on arrival and with whom one must negotiate greetings, which colours the whole experience of a gate. But again, as far as direct mention of walking is concerned, Alberti too remains laconic. Mention does occur fleetingly in his initial definition of architecture in Book 1, Chapter II, where, perhaps surprisingly, he places the division of functions in a house before the provision of shelter, citing the need for places to sleep and cook, so as ‘not to confound public and private matters’. Later, he defines the platform as, ‘those spaces of the buildings which in walking we tread upon with our feet’, and adds that, ‘compartition is that which subdivides the whole platform of the house into smaller platforms, so that the whole edifice thus formed and constituted of these its members, seems to be full of lesser edifices’. He describes apertures as if they are to be cut into walls already built, defining them as, ‘all those outlets, which are in any part of the building, for the convenience of egress and regress, or the passage of things necessary to the inmates’, which is as far as discussion of movement goes in his opening section.8 In Book 1, Chapter IX, following his famous remark about a house being a small city and a city a big house, Alberti deals in more detail with ‘compartition’, stressing that the parts of a building be proportionate like the members of a body, but there is also advice on the relative positions of parts in their order of importance: To every member therefore ought to be allotted its fit place and proper situation; not less than dignity requires, not greater than conveniency demands; not in an impertinent

The classical authors 21

or indecent place, but in a situation so proper to itself that it could be set nowhere else more fitly. Nor should the greatest part of the structure, that is to be of the greatest honour, be thrown into a remote corner; nor that which ought to be the most public, into a private hole; nor that which should be most private, be set in too conspicuous a place. We should besides have regard to the seasons of the year, and make a great deal of difference between hot places and cold, both in proportions and situation . . . And here we should provide, that the inhabitants may not be obliged to pass out of a cold place into a hot one without a medium of temperate air.9 Chapter XIII deals with staircases, which one would expect to involve movement, but Alberti concentrates on slopes and appropriate numbers of steps, advocating frequent addition of landings, so that ‘such as were weak or tired with the fatigue of the ascent might have leisure to rest themselves, and that if they should chance to stumble, there might be a place to break their fall’.10 Again, the emphasis is pragmatic and concerns the constructed object. Andrea Palladio, in his Quattro Libri, gives more detailed descriptions of layouts and is more loquacious about types of staircase, their advantages and elegance, but he is also surprisingly laconic about movement on them, merely remarking in Book I, Chapter XXVIII that: Great care ought to be taken in the placing of staircases . . . The staircases will be commendable if they are clear, ample, and commodious to ascend, inviting, as it were, people to go up . . . They will be sufficiently ample, if they do not seem scanty and narrow to the largeness and quality of the fabric, but they are never to be made less wide than four foot, that if two persons meet, they may conveniently give one another room.11 Yet Palladio, like Alberti, does show a strong sense of propriety and concern about the correct positions of things, and, as with Vitruvius, the loggia earns special attention. In Book I, Chapter XXI: The loggias, for the most part, are made in the fore and back front of the house and are placed in the middle, when only one is made, and on each side when there are two. These loggias serve for many uses, as to walk, eat in, and other recreations; and are either made larger or smaller; according as the bigness and conveniency of the fabrick requires; but, for the most part, they are not to be made less than ten foot wide, nor more than twenty. Besides, all the well-contrived houses have in the middle, and in their more beautiful part, some places, by which all the others have a communication: these in the under part are called entries, and in the upper halls. These places are public. The entries are the first parts, except the loggias, which offer to those that enter the house, and are the most convenient for those to stay in who wait the master’s coming out, to salute or to do business with him. The halls serve for feasts, entertainments and decorations, for comedies, weddings, and such like recreations; and therefore these places ought to be much larger than the others, and to have the most capacious form, to the end that many persons may be commodiously placed, and see whatever is done there.12 One might have expected Palladio to have something more explict to say about the masterly spatial sequences in his beautiful villa at Masera, picked out elswhere in this book by David

22 Peter Blundell Jones

Lea as a prime example of architecture conditioned by the experience of movement (p. 74), but his description is short and understated, more interested in his hydraulic triumph: That part of the fabric which advances a little forward has two orders of rooms. The floor of those above is even with the level of the court backwards, where there is a fountain cut into the mountain opposite to the house . . . This fountain forms a small lake, which serves as a fish pond. From this place the water runs into the kitchen; and having watered the gardens that are on the right and left of the road, which leads gradually to the fabric, it forms two fish ponds, with their watering places upon the high-road; from whence it waters the kitchen garden, which is very large, and full of the most excellent fruits, and of different kinds of pulse.13

FIGURE 1.1.1

Andrea Palladio, Villa Barbaro at Maser, elevation from Quattro Libri

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Vitruvius 1960, p. 155. O’Sullivan 2011, p. 80. Ibid., p. 87, including his version of the Vitruvius quote. Vitruvius 1960, p. 138. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., pp. 72–3. Alberti 1986 (reprint of 1755 Leoni edition), p. 84. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p 13. Ibid., p. 19. Palladio 1965 (reprint of 1738 Isaac Ware edition), p. 34. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 49 (Book II Ch. XIV).

1.2 VIOLLET-LE-DUC ON THE MEDIEVAL CLOISTER Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc’s ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XI au XVI siècle was a crucial source on medieval architecture for the Gothic revival internationally and remains a mine of information, especially for its detailed drawings and engravings, although it has never received a full English translation. It runs from A to Z, ranging from general essays on ‘Architecture’ or ‘Church’ to detailed studies such as ‘Window’ and ‘Chimney’, reporting on surveyed examples, mostly in France. As appreciated in his acceptance by historians 50 years ago as a protomodernist, Viollet took a predominantly functional approach, fascinated by the operation of weapons and fortifications and the assembly details of structure and construction, so that, although there are entries on ‘Boulevard’ and ‘Chemin de Ronde’, these take circulation in a purely pragmatic sense. However, in Viollet’s definition of Cloister, at the beginning of a chapter that describes a host of examples not included here, the experience of space comes more to the fore, supported by evidence gathered from the literature of the age. Cloître (vol. 3, p. 408) opening remarks: Court surrounded by walls and galeries established beside cathedral churches or those of colleges and monasteries. Since the beginning of Christianity cloisters were raised in the immediate vicinity of churches. The form of cloisters is generally a square. The abbeys had two cloisters, one next to the west entrance of the church, the other in the east behind the apse. The first gave access to refectories, dormitories, chapter house, sacristy, warm room and prisons; it was the cloister of the monks, in which all could circulate. The second was reserved for the abbott, dignitaries and copyists, more retiring and smaller than the other, and built next to the library, the infirmary and the cemetery. The cathedrals all had a cloister attached to one side of the nave, whether north or south, surrounded by the dwellings of the canons, who lived under a communal rule. Often schools were built close to the cloisters of abbeys and cathedrals. From the 11th century the synods were occupied in the enclosure of chapters of cathedrals: ‘It is necessary, say the assemblies, that the priests establish the cloisters next to cathedral churches so that the clerks can live according to the canonic rule, that the priests keep to it, and that they do not leave the church or live elsewhere’. It also declares

24 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

that the refectory and dormitory should be built within the enclosure of the cloister. ‘The diversity of dwellings and offices in the cloister’, says Guillaume Durand, ‘signifies the diversity of the dwellings and rewards in the heavenly kingdom, for “In the house of my father there are many mansions” says the saviour’. And in the moral sense, ‘the cloister represents the contemplation in which the soul fulfills itself, and where it hides itself away, separated from the crowd of carnal thoughts, where it meditates on heavenly blessings alone. In this cloister there are four walls which are the denial of the self, the denial of the world, but the love for brethren and love of God. And on all sides are ranges of columns . . . the base of all the columns is patience. In the cloister the diversity of dwellings is that of the virtues’.1

FIGURE 1.2.1

Section of cloister at Elne, France, as depicted in Viollet’s Dictionnnaire Raisonnée (vol. 3, p. 434). Caption from Viollet’s text: ‘This figure presents the section of the cloister and one external bay. In terms of sculpture, this cloister is the richest of those surviving in this region of France. The original capitals are from the 12th century and even the 14th century ones are works of beauty. The shafts of the columns in the gallery facing the courtyard are covered with sculpture of great delicacy, and the last of the builders tried to follow as closely as possible the style adopted by the architects of the first cloister’

Note 1

The quotations were from Guillaume Durand, probably the younger, who died in 1328 or 1330.

1.3 CHARLES GARNIER: LE THÉÂTRE, CHAPTER 4, STAIRCASES1 Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.3.1

Paris Opera, principal façade

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

26 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.3.2

Paris Opera, plan at stage level, front and main entrance to bottom, stage to top, aristocratic entrances to the sides. The main stair in its square well is the focal point of the public part of the building; banks of secondary stairs, not made explicit in this version, are in multiple dog-leg flights lying to right and left of the main stair

Source: Redrawn from published plan by Diego Carrasco

Charles Garnier: Le théâtre

FIGURE 1.3.3

Paris Opera, the main stair seen from the right side

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.3.4

Paris Opera, a flight of the main stair from above

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

27

28 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

The Paris Opera is Charles Garnier’s masterpiece, but the choice of architect was not a foregone conclusion. Initially, Charles Rohault de Fleury had been commissioned by Louis-Napoleon, but he was displaced in 1860 in favour of the Empress’s favourite Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc, who argued for a twostage competition. This was duly held in 1860–1, and, although Garnier only gained fifth place in the first round, he won unanimously in the second. The foundation stone was laid in 1862, although the building was not completed until 1875, delayed by the Franco-Prussian war and the subsequent political changes.2 Garnier followed it up with a book, Le théâtre, which describes the design and the many intentions behind it in great detail, with chapters on arrival, vestibules, foyers and so on, looking at each in turn. We have taken the chapter on staircases as a representative sample, as there experience of movement is of most pressing concern. It was too long to include in its entirety, and so has been edited down to about half, covering the reasoned choices in designing the main stair but leaving out similarly exhaustive treatments of the secondary stairs and stair cage. Garnier wrote in a florid and rhetorical manner and could be rather repetitive, and so the initially direct translation has been subjected to cuts too numerous to mark, although the customary ellipsis does indicate major excisions towards the end. For an appropriate impression, we preserved in full some of Garnier’s more rhapsodic sentences about the ritual of theatre. Chapter 4 The Staircases Here we touch on one of the most important aspects of organising a theatre, not just for the sake of connections and circulation, but to produce an artistic motif that contributes to the general beauty of the building. With most large auditoria in France and abroad a rational composition of stairs is lacking. There are buildings where walkways are well arranged: the Carlo Felice theatre in Genoa, for example, or the Grand Theatre in Munich, which, on each side of a vast vestibule, develops two great ramps of coloured marble reminiscent of those at the Odéon in Paris. There is also the theatre at Bordeaux, whose stair is famous, and some in new Paris theatres. But taken together, almost all theatres are incomplete in having stairs that are small and mean, no larger than the secondary ones. One has to hunt around to find one’s way, and decorative motifs are often missing. So rather than taking them as models, the architect must regret the inadequacy of existing stairs. It is not just the architect’s fault, for the site is often restricted, the programme too rigid, and one must excuse the artist caught up in his operations, unable to exceed strict necessity when an additional generosity was needed. Ever since primitive theatres, the monuments for theatrical display have shown this inadequacy. Little was demanded because people were easily satisfied, and nobody supposed that, independently of the plays presented, the view of grand staircases filled with people could also be a spectacle of pomp and elegance. Without considering any architectural motif, architects sought only a means to arrive in the hall, yet grand and beautiful staircases were not rare in palaces, museums, and even convents. So lack of artistic creativity was not the problem, but rather lack of resources, lack of space, or lack of will on the part of clients. But now that luxury is extended and comfort sought everywhere, when the departure of the audience is awaited by observers eager to witness an elegant and varied crowd, with today’s facility of communications and the need to satisfy the eyes as well as the mind, the architect faces a need for monumental organisation and large wellplaced staircases. In a large theatre there must be no indecision about which route to follow towards entrance or exit, and the motif chosen for effective functioning must

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also be an artistic motif predisposed towards the splendours of the production and the shimmering splendour of the ladies’ dresses. Let us consider the form and placing of the staircases. We must be guided by practical study of crowd movements and by the desire to develop the art at large scale in a sumptuous way. First general layout: whatever your feelings about the principles of equality, it must be admitted that in a theatre one can never make all seats equally good. If differences in quality exist, differences in seat prices follow, which leads in turn to a difference between the comfortable and the luxurious. This vicious circle is unavoidable, so despite doing all possible to avoid complaints, one is obliged to create several categories of seats, which basically divide between ordinary and luxurious. The most rational method to split the crowd is to follow the seats, so the stairs divide into those serving ordinary seats and those serving luxurious ones. The route for each is defined, and confusion is avoided. I am well aware that some pedantic egalitarians will say this initial division disfavours part of the audience, and that the theatre should belong to all without distinction. I am not sure that any great harm is done to them, but if two or three thousand people are made to pass along the same route, that route will certainly be badly encumbered, and if everybody is treated the same, all are treated equally badly. I do not see therefore that it would achieve any increase in dignity. Since nobody is embarrassed to go to the stalls or to the third level boxes, I see no reason why people should be embarrassed to take a route not shared with those going to the first level of boxes. When in the street I walk on the pavement, I do not feel insulted to leave the central carriageway to vehicles: it is a guarantee of security and makes circulation easier for everyone. Dignity is not involved. So in any theatre there must be first of all a staircase for luxurious seats, a stair of honour, if you wish, supposing that it belongs not to the persons who climb it, but rather to the position it occupies. Then there must be other flights leading to secondary seats. This is the principal division, but we must attend to the way fashion influences the quality and value of seats, for if categories change, it is not the same with the stairs. They have to remain as constructed, and since they must be useful however the seats are designated, they must not be too isolated from each other, allowing passage from one flight to another to take place easily. Therefore the grand stair of honour should connect with the secondary stairs, so that people can move easily from one to the other. Moving on to the placing of the stairs, we can assume that the grand staircase should be central, for if set to one side it would serve only one side of seats, and it would constrain persons attempting to move from one side to the other across the crowd in the middle. It is obvious that it must occupy the noble place in a building, following the axis of the auditorium, the vestibule, and the building as a whole. With the grand staircase so placed, the secondary stairs should be laterally placed, that is to right and left of the principal stair. I say to right and to left not to right or left because it is advantageous that the large crowd going to the secondary seats is split to avoid crossings and embarrassment at every level, and indecision about which path to take. Furthermore, because in terms of usage any auditorium should be symmetrical in plan, it is logical that its connections also be symmetrical. When services offered are identical, what is found on the left should also be found on the right, and for all these reasons, following common sense as well as study, one must conclude that the stair of honour should take the centre, with secondary staircases to right and left of it. This starting point can be

30 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

further fulfilled by study of the arrangement of flights and ease of communication between different routes, and this we must undertake next. The disposition of flights in the grand central stair can be arranged in various ways, many of which can be effective and monumental. There are four main approaches [partis] under which one can gather all variations; they can be discussed one by one, and this study will show by the variety of their arrangements, that these four partis include almost all grand motifs of stair flights found in practice. The first, offering greatest simplicity, is the straight flight. On arriving at the cage of the stair, one discovers a grand broad ascent and there is no hesitation about where to go. The route is indicated, the way simple, the aspect monumental, the motif frank and accentuated. Leaving enough space to right and to left of the central flight, whether for circulation on the same level or for circulation descending, the cage enlarges, develops, takes on the form of a beautiful vessel, which one can decorate with nobility and splendour. Considering these qualities alone, the big straight stair would be a suitable choice, but one must look beyond first impressions and also study its faults. Following the custom adopted in nearly all theatres, the foyer, the principal galleries for promenade, should be at the level of the first boxes, that is the piano nobile, where one combines luxury with comfort. This means that to pass from the foot of the first staircase to the first boxes, one must ascend the height of the ground floor to the stalls or baignoires,3 then carry on from the level of the baignoires to the first boxes, that is two levels of ordinary corridors. Now, the minimum height of such galleries in a grand theatre is about 3 metres. This is a bit high for the services themselves, but rather low for the galleries and corridors that surround the hall. It is therefore a compromise, and the height of 3 metres is the average that should be adopted, at least for the lower floors. For a monumental staircase of 3 metres where the steps have to be really gentle one must assume a minimum of 22 steps. With each around 35 cm wide this makes a length of more than 7 metres, so whatever the form of the flight, one must allow for this length. Because the central stair rises two floors, it is indispensible that it should serve in its course the first luxury seats, stalls of the amphitheatre, balconies, or baignoires, which are situated half way to the first boxes. There must therefore be a mid-level landing to let people off to right and left. Another landing is needed at the head of the stair, for one of the indispensible conditions of stairs is that they must not finish without a pause before the entrances; this is not only indispensible practically, but also artistically. For satisfactory proportions these landings require as much depth as breadth, so they should be as deep as the width of the stairs. But since a grand central stair is useless unless it allows easy circulation of the crowd, it needs at least five metres of landing, and again this is the minimum. This dimension of five metres must therefore be taken up first with the lower landing, then the middle one, then the upper, adding up to 15 metres; to this add the two flights of a further 15 metres, and it produces around 30 metres in all, without taking account of the wall thicknesses of the surrounding cage. Certainly it is not impossible to construct a staircage of this size, and size alone would give a grand effect, but what is more difficult is to find a site to permit such development. Even given the space, developed at this scale, this motif leads to the inconvenience of separating hall from foyers excessively. The inconvenience is but relative, and might be corrected, but there is another problem that seems yet more significant. A grand central stair ending directly at the corridor of

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the first boxes also pulls the lateral stairs forward and produces a problem of continuity between staircases. For as we saw above, it is important that all staircases intercommunicate, and if they fail in this the fault is felt on every ascension, increasing separation between the connections of seats, an isolation that brings embarrassment. The architect should concentrate on rational and practical aspects before considering any idea of splendour and artistic desire, so if he cannot remedy this fault, he should not hesitate to reject this arrangement which, although furnishing him with a pattern that is easy to study and of a certain effect, commits a significant sin. Art is not complete until the whole programme is satisfied, and, even if it costs the artist a little, he must follow a programme that is both reasonable and reasoned. The second grand pattern of staircase that can be used and has often been employed to happy effect is that of two opposed flights leaving sideways from a grand central vestibule and ending to right and left of the theatre. The Paris Odéon is so composed, and its appearance is monumental. The grand theatre in Munich, already mentioned, follows the same parti with equally monumental effect. This arrangement does not have the same inconveniences as a single central flight, does not push back the foyer too far, and if the lateral stairs are placed at the extremities of the paired flights, communication between main and secondary flights can be easily managed. Also the two opposed flights form so to speak an amphitheatre between them, grouping persons who ascend and descend in a harmonious manner: a double spectacle in which each is at once actor and spectator. In this parti, then, everything seems of good service, and to allow the artistic manifestation every development and prestige, so one can only approve it in principle as a grand and beautiful arrangement. But this too is not without inconveniences, for owing to its size, even its grandeur, it has a disadvantage which must be noted. It goes without saying that I am speaking always of a grand theatre where the foyer is at the height of the first level of boxes, where one has to mount two levels to arrive at these boxes, and where the average height of the corridor to the hall is three metres. We have seen earlier that a single central progression established in these conditions had a development of around 30 metres. With two opposed progressions it needs at least twice the space, for the central vestibule needs at least ten metres of width to answer the needs of the two grand staircases. This gives the whole ensemble of the two flights a total dimension of around 60 metres. But, as the greatest width of hall in which performances remain audible is 40 metres, including the salon of the boxes, it results in people having to turn back from the tops of the flights to rediscover corridors to the boxes. Certainly, if the vestibules or galleries through which one passes on this route are well disposed and generously decorated, it will be no great pity, and the longest circulation will be made easier. But it is illogical to pass the goal before arriving, and it would be better if the arrival took place where it is most convenient. Nevertheless this little inconvenience does not inflict an irredeemable vice on this grand arrangement, which admittedly fulfils the conditions required for easy circulation of spectators and good architectural order. It is even advantageous that at mid-route, at the level of the baignoires, the doorways placed to the right of the first landing will meet the corridors at a convenient point, and here again logic is satisfied. But another drawback is that the staircases impede circulation from the hall to the foyers, so either one must pass around the edge, or cross above the central vestibule of

32 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

the ground floor. Both cases are problematic, for if one goes round the edge one must leave the boxes, pass along the ascending flight, and traverse the outer landings to go to the foyers. If instead one passes above the central vestibule of the ground floor, the circulation is direct and the goal well indicated, but it does introduce a further inconvenience. If the vestibule of the ground floor is cut off at the floor of the foyer, it divides the collection of stairs in two, so instead of one open cage, wide and monumental, one has two cages distinct and separated, which however grand and well decorated, can never have the simplicity and nobility of a single cage. The motif is deflowered, unity destroyed, and the great artistic advantage of this double arrangement is almost annihilated by this division. There is a third parti sharing aspects of the previous one, which has perhaps a certain advantage. The opposed flights, having arrived at the level of the baignoires, instead of continuing to the level of the first boxes, turn back towards a grand landing placed above the central vestibule. The arrival of the stairs is closer to the boxes, and as the staircase takes less space across the width of the theatre, circulation from hall to foyers is more direct, so the faults noted for the second parti do not apply to this third one. There is advantage here, but communication with the secondary stairs is at the level of the baignoires, so people going to the second boxes leave the upper part of the main staircase at that point. This lessens comfort and the sense of parade for those using the second boxes. Since when one constructs a building all aspects must be considered, even the prejudices of the public, this hindrance has to be acknowledged. Furthermore, when arrival occurs above the ground floor vestibule, it suppresses the grand order of the stair cage as with the previous parti, again producing two distinct cages, which is always a bit mean in comparison with a single grand vessel. One can partly remedy this fault by arranging the arrival of the two upper flights not on a whole floor over the vestibule, but at a landing of the same width as the staircase. In this way, apart from the landing the vessel is open. The two flights lengthen, approach and join, but always within a single space. This arrangement seems convenient if one does not reproach the landing for cutting the architectural order where it is added, and obscuring the wall of the end of the cage from the spectators who arrive and begin to mount the stairs. But the addition of stairs and landing is a real obstacle to free lines of sight, and no matter how cleverly the motif is studied, there is no avoiding that disagreeable addition. I do not claim this fault is reason enough to reject the whole parti, for there are so many ways of composing an artistic arrangement that I cannot deny that the disadvantage might be overcome. I wished only to describe the motif, its qualities, and the aspect that presents most difficulties for its artistic arrangement. There remains one more parti, and as it is the one I believed necessary to adopt, it goes without saying that its qualities seemed to me to outweigh its faults. This motif is certainly not new. Examples can be found as far back as the Italian Renaissance, and it has sometimes been deployed in buildings over the last two centuries. It made its reputation with the Grand Theatre of Bordeaux, where that great architect [Victor] Louis gave it a special place. Since then it has remained as a type more or less modified, but which retained the great advantage of being simple and logical. In adopting it for the new Opéra, I hope at least to have given it a more particular character, which I have designed with more suppleness; but its basic parti derives from that first arrangement, which seemed to me to conform most to the exigencies of art and reason.

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I have had no reason to hide its fortunate parentage, and I am more at my ease in making this observation since, whatever parti I had adopted, it would always have been used earlier in some form or other. Types are limited: one cannot help but ascend at the front, at the back, to right or to left, and it is above all in the development of a motif that diversity and originality make themselves felt. Let us now examine this motif and understand the reasons that militate in its favour. The arrangement is simple: on the building’s axis the arriving visitor encounters a great monumental flight of stairs. It rises to a landing in front of a first entrance, then the route divides, one flight rising to the right and the other to the left, both ending in galleries at the level of the first boxes. The form is almost naïve, but despite its simplicity it adapts itself to all requirements. At the top of the first flight a central doorway leads to the baignoires and the stalls of the amphitheatre, and that accomplished, the lateral flights lead on up to the first boxes. Now as the two opposed flights and the landing between them only take about 20 metres, one arrives close to the median part of the corridors for the boxes. Before people reach the end of the two upper flights, the secondary stairs are visible directly opposite. Audience members stopping at the first boxes turn right or left according to the direction they have chosen to climb, while those progressing to the second level of boxes continue straight on. There is again division of the crowd, generous facility of communication, and logical arrival at all seats. These conditions fulfilled, let us see if others are too, and if the communication of the boxes with the foyers is broad and easy. Since the width of the cage scarcely exceeds 20 metres, the galleries of the passage established to each side will align with the middle of the corridors of the hall, to give the greatest average proximity to the seats and proximity to the foyers, all with direct view of the route. There is no embarrassment, no detours to get from hall to foyers, so again the problem seems resolved. We saw earlier that, when two opposed flights were reunited by a central landing, it masked part of the wall. In this case, on the contrary, the two opposed ramps instead of being reunited, extend one another, and the upper landing is removed. As for the intermediate landing, the blocking of the lower wall, being at a far lower level than the landing of the earlier case, and diminishing almost geometrically with height, leaves the door at the bottom almost completely visible, and the lateral flights sloping up to the floor of the boxes do not hide this arrival at all. The walls of the cage are therefore exposed, it is vast and unencumbered, and if the architect decorates it with talent, the motif seems to offer all necessary resources. I sought the inconveniences that could arise from this arrangement, and can honestly say I have only found just one. It is that the landing by the doorway to the baignoires, being unable to exceed the width of the steps, is relatively restricted in size, and does not permit more than a single opening on the axis of the main flight. It is large enough for arrival, but one might fear when everybody leaves that it will be a little crowded, made worse by the way people leaving through that opening will collide with those descending from the first level of boxes. This would produce great inconvenience if the principal stair was not complemented by secondary stairs, which well connected, will invite use by audience members coming from the lateral corridors. Only the central crowd will take the main staircase, and since the corridors, like the special doors giving access to the median levels, can be well placed to right and left, one can believe that the middle door will suffice for practical purposes of exit . . .

34 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

There remains only to make some observations on the form of steps. If of rigid and rectangular form, and if the flights ended or turned at right angles, the arrangement would not only lack continuity and grace, but also ease of circulation. One normally walks perpendicular to the nose of the steps, so on arrival at the intermediate landing one has brusquely to change direction. It is therefore essential to give the steps gentle curves that lead naturally in the direction of the flights. To achieve this one must consider the stair as divided between right and left, and trace on the drawing the line one would follow to pursue this route without brusque changes of direction, and so to use this directional line or ‘line of the crowd’ to arrange the steps so that the flights end more or less perpendicular to it. In this way the route can be traced naturally and rationally, and one passes from one flight to the next gradually, without agitation, without hesitation, following a continuous line that is only slightly deflected at the landings . . . Finally, if the grand central stair is a sumptuous and eventful place, if the decorative treatment is elegant, if the animation which dominates the stairs is an interesting and varied spectacle, there will be advantages from which all can profit. If one then places the lateral walls of the stair cage in such a way that they are always open, all persons circulating on every floor can if they wish find interest in the view of the grand stair and the incessant circulation of the crowd. It will be good then to make the vertical walls very largely open to the cage, and to create openings to the large balconies that allow a good position and easy view of all movements taking place on the grand stair. This is rational, practical, artistic, and leads inevitably to a motif that is rich, grandiose and eventful. On each floor the spectators leaning on the balconies decorate the walls and seemingly bring them to life, while others ascend or descend, adding further life. Finally with the addition of cloth and flowing draperies, with many-branched chandeliers, lustrous surfaces, marbles and flowers, colour throughout, one makes of the whole a brilliant and sumptuous composition reminiscent of canvases by Veronese. The light that sparkles, the resplendent costumes, the animated and smiling figures, the meetings and greetings: all give an atmosphere of feasting and pleasure, and without being conscious of the part played by the architecture in this magic effect, all enjoy themselves, in their happiness paying homage to this great art, so powerful in its manifestations, so elevated in its results.

Notes 1 2 3

Charles Garnier 1871, Ch. 4, pp. 57–94. Robin Middleton in Middleton and Watkin 1980, p. 244. Literally bathtubs, a particular layer of large, open boxes at the back of the stalls.

1.4 HERMANN MUTHESIUS: WIE BAUE ICH MEIN HAUS Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

Hermann Muthesius is best known as the author of Das englische Haus, a three-volume study published after his sojourn in Britain that was the best contemporary record of the Arts and Crafts architecture. However, he also designed many houses himself in the Berlin area and was first president of the Deutscher Werkbund, and so a contributor to the modernist breakthrough. His book Wie baue ich mein Haus (How I build my house) of 1917 was intended for the guidance of clients, particularly for those moving out of the city to suburban locations. In its various chapters, there is much concern with room relationships and functions, including how one moves from one room to another, but also concentration on the social niceties of a society that still takes for granted the presence of servants. The two chapters included here are 12 and 13, from the middle of the book, about how the house is approached, and then about the circulation within it. Muthesius illustrated it with line drawings of his own work, which we reproduce. Chapter 12, The route to the house (Der Weg zum Hause), pp. 107–14 A difficult question that arises in the initial planning of a house is how to make a good entrance. The way one approaches, how one enters, where visitors wait to be received, all this needs the most careful consideration. The entrance does not have to be in the street-front, and can be at the side, but how to enter should never be left in doubt. An entrance at the back is definitely to be avoided. In the case of a large house one must first decide whether a drive for vehicles is to be provided, and if so, there must be room for the vehicles to turn before they leave again. For today’s large and long motor vehicles this is not so easy, as a large vehicle requires the outer radius of the drive to be at least 14 metres, as shown in Figure 1.4.1, and this must be provided even with the house forward on the building line. In this case, though, one can make two gates, one for entry and the other for exit. It is sensible to provide a drive that can take motors for the use of the guests, even if the owner himself uses only a horse drawn carriage. If the house is on a large site and far from the boundary, a porter’s lodge at the entrance is always needed. The porter can then open the gate as the carriage approaches, allowing it to continue on up to the house door. But if the house is near the boundary,

36 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.4.1

Plan of radius for drive

Abb. 75. Vorfahrt zu einem groBeren Hause

the gate can be opened by servants living in the house, although the carriage has to wait as the servant hurries out to do it. A perfect arrival can be obtained with a covered porch (Figure 1.4.2), which allows transition from carriage to house in rainy weather without wetting the feet, but it is an expensive addition only affordable for a large house. If the point of arrival cannot be covered, the best mode of arrival being therefore precluded, it is better to omit such a porch altogether. The whole task will then be made much easier: instead of the main gate, have a garden door, and in place of the elaborate drive, a garden path. As an addition one can build a covered way from the gate to the house, which makes the drive unnecessary. Alternatively one can build a pergola, which when covered in plants at least gives some protection. Planning control demands if the house is a certain distance from the street – usually 30 metres, which is the length of the fire hose – that there must be an entryway, but it does not have to be fully metalled, and a garden gate only 2.3 m wide will suffice. For good supervision of the entrance it is essential that the servants can see the garden gate from the house, and it is usually provided with an electric latch that can be operated from within. It is therefore essential that servants can recognise who has arrived before opening the gate. This issue must be considered from an early planning stage, to assure that the service rooms gain a view of the entrance. But where will the servants be? Often it is the so-called servant’s room that is given easy access to the entrance and overlooks the gate, but this arrangement fulfils its purpose only if the servant remains in his room, which he hardly ever does. He has housework to do, which takes him to the servery or cleaning room, or into the kitchen, and his own room is used only to sleep. Only in great houses like that of a Duke is it possible to have a servant constantly on watch in his room to receive visitors. Therefore it is in all cases better to make sure that the house-door can be seen from the kitchen, the one room where the presence of at least one of the servants is guaranteed. If the kitchen lies not on the same side as the entrance but to the side, a projecting bay can be provided to allow the servants a

Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus 37

Abb. 76—78. Verschiedene Gestaltung des Eingangs zum Hause FIGURE 1.4.2

Various entrance arrangements with waiting places for guests, left, and porte cochère, middle

sideways glimpse of the approach. This has the advantage that visitors do not have the feeling of being scrutinised by the servants. It may also be desirable to run a speaking tube from the house to the gate, so that visitors can announce their identity. Once the gate has been opened and the way cleared to approach the house, the visitor proceeds to the house door, where he must ring the bell for a second time. It is most desirable to set the door back a little (Figure 1.4.3), or to provide it with a small sheltering porch to protect the waiting visitor if it is raining. If such a shelter gives more of a feeling than the reality of protection, it nonetheless generates a homely atmosphere and lends the house entrance an inviting impression. To build open steps leading up to the entrance is not recommended, lest in winter they become slippery and cause accidents: a clever designer will usually find ways of accommodating changes of level within the house. The door having been opened and the visitor welcomed, he must wait some minutes before being received: where is this to happen? Precisely in this matter the rules remain rather unresolved in German houses. In blocks of flats the visitor, having handed over his card, has the door off the staircase closed again in his face, or at least reduced to a narrow slot. This always gives the feeling of being neglected, and we have to excuse such bad form as inevitable with the rented flat. But in the case of many one-family houses it is not much better. Here at least care should be taken that the visitor, after the door is opened, is conducted into a small antechamber where he finds a dignified welcome (Figure 1.4.2, compare with Figure 1.4.4). For this purpose the wind lobby can suffice, provided it is well appointed and provided with a seat. This seat is more symbolic than real, for nobody will sit there, but it makes the room welcoming, and conveys the idea that one might spend some time there. When the servant returns, the visitor can be led first into the cloakroom and then to the hall or antechamber. To bring a visitor from the front door straight into the hall and leave him waiting there has the disadvantage that he has in one move penetrated too far, for he still has his overcoat on, and furthermore someone may have been

38 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

mistakenly admitted to the house who should not be there. For there are also commercial representatives whom the house owner would prefer to see in a special room, perhaps in a waiting room or study next to the entrance, or in a dedicated interview room (Figure 1.4.2). As for the cloakroom, it is important that it has two doors, one for entry from the wind lobby, the other for exit to the hall. This is especially needed for social occasions, even with small groups, when the lack will be felt if everyone has to use the same door to enter the cloakroom as to leave it again, for the participants all arrive and depart at the appointed hour, and those entering will bump into those leaving. Some say there should be separate cloakrooms for men and women, but this is excessive for a middle-ranking house. On social occasions a special room can be set aside for women even on the upper floor, in which case they must pass through the hall. The men, having used the facilities on the ground floor, can then await their womenfolk in the hall. The preparation of such a room, in which a dressing table with sewing kit and other items necessary for feminine attire, used during the kind of social occasions which bring women to a house for several hours, also has other advantages; for the special cloakroom with adjacent lavatory remains private from the men. Almost any other room on the ground floor can serve temporarily as a women’s cloakroom, such as a reception room, children’s dayroom or mending room. This double use then needs to be carefully considered during planning. A dedicated women’s cloakroom for social occasions is an extravagance reserved for the cream of houses and those in which entertaining plays the dominant role. In the correct arrangement of wind lobby, cloakroom, lavatory and hall there is yet more to be considered. It is not unusual for a door to lead directly from the hall to the lavatory, so that people sitting in the hall get a glimpse of its interior every time the door is opened. Such a layout can only be considered a design error. Often there is a lack of tact and propriety in our hospitality over the presentation of lavatories, especially when the signs ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ are placed too close together. The lavatory is a room whose presence should never be too obvious, but which nonetheless should be easy to find. Access through the cloakroom is always the best solution. Extraordinarily

Abb. 79. Geschutzter Hauseingang FIGURE 1.4.3

Setback of door

Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus 39

u n g e fa h r im V e rh a ltn is des w a ch s e n d e u u m b a u te n R a u m es an steigen

FIGURE 1.4.4

Plan of house showing whole entry arrangement

frequent too are halls in which coats are hung, an arrangement to be expected in the smallest houses, but too often also found in middle-ranking ones. It is no pleasure to change galoshes or overshoes there, especially with the storage already full of children’s clothes. Through careful planning it is possible to meet this important need in comfort and dignity even in small houses by adding the necessary side rooms. Figure 1.4.2 shows how wind lobby, cloakroom, and lavatory can be assembled even in tiny spaces, but such a concentration is only allowable for very small houses. Hardly less important than the placing of the main entrance is that of the service entrance, which should also be overlooked by servants. Whether it is necessary to decide a special route to the kitchen in planning the site, or to branch it off in laying out the floor plan, depends on the circumstances. An excess of entrances makes the whole plot too public, and it is tiresome constantly to have to open and close too many gates. The back entrance to a house should also have an ante-room to divide it from its first destination, the kitchen. A practical measure is to put a small window in the kitchen door through which supplies can be passed without the delivery boy needing to enter. The kitchen entrance should lie to one side, so that traffic in and out does not obstruct the owner, but it is sensible not to remove the owner’s supervision entirely. With a large plot it helps to add a service gate to one side or the other. It is best left without a knocker, and kept locked when not in use. Life is much easier for the inhabitants if a single key opens not only the garden gates but the house doors as well. It can even extend to the inner doors, to cupboards and furniture. If this is required it must be specifically ordered from the locksmith, otherwise in the usual thoughtless way each door will have a different key and the owner will find himself laden down by a heavy bunch. This is perhaps the place to say something about the boundary of the plot, even if it belongs more in a book about gardens. Over its design local planners have held a

40 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

great influence. At first they insisted that the boundary should be kept transparent, to lend a ‘villa colony’ a friendly appearance, and only metal fences were allowed. Later wooden fences were permitted. Then along a small part of the boundary a wall was allowed, at first a third, then half of the perimeter. We are moving now towards the return of the old garden wall. The transparent boundary belonged, along with the front garden behind it, to the period dominated by a concern for outer appearance. A welcoming view for the visitor was the priority, for which the house owner was obliged to make sacrifices. For the owner of a country house it is certainly no obligation to lay out his garden for the appreciation of strangers and to live as if on a stage. Despite the planners’ efforts, the general tendency today is to close off the street edge, even if mostly through the planting of thick bushes or a hedge behind the metal fence, which the planners are powerless to prevent. The boundary should be laid out from the first with these considerations in mind. A solid wall has many advantages, though it is expensive. A cheaper alternative is a wooden fence, but the fence-posts can at least be set on concrete bases, for if set directly in the earth they rot in a few years. The connection between timber and concrete can be made by casting iron straps into the concrete. A narrow gap should be left between the post and its base to prevent rot. Wooden fences are cheaper than even the simplest iron ones. The cheapest boundary is the wire fence, but the effect is so horrible that it can spoil a whole house. At best it can provide support for thick planting. In other countries a living hedge has been used with advantage, which also has a pleasant appearance on the street. The best boundary to a property, though, is undoubtedly the garden wall, which should surround the entire plot if the conditions allow it. 12 Circulation within the House (Verkehrswege im Hause), pp. 115–19 Two parties inhabit the house who are well known to each other but belong to different strata of society: the gentry and the servants. An essential task of house design is to allow both parties to move freely as they wish, but to divide the circulation of the gentry from that of the servants, while retaining all necessary connections for the maintenance of domestic life. This basic division is no general rule intended to disadvantage the less fortunate, but is rather something forced onwards by the growing independence of the lower classes. The ancestral relationship, by which gentry and servants ate at the same table, is long past. Today the consciousness of the lower condition would feel such unnatural mixing as more of an imposition than a benefit, and mutual existence without conflict is the goal for which both parties strive. It is therefore important as much for the gentry as for the servants to keep the room groupings separate. Both groups must take care, though, that the necessary connections can be made at every point along the border. The connections of the servants with the gentry part must allow them to go about their daily work, while the reverse connection requires that the lady of the house is able to supervise them in all their activities. For both parties to retain a tranquil life it is essential that the circulation routes of the gentry do not cross over into the territory of the servants, and vice versa. Daily observation reveals that this is constantly where mistakes are made. For example, it is common that servants must cross the hall to open the door, though we try to make the hall into a reception room [Wohndiele], so this results in an imperfect arrangement. The way to

Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus 41

the front door should avoid the dwelling rooms. But there are greater offences. In the ground plans of Berlin tenement flats there is a room that links the rear service rooms with the front living rooms and also leads to the hall door, the so-called Berliner Zimmer. Here again one finds an arrangement of antiquated origin, which could only have arisen because the Berlin tenement was managed by unsuitable authorities. But what should one say when such crossroads of rooms are built in freestanding country houses, and even published by their authors? To transplant the most questionable error of the Berlin flat can only show a shocking lack of design skill. The fact that in the 18th century the rooms in the linear wing of a castle were usually strung together without an adjacent hallway can scarcely excuse such bungling. The living conditions were then different. It seems they tried to overcome the problem with screens, to make the movements of servants less obvious to those in the room. But it is today an essential principle that every room be enterable from an anteroom or hall. The door cuts off the room from the service side, so is much more important than the doors between the rooms. Only service rooms such as the kitchen or scullery do not need such antechambers, for they are already fully dedicated to service and linked with each other. The room that requires the liveliest traffic to and from the service rooms is the dining room. The laying and clearing of the table, which takes place several times a day, requires a more protracted presence of servants in these rooms. It has therefore become customary for the dining room to be used not as a living room but only for eating, unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary. Today’s dining room is in terms of location the most restricted room in the house. Since it needs a close connection with the kitchen, it naturally must be close to the service rooms. When there is a hall in the middle of the plan, it is a good strategy to place the living rooms on one side and the dining room on the other along with the service rooms (see Figure 1.4.5). Then the whole service operation, which can be obtrusive during the laying and clearing

A bb. 81. H aus m it g e tre n n t liegendem EB zim m er

FIGURE 1.4.5

Plan of house with dining room opposite reception rooms

42 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

of the table, is removed from the living rooms, and crucially the odours are also constrained to the smallest area. Such an arrangement is especially advantageous on social occasions. It means that one must cross the hall when going to dine, but this is no drawback, rather it is an advantage, for it brings the hall, on which much design effort may have been bestowed, more of a central role, and when the hosts are entertaining it makes the progress to table a truly festive event. As for the often-desired direct connection between living and dining rooms, the reason generally given is further use of the dining room on social occasions following the meal. But when the dining room has been cleared and can again be part of the circulation, it can equally well be reached via the hall. In any case the advantages of the separate dining room exceed the disadvantages, which incidentally are more imagined than real. In the design of the house plan the two aspects of dwelling and entertaining intersect easily, but many clients put too much stress on the latter. They are used to city living, and to considering the duties of entertainment first in choosing a dwelling. This concern for entertaining has influenced the design of the house plan in a particular direction, namely the connection of the reception rooms by sliding doors. These doors then only serve their purpose when the house is full of people and it is advantageous to make several rooms, as it were, into one single room. But when the family members are gathered in a small circle, nobody will want to open the sliding doors to the second or third room and so to extend the space: they are more likely to want to make it more intimate. Special consideration must be given to the relationship of both gentry and servants’ territories with rooms for the children. It is not always easy to find a suitable place in the plan for the children’s playroom. It should naturally not be far from the living rooms, but it is also important not to place the source of noise from youthful activity too close to the adults’ reception rooms. A position not far from the kitchen has the advantage of easier service, for there tend anyway to be frequent routine domestic tasks in attending children. But in this matter one is seldom free, for as in other parts of the house, orientation matters, and should be a primary concern. It is most desirable to give the children their own lavatories and even their own entrance. The children’s lavatory cannot always be kept as orderly as a general one that is also used by guests, and it should contain its own wash basin. The consideration of the circulation of servants within their own area is very important. The best functioning of the service area of the house cannot be considered as achieved while things are lacking there. The sequences of service rooms, and the way they are laid out to lead from one to another, are matters of the first importance in a well laid out house. Here especially the critical opinion of the mistress of the house must be sought. The details of the service rooms will be dealt with later, but something should here be said of the accommodation of servants, that is about their sleeping quarters and day rooms. Obviously it is desirable not to place their recreation rooms too far from their workrooms. And since the servants’ bedrooms are usually in the attic, and therefore far from the work rooms, it is a great relief if a small servants’ sitting room can be placed next to the kitchen for daytime breaks. Then the servants’ bedrooms are merely bedrooms, for a free evening can be spent in the servants’ room. As for those other quarters a difficulty arises if both female and male servants are present. The bedroom

Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus 43

of one male servant can be conveniently placed in the ground floor, with the advantage that the house is better protected from larceny. It is recognised that thefts seldom occur from those houses in which a man sleeps on the ground floor, while thefts are invited if all residents are in the upper floors. The bedrooms for female servants are best placed in the attic close to the service stair. Guest bedrooms in the attic, as often mentioned, must be fundamentally and visibly divided from those occupied by maidservants.

1.5 ARCHITECTURAL PROMENADES THROUGH THE VILLA SAVOYE Flora Samuel

The ‘promenade architecturale’ is a key term in the language of modern architecture. It appears for the first time in Le Corbusier’s description of the Villa Savoye at Poissy as built (1929–31), where it supersedes the term ‘circulation’, so often used in his early work.1 ‘In this house occurs a veritable promenade architecturale, offering aspects constantly varied, unexpected and sometimes astonishing’.2 Taken at a basic level, the promenade refers, of course, to the experience of walking through a building. Taken at a deeper level, like most things Corbusian, it refers to the complex web of ideas that underpin his work, most notably his interest in the relationship between individual subjectivity and collective values. ‘You enter: the architectural spectacle at once offers itself to the eye. You follow an itinerary and the perspectives develop with great variety, developing a play of light on the walls or making pools of shadow’, the purpose of all this being to help us ‘learn at the end of the day to appreciate what is available’.3 This statement deserves comparison with one by René Guilleré, a contemporary of Le Corbusier’s, who wrote, with regard to jazz, ‘In our new perspective there are not steps, no promenades. A man enters his environment – the environment is seen through the man. Both function through each other’.4 A key issue in the discussion of the promenade is for whom it was designed. What are the implications of designing a route to be perceived one way, when we will all perceive it so differently? This is a problem for the historian who, in describing one experience of the journey, gives expression to only one version. Rather than giving my own interpretation of the promenade at the Villa Savoye, a journey that has been interpreted ad nauseam (Figure 1.5.1) – under the building, up the ramp, out into the garden and up to a window on the landscape – I shall focus instead on whom it was aimed at, clearly not the client alone. To do this, I shall refer to the depiction of the building in Le Corbusier’s carefully curated Oeuvre Complète, as well as the film Architecture d’aujourd’hui by Pierre Chenal (1930), in which Le Corbusier played an instrumental role. It is notable that neither follows a slavish route; they jump about offering a variety of different viewpoints; whether the promenade was one route or several within the same building remains debatable. At the same time, I shall consider the promenade as a means to order information, and Le Corbusier loved order. The art historian David Joselit writes that the promenade is radical

Architectural promenades and Villa Savoye 45

Diagram of the promenade in the Villa Savoye Source: © Flora Samuel and Steve Coombs FIGURE 1.5.1

in being a very early example of a ‘format’, a ‘dynamic mechanism for aggregating content’, the World Wide Web being another example. He argues that, ‘what matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting’. The promenade enables the visitor to make new and individual sense of the information presented by the building. In this way, it anticipates the contemporary art of today, for example Sherry Levine’s Postcards #4 (2000), in that it is not about the objects being seen – which, in the age of mechanical reproduction, are of course endless – it is about the multiplicity of possible ways to see that object.5 Le Corbusier recognised that the building’s meaning is, for each person, in some sense individual. In his writing, he liked to toy with the point of view, leaping from first to third person singular – used to suggest an artificial degree of professional distance – and back again. At the same time, he was intensely aware of narrative stance, of the viewpoint of the individual vis-à-vis the viewpoint of the collective, an awareness that would play an important role in the development of the promenade. Le Corbusier wanted to make frameworks in which people could live out their own lives, while dictating very strongly exactly what that framework should be. It is one of those paradoxes that make his work so very interesting, so expressive of one of the central conundrums of architectural practice: how do you design buildings that allow others to be themselves?

46 Flora Samuel

As Andrew Ballantyne writes, ‘what gives buildings longevity is not what they meant for their designers, but what they come to mean for others’.6 Any discussion of the promenade needs to be prefaced by a consideration of its audience. Le Corbusier’s buildings were incomplete without people.7 They acted as a frame for the human life within. Without this, the promenade does not exist – it is the person that makes it whole, makes it happen. Hence the fact that the photos of the Villa Savoye included in the Oeuvre Complète are taken at eye level, or appear to be. In Le Corbusier’s depiction of the Villa Cook, a mannequin poignantly suggests human inhabitation, creating illusionistic games of scale against its verdant backdrop. In the Oeuvre Complète depiction of the Villa Savoye, items of clothing and equipment – a hat, a set of golf clubs, a pipe – talk of inhabitants unseen.8 When planning a film to be made about the Unité in Marseille, the building itself played an active role in the drama. Built matter was very much alive, working on people at two levels, the first bodily – the idea, Platonic in origin,9 being that affecting the emotions would affect how people think – the second intellectually, ‘for those with eyes to see’.10 Le Corbusier took a great interest in Orphism, which alluded, simultaneously, to an ancient mystery cult and a contemporary art movement instigated by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.11 Orphism was at the root of multiple world religions, meaning that its symbolism had wide applicability. One dualism at the heart of Orphic religion was the relationship between light and dark, in other words spirit and matter, which impacted on Le Corbusier’s architecture in multiple ways. A clear example is his preoccupation with Jacob’s ladder, the route from earth to heaven.12 The connection between this biblical ladder and the promenade is made clear in the case of the Maison Guiette in Antwerp (1926), where he describes the stair that serves the various floors as being like, ‘the ladder of Jacob which Charlie Chaplin climbs in The Kid’ (1921).13 It is my belief that Le Corbusier’s promenades are plays upon this original topos. In my book Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade, I argue that the Villa Savoye is the exemplification of the Jacob’s ladder route.14 Indeed, Le Corbusier wrote, in the Oeuvre Complète, that it is necessary here ‘to go and find the sun’ in the solarium, which ‘crowning the ensemble’, is ‘a very rich architectural element’.15 This then is the focus of the promenade, which begins in the muted spaces of the entrance and finishes in a blaze of light. Finding the sun, the central message of Le Corbusier’s inner world, is thus central to the narrative of the promenade. Given that the promenade was designed for a multiplicity of different viewpoints, how should we refer to the person who enters the experience? I find myself choosing the word ‘reader’, as it suggests an active role in the interpretation of the building. I take my cue from Guiliana Bruno, who writes of the way in which the architecture can be ‘“read” as it is traversed’.16 Further, ‘As we go through it, it goes though us.’ Reader is the word also used by film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, much admired by Le Corbusier, whose theory of montage occupies the interstices of this account.17 Le Corbusier stated, ‘architecture and film are the only two arts of our time’, before going on to note that, ‘in my own work I seem to think as Eisenstein does in his films’.18 Bruno describes his thinking as, ‘pivotal in an attempt to trace the theoretical interplay of film, architecture, and travel practices’.19 Le Corbusier’s audience is ‘the spectator’ and, ultimately, ‘the human eye’, completely disembodied, floating around the building at a specified height. The eye, for Le Corbusier, is restless and challenging. ‘[It] can reach a considerable distance and, like a clear lens, sees everything even beyond what was intended or wished.’20 David Joselit writes, ‘The architectural promenade gives form to a continuous modulation of vision through movement:

Architectural promenades and Villa Savoye 47

a now rising, now curving platform along which to proceed.’ Kenneth Frampton evocatively describes this effect as, ‘a topographic itinerary in which the floor planes bend upward to form ramps and stairs . . . fused with the walls so as to create the illusion of “walking up the walls”’.21 The axonometric projection is often used by Le Corbusier to define the elements of a route. As Yve-Alain Bois points out, ‘there is no central point in axonometry; it is entirely based on the notion of permutability, of infinite transformations’.22 In the early drawings, arrows are used by Le Corbusier to indicate designated routes within his buildings, but he stopped using them around 1930; however, Le Corbusier never stopped imagining himself into the spaces of his plans – rough process drawings often reveal traces of fine lines drawn repeatedly, as Le Corbusier’s pencil point went round and round the plan, acting out the motions of daily life.23 These, coupled with the countless rough perspectival sketches that exist of individual events en route within his buildings, indicate the full extent of his preoccupation with lived space and, hence, his interest in film. Pierre Chenal’s movie Architecture d’aujourd’hui (1930) was presented originally with subtitles by Le Corbusier and a soundtrack provided by his brother Albert Jeanneret. It begins with a locating shot of the façade from the ground-level garden, moving up and along the ribbon windows that open on to the living room and the first-floor hanging garden beyond. Referring to the way the eye can pan across the view, Frampton writes of the ‘cinematic effect’ of this window type from the inside.24 Here, it is used in reverse. The view provides a clue as to where the camera will be positioned next, another garden space, the hanging garden itself, where it tilts and pans along and up the ramp to the rooftop solarium, in this way following the promenade from ground to roof. The shot feels full of potential, waiting for human contact to make sense of these abstract forms and spaces. Next, the camera is positioned at rooftop level, looking down on a woman as she comes through the door into the hanging garden and starts walking briskly up the ramp, her face in full view. Then, with a trick of continuity, the woman is seen walking up the same portion of ramp – this time from within the stairwell from which we have just seen her emerge, as though reliving her experience from that angle. With further editorial sleight of hand, the camera then returns to the ramp to catch the woman’s back as she strides up to the solarium window, the fulcrum of the entire house. The emphasis of the shot is on her hand moving along the delightfully curved handrail, which occupies the middle of the frame. The woman, now being filmed from rooftop level, is seen taking a chair and moving it into a position, hidden from us by plants, from which she can appreciate the view from the solarium. She settles down to enjoy the ultimate experience that the house has to offer. Then, in an echo of the very first, locating, shot, the camera is positioned back down in the garden, looking at the solarium window from below. From here, it is moved further back into the woods, but it still looks at the same window, a reminder of the viewpoint of the woman, who sits in comfort, unseen behind the frame. Technical constraints are likely to have limited Chenal in the amount of shots that he used. Despite this, the screen geography of the space is extremely clear. The camera angles suggest a sequence of sunny spaces, each leading on from one to other, which are stitched together by the movements of the body. It is impossible, in film, to show a person progressing up a house in one shot; continuity techniques are needed to make sense of the sequences and the changing position of the camera. It is the absence and then presence of the person that make it far more poignant.

48 Flora Samuel

Conclusion Le Corbusier was acutely aware of the multiple subjectivities that might play a part in completing the building. Multiple viewpoints were, after all, central to the creation of the purist canvas, where bottles, jugs and so on can be seen from below, above and in elevation simultaneously. His bêtes noires were the buildings of the baroque, whose undemocratic, perspectival games were designed to be seen from one fixed point, that of king or bishop. Just as postmodern theory gave credence to all viewpoints, no matter how low in status, Le Corbusier’s buildings resist a hierarchy of viewpoint, something that works in counterpoint to the crescendo of light and drama that constitutes his Jacob’s ladder-type promenades. The promenades in his buildings are available to all, whether the rich industrialist or the radiant farmer, but, in the end, the delights of architectural detail as art – spatial games and hidden meanings – are the territory of the rarified few who enter into the club of architecture. I believe, as did Le Corbusier, that buildings can be read in a variety of different ways, depending upon who is doing the reading. We should try to create architecture that allows the readings of others into the fold. Although he might have used all sorts of abstract, didactic, rigid and formal techniques in the evolution of his ideas, techniques that largely deny the fluidity of human existence, he did at least recognise the needs of what he called ‘the individual and the binomial’. Returning to Joselit, ‘Le Corbusier’s topography (and its diagrammatic or permutational legacy among contemporary architects) incorporates a concept – and a physical experience – of centrifugal vision, of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might call “lines of flight”.’25 Perhaps ironically for one who has been portrayed as the arch exponent of modernism and the totalising narratives of truth, Le Corbusier was revolutionary in his deep understanding of viewpoint and its variation from person to person, as encapsulated in the promenade.

Notes 1 ‘Circulation’ is particularly prevalent in Precisions, where a section of a chapter is devoted to the subject (Le Corbusier 1991, pp. 128–33). This was originally published as Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Le Corbusier 1930). 2 Le Corbusier and Jeanneret 1946, p. 24. 3 Le Corbusier and Jeanneret 1995a, p. 60; originally published in 1937. Translation from Benton 1987, p. 4. 4 René Guilleré, quoted in ‘The synchronisation of the senses’ in Eisenstein 1977, p. 81; first published 1943. 5 Joselit 2003, p. 48. 6 Andrew Ballantyne, ‘Living the romantic landscape (after Deleuze and Guattari)’, in Arnold and Sofaer 2008, p. 30. 7 Le Corbusier and Jeanneret 1943, pp. 134–5; originally published in 1937. 8 Le Corbusier and Jeanneret 1995b, p. 26; originally published in 1935. 9 Plato, The Republic III, in Buchanan 1997, p. 389. 10 Le Corbusier 1987, p. 169; originally published in French in 1925. 11 Flora Samuel, Orphism in the Work of Le Corbusier, unpublished PhD thesis, Cardiff University, 2000. 12 See Le Corbusier 1989, p. 8; originally published in 1950. 13 Le Corbusier 1995a, p. 136; originally published in 1937. There are various edited versions of this film, but the 1971 Chaplin-edited version does not contain an image of Jacob’s ladder. There is, however, an extraordinary dream sequence in which Chaplin’s alter ego, the tramp, dreams of his slum home translated to heaven, bedecked in flowers, in which all the people whom he knows have sprouted wings, including the dog. The dialectical nature of these two worlds is then broken down. It is no wonder that Le Corbusier admired Chaplin so much – including him within the images in the Electronic Poem – he played with so many of the issues that Le Corbusier held dear.

Architectural promenades and Villa Savoye 49

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Samuel 2010. Le Corbusier 1995a, p. 187. Bruno 2007, p. 58. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage of attractions’, in Eisenstein 1977, pp. 181–3 (181). See François Penz, ‘Architecture and the screen from photography to synthetic imaging’, in Thomas and Penz 2003, p. 146, for a discussion of the close links between modernist architecture and film. This interview is cited in Cohen 1992, p. 49. Bruno 2007, p. 57. Le Corbusier 1960, p. 175. Frampton 2001, p.79. For Yve-Alain Bois, it ‘functions, in part, to make possible a cinematic reading’, in Sergei M. Eisenstein, Yve-Alain Bois and Michael Glenny (1989) Montage and architecture, Assemblage, no. 10, pp. 110–31 (p. 114). See, for example, FLC 29310 in Allen Brooks, Archive, Volume XVII, p. 462. Frampton 1996, p. 144. ‘I see reflections on the water, I see beautiful boats sail past, I see the Alps, framed as in a museum, panel by panel’, wrote Le Corbusier of his own beleaguered entry for the League of Nations competition (Le Corbusier 1991, p. 48). Joselit 2003, p. 48.

1.6 GUNNAR ASPLUND: ‘PICTURES WITH MARGINAL NOTES FROM THE GOTHENBURG ART AND INDUSTRY EXHIBITION’, 19231 Translated by Eva Berndtsson and Peter Blundell Jones

By 1923, Gunnar Asplund was already a leading figure in Swedish architecture and one of the main authors of the classical revival known as Swedish Grace. He and his colleagues were also the editors of the journal Byggmästaren, for which he wrote this article about the temporary buildings by Ahlberg, Lewerentz and others at the Gothenburg Art and Industry Exhibition of 1923. We include it here because of the attention given to experience of the spatial sequence and its visual effects. The buildings in the exhibition area are even now being torn down and cleared away, but let us save one complex for memory and for enjoyment. The pictures have not been shown before in this magazine, and the architectural power which gives them value doesn’t end with the summer. The Art and Industry building by architect Ahlberg, the Crematorium Building by architect Lewerentz, and the buildings for the workshop by Lewerentz and Wernstedt were not special for their size or ingenious effects, but because of a certain quality which one would like to believe is today’s and tomorrow’s willpower in our developing architecture. But let us enter. We went past the Art and Industry’s façade which was beautifully located against the greenery under the silhouette of the rock (Figure 1.6.1). It had good restful proportions but the addition of signs and reliefs demanded by the exhibition organisers have reduced its clear rhythm and character: we have stringent demands! In the Interior, however, the given of a strong uphill slope has resulted in a clear rhythmic configuration which is the hallmark of good architecture (Figures 1.6.2 and 1.6.3, plan and section). The columned court with its impluvium and the straight long central staircase, up which one circulates with groups of rooms on both sides at increasingly higher levels, is a brilliant architectonic idea. It is practical because of the clear orientation it gives. It is also refreshing and full of good feeling with its diversity, its fountains, its beautiful views of water and sky: note the joyful rest of the columned courts which is achieved by a clear shape, by locating the main entrance not on axis with the staircase but in the corner (Figure 1.6.4), by the peaceful rhythm of the columns and the splashing of the water (Figure 1.6.5). Note the energetic liveliness in the staircase, the enclosed serenity in the exhibition halls (Figure 1.6.6), and you will find that the beautiful change between them in

Asplund: Art and Industry Exhibition 51

proportion and character is the foundation to the pleasantness of it all. It is strange that the long staircase does not deter but attracts. Perhaps it was made a bit too narrow. It was difficult because of the crowd to catch the beautiful view, and the round openings in the walls did not really fit with the Egyptian lines of the rest, but the staircase delighted with its directly aligned landings beautifully shaped as octagons and circles. Especially I want to remember the crystal of the fountain and the beautiful terracotta reliefs by Ivar Johnsson (Figure 1.6.7) and the interesting cupola room with the light opening above and with the sculpture of Triton, who greets the incoming light with raised arms (Figure 1.6.8). The room sequence like a string of pearls on the central axis beautifully connects up the exhibition. . . . There was no cold or boring exhibition atmosphere in these rooms but rather a certain bourgeois cosiness. They had fine proportions, tasteful colours, and were cleverly arranged for the exploitation of optical effects. The lighting was exquisite. . . . When we progress further through the doorway under the cupola we find a Jacob’s ladder in the light against us leading up to the plateau of the crematorium (Figure 1.6.9). Here is a clear monumental idea: this staircase with its terraces of graves in the outside air: you really wish you were on your own with an open view, not blocked by the backs of other visitors. The original idea with the rising terraces and the increasing gradient of the staircase augmented one’s expectations. Up at the top on the magnificent plateau one is rewarded with wide views over the roofs like a fairytale city. The building before you has fine proportions and massing but is not entirely convincing as a termination. How would it have been without a building at all, but with the open sky beyond the staircase?

FIGURE 1.6.1

Gothenburg Exhibition 1923, Art and Industry Pavilion by Hakon Ahlberg, main entrance. All illustrations in this section are reproduced from the original Swedish article

52 Translators Berndtsson and Blundell Jones

S K A L A

i : 600

FIGURE 1.6.2

(left) Art and Industry Pavilion, section

FIGURE 1.6.3

(right) Art and Industry Pavilion, plan

Asplund: Art and Industry Exhibition 53

FIGURE 1.6.4

In the first hall, looking back to the entrance

FIGURE 1.6.5

First hall on axis, looking towards the main stair

FIGURE 1.6.6

Textile room, largest of the exhibition halls, left side on plan

FIGURE 1.6.7

Fountain and reliefs in the octagon at the top of the tapered stairs

54 Translators Berndtsson and Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.6.8

Cupola room with statue of Triton

FIGURE 1.6.9

Up the final stair to Lewerentz’s crematorium room

Note 1

Article in Byggmästaren, 1923, pp. 273–8, translated by Eva Berndtsson and Peter Blundell Jones in 2002 and shortened to exclude the text on the workshop buildings, which would have doubled the required illustration.

1.7 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S USE OF MOVEMENT John Sergeant

‘Ground plan and perspective view of Ward W. Willits’ villa, Highland Park, Ill’, Plate XXV in the Wasmuth portfolio of Wright’s work to 1910, must be one the twentieth century’s most compressed and beautiful renderings (Figure 1.7.1). Wright had developed the aesthetic of a central loggia flanked by twin masses and far-flying roofs in this well-known Prairie house of 1901. He had taken the quasi-sacred pinwheel hearth of his own Oak Park house (1896) and placed it centrally, to disturb and enrich a cross-shaped plan: a form of overpowering horizontality nailed by its chimney into the prairie. It offered a sense of place in contrast to the rush, noise and coal smoke of the Loop; apparent security in the face of contemporary social and technical change: Chicago ‘born in a flash . . .’ in the stark prairie.1 The classical gesture of welcome given by the Willits loggia is firmly rejected by a defensive balustrade, and you must slide along the eastern boundary to the protective shelter of the porte cochère. From your vehicle, you turn left and climb four steps to the front door, still under this great roof (Figure 1.7.2). You are welcomed, there is a seat before you, and you turn into the stair hall, which opens vertically above you. If it is not a personal visit, you enter the reception room to your right, overlooking where you started. Otherwise, you are invited to turn left and mount five broad steps, where progress is blocked by a slatted oak screen, the back of an unseen inglenook seat, but through it is glimpsed a 60-feet (18-metre) vista through dining room to porch and garden beyond. You enter a richly ambiguous space: still within the entry sequence, but unknowingly also in the corner of the living room. You are also in a subspace of its own. You turn left to face the street you have left and spiral around the room, before turning left at the hearth, where the sequence is repeated down the back of the second inglenook seat into the dining room. As you take a seat, you have completed ten turns. In 10 intensive years up to leaving Chicago for Florence in 1910 to complete the drawings for the Wasmuth, Wright probably felt that he had extracted almost every possible variation from his Prairie idiom. In a remarkable series of houses, he had explored every imaginable permutation of plan arrangement, of ambiguously overlapping sequences of spaces, of setting up rooms with respect to hearth, sideboard or staircase, and of gradual movement from public to private territory. At their heart was always a binding and releasing, a grounding at the

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GouNOaiss ots OBCRGescHOSSES

6BUN0RIS3 0E5 HAUPT«E3CHOUU

FIGURE 1.7.1

Ward Willitts House, 1901, Highland Park, IL. Plans and perspective. The route processes through reception to the ‘conspicuous consumption’ (cf. Thorstein Veblen) of the dining room via the more informal living room

Source: Courtesy The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation (Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University). All rights reserved. All drawings in this section are reproduced from the original German book

Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement 57

FIGURE 1.7.2

Ward Willitts House, diagram of route on plan Source: Drawing by John Sergeant

primitive level of the fire, with an outgoing of windows or loggia: what the historian Vincent Scully memorably called, ‘a womb with a view’. Wright took a remarkable, intuitive leap in realising these projects. The formal properties, the tartan strips of the Froebel grid that the visitor traverses, have been extensively analysed by MacCormac (1968) and others, but they did not remark on the meandering or spiralling movement, which is widely thought to have originated in Wright’s exposure to Japanese culture.2 He did not visit Japan until 1905, but he experienced the Japanese Pavilion, the Ho-o-Den, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Its symmetrical form suggested an axial entrance, like the Willits House, but this was denied by a rope across the axial steps. Visitors had to move one way, as they always do at world fairs.3 Before 1893, Wright was probably the foremost Western expert on the Japanese print: ikoye-i. By 1905, he had assimilated the seeming simplicity and sense of progressive discovery found in the Japanese building tradition. Wright learned from both tea-house and temple complex. Both have an indirect and shifting approach. In the first, small changes of direction are carefully orchestrated to direct attention to a tree, rock or garden feature; they are indicated by the paving or arrangement of stones and measured to the kimono-encumbered step and wooden clog (see Chapter 3.4, p. 178). It is a sequential process of renunciation, of withdrawal from daily cares, and at small scale. In the second, these changes of direction operate at the scale of landscape, making connections with the world beyond as part of a narrative. A stroll-garden, as at Katsura, is a literal representation of the inner sea, lost memory. Nitschke (1966) has shown how movement over an entire complex is worked into the form of a site, reserving its finest features for places of repose or surprise.4 Kyu-misu-Dera, in the south-eastern hills of Kyoto, is typical (Figures 1.7.3 and 1.7.4). Arrival at a great outer portal leads up the contours and past a glowing-red pagoda. Further up, you may purchase offerings or deposit prayers, before reaching a water basin filled by a cosmic dragon, symbolising and offering cleansing. You continue to find yourself high on a cliff, as if on a stage: to the left is the great Buddha Hall, to the right a view across the mountain towards the distant city. Your feet echo on wood, for a mighty timber platform intercedes between earth and sky. Beyond are three small temples and forest. Below, in a defile, at the foot of a great flight of steps, is a fountain, the purest water in Japan. The temple is dedicated to safety in motherhood; the woods above are wilder, animist: a place of spirits. You descend, drink or collect your water, and traverse the contours to leave by the gate where you arrived.

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FIGURE 1.7.3

Kyu-misu-dera Temple, Kyoto, Japan, 1633, on foundation of 798 Source: www.khusley.com

FIGURE 1.7.4

Kyu-misu-dera Temple, plan. Building dispositions are intimately linked to the site, developed organically from walking it. Key: 1 portal; 2 pagoda; 3 Buddha Hall; 4 Shinto shrines; 5 fountain Source: Redrawn by John Sergeant

Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement 59

Japan 1917–22 The commission for the Imperial Hotel provided Wright with an opportunity for more detailed study and to undertake smaller works, among them the Yamamura House of 1918–23, completed by Arata Endo (Figure 1.7.5). It has not been explored by Wright scholars, but I see it as a crucial link between the movement patterns of his Prairie houses and the subtle interplay with greater landscape of his later work. Sited in Ashiya, the building lies on the urban periphery, south east of Kobe. The Ashiyagawa River gushes down out of the hills, beautifully embanked in diagonally set stone, and the house crowns the ridge above. Wright ran the driveway along the contours up to the top of the ridge, which dominates the view of valley and sea. Poised there, with its service wing set higher, the house is angled to follow the lie of the land. Because of the slope, car arrival is restricted to a small rectangular forecourt, and the building takes the form of a series of single-storey set backs, like a stair up the ridge. The first element, the living room, spans the court, making a powerful threshold marked by four piers, through two of which the view can be glimpsed: opposite, a fountain drops water into a basin, and beside it, the door faces the mountain. The obvious, and grander, manoeuvre for the car to drop off passengers and then continue around the contours was impossible, as

FIGURE 1.7.5

Yamamura House, 1918–23, Ashiya, near Kobe, Japan. Exploded isometric Source: Drawing by John Sergeant. Key: 1 entry; 2 living room; 3 Japanese-style rooms; 4 dining room

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the land to the north west drops steeply; instead, it must execute a two-point turn and leave as it came. Garages are elsewhere. On entering, there is only a vestibule, and you ascend, to your left, the first of two stairs. This sets up a spiral that arrives in the reception room, a powerful space, anchored by its fire, aligned to the view, with built-in seats each side, poised above the land, which falls away on three sides. This would surely be enough, but Wright continues. You return to the stair and ascend one more level, stepping this time to the left, up the ridge, where you are confronted by a grand gallery, with views to the north west. It passes along the whole length of a three-room enfilade set three steps higher: Japanese-style rooms, linked by sliding doors and able to serve many functions, including sleeping. They lack paper screens, shoji, but have floor mats, tatami, to bestow a cultural authenticity. You become aware that the gallery is also a kind of internal verandah, engawa, signalling threshold to a Japanese person, a barrier between the boarded exterior and tatami-floored interior, traditionally never crossed without shoes being removed.5 Passing, perhaps hungrily, along the gallery, you ascend a second stair to the dining room, the goal of the promenade. The square table is offset under a pyramidal ceiling, and a loggia overlooks the entire length of the house and ridge beyond. Servants could produce a meal as if magically, for there has been no hint of the service wing hidden behind this highest level. Yet even this is not all, because the composition possesses an architectural coda: after eating, you stroll on to the stepped terraces of the roofs, feel the evening air and observe the sunset.6

Middle age: Los Angeles By the time he returned to America from Japan in 1922, Wright had moved from a design procedure based on grids applied to a site to a more open acceptance of place. The pre-cast concrete ‘textile block’ he developed imposed a three-dimensional spatial ‘net’, which enabled him to negotiate with topography as found, and movement bound the two together. He had carried the mental ‘table’ on which he had learned Froebel’s Gifts to the flat prairies of the mid west career, but it was inadequate for the hilly sites of Los Angeles. The Storer House (1923) typifies these blockwork designs: it stands on a corner of a contour road in the Hollywood Hills. It follows Wright’s new grid cage of 16  16 inch (400  400 mm) textile blocks, extended beneath the ground plane to encounter and discipline topography, which produced an easy rocking motion up to the south-facing terrace. Until smog removed the view, ascending the house meant passing through this ‘textile-matrix’ to gain levels from which to gauge the horizon of distant Long Beach, beyond the great grid of the city.

The desert and Taliesin West Pneumonia and Wisconsin winters drove Wright to the Arizona desert after 1930, and the vegetation and sense of space he found there clearly energised him. Falling Water, a dazzling series of Usonian houses, and Taliesin West followed in short order. His first desert camp, Ocatillo (1927), only survived a season, but was a clear response to new conditions. Wright enjoyed the achievement of a dust-pink boarded compound on a knoll, its 30–60º perimeter adjusted to the contours, canvas-roofed cabins ventilated by flaps, and a central camp fire: ‘my living room is as high as the stars’. He returned, to Maricopa Mesa, and built the second camp, Taliesin West (1938) as his winter home and headquarters for the Taliesin Fellowship, office and school (Figure 1.7.6). Although much altered, its primary design moves remain:

Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement 61

10

8

13 14 12

7

9 5

3

4

>11

2

8 1

15

FIGURE 1.7.6

Taliesin West, 1938, Scottsdale, AZ. Wright brings the visitor to his door via a promenade that progressively takes you into the place, which was not ‘charged’ before its building. Key: 1 entry; 2 office and Wright’s study; 3 pergola; 4 drafting room; 5 kitchen and dining room 6 loggia; 7 kiva; 8 terminals; 9 prow; 10 borrowed landscape; 11 pictograph rocks; 12 garden room; 13 green garden; 14 apprentices court; 15 service area

Source: Drawing by John Sergeant

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two alignments, one overlaid on the other at 45º.7 At my first visit in 1969, it seemed a long drive from Phoenix, and a wilder place, part of the choreographed journey by which Wright conjured up his most profoundly grounded project. It uses his ‘terminals,’8 a ‘prow’,9 borrowed landscape10 and the Anasazi prehistory of the place11 to achieve a deep specificity. The result is slow ascent and withdrawal from the urban grid, to-and-fro movement about the complex, release into a withheld vista and then compression through dark to light towards the ultimate goal, his hearth and garden. It has often been analysed, but the most persuasive account of arrival is that of Philip Johnson; whatever we may think of Johnson’s own architecture, it is valuable for being thoughtful, observant and made during Wright’s lifetime. (Wright) has developed one thing which I defy any of us to equal: the arrangements of the secrets of space. I call it the hieratic aspects of architecture. The processional aspects. I would like to tell you about it briefly. You drive up from Phoenix, about 20 miles out, up a dusty desert road, wondering why you came because it’s terribly hot, and you go up a slight rise. Finally you turn into a particularly dusty, nasty and ill-kept road. But there is a little sign that says ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’. You come to an agglomeration of tents and stones where the car stops. There is a low wall and you realise after you have been there and come back again, that he has been pushing out the spot where the car stops, further and further from his place. I’d like to recommend that to you and to me. The car, of course, is one of the deaths of architecture. It’s out of scale, it makes noise, it doesn’t please the eye. And you cannot, from a sitting position, even look at architecture. It has to be by the actual muscles of your feet. He now makes you walk about 150 feet, until you get closer to this meaningless group of buildings. You’ve seen the plans many times and I’m sure you didn’t understand them any more than I did before I’d been there. As you approach, he starts you off on a slight slope, with the mountains to your left, and so up the first steps you go, away from the buildings instead of toward them. And how he takes your eyes and makes you follow. You go down the steps this way but the buildings are over there. Then the steps turn at right angles and you go between two low walls, very much narrower this time. You have the sensation that you are always changing your point of view on the buildings. You turn, pass his office, you climb four more steps and pass a great stone that he has put there with Indian hieroglyphics on it, which he found on his place. There is no door in sight. There is a tent roof on a stone base but no door; there is nothing in sight. You just begin to wonder. The path takes you down a long walk, about 200 feet perhaps, with this tent room on your right, the mountains on your left. You begin to wonder what is happening when, at your right, you pass the tent room, the building above goes overhead. But the view – two enormous piers – and you look again (a trick) through a dark room, a 6-foot room, out onto the terrace of Taliesin West: an enormous prow that sticks out over the mountains. Now you’ve been climbing all this time and you never knew it because you never looked back; but for the first time, you realize you have been climbing and for 90 miles you look across the desert through that darkened hole. And again, of course, the steps start rippling. You go down three steps more and you are pulled out onto this prow of the desert. He calls it his ‘ship of the desert’. That’s where Frank Lloyd Wright is usually standing to greet you with his purple hair, his cape, and you say, ‘Now I’ve arrived at this magic place’. But you’ve just begun your trip. He then leads you through a gold-leaf concrete tunnel that turns three times and you are pushed out into the single most exciting room that we have in this

Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement 63

country. It is indescribable except to say that the light, since it all comes from the tent above, has infiltered and mellowed. You are just beginning to absorb this room when he opens a few of the tent flaps and this is when it really hits you. You look out – but not onto the desert. You look out this time on a little private secret garden that he has built beyond this room, where water is playing unlike any water in the desert. The plants are 20 feet high in this garden, and there is a lawn such as you have seen only in New England. You say, ‘Now I see what I’ve come to Taliesin for’; you have not. He makes one more turn, two more turns. This time the door is 18 inches wide and you have to go in sidewise. It is entirely an inside room, no desert or garden. One wall is of plants. To be sure, you cannot see them: that is, you can’t see through them, but that gives you the jungle light that comes into the room. There is a shaft of light that comes from 12 or 14 feet above (this is a very high room now). The room is 21 by 14 feet, all stone. One entire length of it is fireplace; on the other long wall is a table and two chairs – and that is where you have come to be. You sit down with Frank Lloyd Wright and he says, ‘Welcome to Taliesin West’. My friends. That is the essence of architecture.12 Movement in a literal sense was a fundamental part of a lifetime that spanned from the pace of a horse to the flight of a plane. Lloyd, Wright’s son, wrote of Kano, Wright’s black saddle horse, and admitted that, ‘Dad kept busy paying fines’ for speeding his customised yellow Stoddart Dayton roadster around Oak Park. Allen Brooks has described how the workforce on the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo arrived at 6.30 a.m. to find neat instructions fixed to all the cabinet work: Wright had travelled by night train from Chicago for his site visit and had arrived in the early hours.13 Ocean liners seem not to have exerted the fascination that they did for Le Corbusier, although Wright recrossed the Pacific from Long Beach to Yokohama and crossed the Atlantic to Rio in 1930, Florence in 1909 and London in 1939. The Taliesin Fellowship made annual migrations between its Arizona winter home and summer in Wisconsin: Wright in his Auburn Cords and later Lincolns, with a retinue of cars and a portable kitchen. His ‘aerotors’ would have taken off vertically to engage with an invisible, three-dimensional grid above the 1-mile matrix of Broadacre City. Movement had the same romance for him as for the rest of his generation; however, I would argue that the slower pace of season and time meant more to him. His autobiography speaks of the smell of Taliesin, wood smoke, pine boughs, wild plum blossom and huge bunches of flowers. He loved the effect of wear on materials, ‘wood best looks after itself’, the oil of the human hand, discoloration from weather, the icicles hanging from the eaves. His ‘In the nature of materials’ articles14 articulate the beauty of patina in metal, the verdigris of copper. There was no attempt to defy ageing, other than through the skill of the architect, by understanding and detailing. Architecture was to be there in the world, but in no way separated from the processes of time.

Notes 1 During Wright’s early career, Chicago went through deep social unrest. See Lionel March (1970) Imperial city of the boundless West: The impact of Chicago on Frank Lloyd Wright, The Listener, vol. 83, no. 2144. 2 Richard MacCormac (1968) The anatomy of Wright’s aesthetic, The Architectural Review, vol. 143, no. 852, pp. 143–6. Nute 1993. Visitors had to zigzag along the heavy roof overhang, peering into, but not entering, the spaces inside. This, and Wright’s substitution of the hearth for the tokonoma, or sacred recess, are documented here.

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3 Pilgrims do the same, whether in the 300 BC Buddhist cave temples at Ellora, India, the symbolic revisitation of Jerusalem’s holy places (see Krautheimer 1983) or any number of European cathedrals and abbeys, along aisles around the apse containing the sacred relic, or indeed the haj. Pilgrimage, a physical embodiment of faith, is the primary form of processional movement in architecture. 4 Günter Nitschke (1966) MA: The Japanese sense of place, Architectural Design, March, London. 5 What Wright called the ‘Shinto be-clean’ admonition also marked the threshold: a transition of level from dirty exterior to the fragrant, soft-woven tatami a step above, the surface for sitting or sleeping. Wright had only encountered the Ho-o-den Pavilion at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and was not to visit Japan until his Prairie style was established. It was probably ignorance of this Oriental understanding of threshold that allowed him to enter directly from a covered exterior into the interior. 6 This entertainment, ‘walking the leads’, was an important ritual of seventeenth-century England, where the company would take the air after eating to consume sherbets and cordials on the roof. 7 For more detailed analyses, see: Neil Levine, ‘Wright’s diagonal planning’, in McCarter 2005; also John Sergeant, ‘Woof and warp’, ibid. See also Neil Levine, Frank Lloyd Wright and John Sergeant (1997) ‘MA’: Composition and reflex in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4. 8 A square of red concrete is encountered at the start. It acts as a major terminal, key word in Wrightian composition, its counterpoint being the private pool, drawn in the second design, in the Master’s garden. It is inscribed with a poem by Walt Whitman. 9 A ‘prehistoric Native-American petroglyph boulder’ (found on the site), as Neil Levine has pointed out, is placed at the hinge of the great triangular prow that forges south from the living and working quarters and that, he argues, constitutes a new openness and flexibility in modernism. See his ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s diagonal planning revisited’, in McCarter 2005. 10 The view of the Superstition Mountains, 30 miles away, was presented along the line of approach and beneath a bridge. This was lost when Olgivanna, Wright’s widow, enlarged her bedroom. 11 The second key to the turn south and view through the loggia is the massive stone box of the kiva. In practice, the Fellowship used it for meetings, akin to a monastic chapter house. Unlike the circular Pueblo or Anasazi kiva in the locality, for example at Chaco Canyon, the Taliesin version is square and above ground. However, Wright was clearly recalling it: the four lights set in the floor recall the four columns supporting the Indian original. 12 (1957) 100 Years, Frank Lloyd Wright and us, Pacific Architect and Builder, March, reprinted in Johnson 1979, pp. 193–8. 13 See H. Allen Brooks in Eaton 1969. Transcontinental trains were the means of transport until after the Second World War; not just a convenience, but also an inspiration. The Larkin Building, Buffalo (1904), pioneered air-handling to combat its location alongside a smoky marshalling yard. 14 ‘In the nature of materials’ was the title of Wright’s 1928 articles in Architectural Record and Henry Russell Hitchcock’s compilation of his work, Hitchcock 1942.

1.8 HANS SCHAROUN AND MOVEMENT The Kassel Project 1952 Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

The Kassel Theatre project of 1952, designed in collaboration with leading landscape architect Hermann Mattern, was a milestone in Scharoun’s work but also his saddest loss, scandalously dropped after detailed development and a start on site. It won the competition outright, much praised by the judges, and was developed for construction. Work began on digging the foundations, but then the bases of old fortifications were found, and it was stopped. Meanwhile, the city authorities had secretly developed an alternative scheme by local architect Paul Bode, who had not even entered the competition, and that was built instead. It caused Scharoun, not only the loss of his most important collaboration with Mattern, but also a loss of credibility, for, in justifying their dishonest move, the municipality’s officers claimed technical shortcomings that were, in fact, never put to the test. Scharoun’s contemporary text reveals concern with movement both inside and outside the building, for the theatre’s approach and relation to the city were part of the arriving audience’s unfolding visual, spatial and haptic experience, which continued in the foyer and entry to the auditorium. The extract opens with a discussion of the city’s history and the origins of the square Friedrichsplatz in which the theatre was to be situated.1 The Friedrichsplatz area of Kassel was formerly the zone of negotiation between two clearly laid out city-cells. Naturally the development of this free area was conditioned by topological and technical demands, but it occurred in a period when the necessity of defining such city-cells was still present, along with consciousness of the essential conditions. So the later Friedrichsplatz grew in the ‘void’ left between two individual gestalts: between the medieval town on one side and the Baroque new town on the other, each obedient to the rules of its period (Figures 1.8.1 and 1.8.2). In the formal design of the Baroque town the Duke’s concerns found expression, so in developing what had been the ‘void’, the Duke’s interests became increasingly dominant, that is to say it became a formal part of the Baroque new town, obedient to the new town’s rules. In the establishment of the new boundary, the medieval town was therefore fronted by a stage-set. But the Friedrichsplatz was initially no closed square, for the ducal influence was more a presentation of the Duke’s power over the increasingly managed bourgeois class, which was shown by the ‘suppression’ of the image of the bourgeois medieval town. So begins the tragedy of the square, which in this early condition was

66 Translator Peter Blundell Jones FIGURE 1.8.1

Plan of central Kassel in 1742. The medieval town on the right still has its fortifications, and the Baroque new town on the left is identifiable by its grid. Friedrichsplatz is developing between the two, the Ducal palace, later Auepark (valley-park), is bottom right betwen rivers Source: Adaped from period maps available online

FIGURE 1.8.2

Plan of central Kassel in 1835. By now, Friedrichsplatz has been formalised, with classical façades redefining its east side, but it remains open to the south Source: Adaped from period maps available online

just a piece of landscape and a parade ground. This ‘suppression’ also applied to the adjacent Ottoneum [an early theatre], which arose during the period of the Baroque new town, but was in its content more dedicated to the spirit of the medieval town.2 If we wish to remedy the blocking off of the old town, whose layout is undoubtedly of historic significance, the recovery and reintegration of the Ottoneum must also be a priority, which belongs in its essence to the area of the medieval town. The position of the Zwehrenturm [an old city gate tower from the fourteenth century] and the open space formed between the Ottoneum and the Zwehrenturm make an effective prelude to that special and characteristic spatial order, and – following tradition – can exemplify the territory of the medieval city-cell. The creation of a new layout will not be a matter of conserving the falsified wholeness of the square, but rather of finding balance between three contrasting elements: the medieval city-cell, the Baroque new town, and the connection with the landscape beyond. What we mean by the latter needs explaining: the ‘void’ was originally an integral part of the landscape with unbroken visual contact towards the valley. Once this is understood, one sees its elementary essence as a free space with its large dimensions and the fluid treatment of its surface. So a sequence of street spaces leading

Hans Scharoun and movement: Kassel Project 67

from deep within the town needs to be developed, and the order of these street spaces must be determined in relation to the general layout and the form of the buildings, then further considered in connection with the transition between the square and the valley, permitting recognition of a more dynamic as opposed to static treatment. Although the connection with the dynamic essence of the medieval city has obviously been disrupted, the forming of spaces can still retain something of its essential dynamism, even if this needs to be combined with the gestalt means of a geometric coordination system. In addition, the economic development of the city and its new traffic demands are influences on the development of the square that cannot be ignored: for it is becoming so divided by major roads that its built unity is disrupted. So in place of the old aristocratic order a new ordering must be found. Our time brings interactions between the themes of organic and geometric organisation – a struggle between traditional and landscape-related forces. This leads to a mixed deployment of powers, for on the one hand interrelated focal points must be developed, while on the other axes connected with these foci must be added which are appropriate to our lively but highly problematic period. The landscape provides focal points that are aspects of the Duke’s courtly society. Its structure expresses the social order of those times: it is a place that in the form of landscape-bound organs makes an original lively reference to the functions and the environment. Our new, contemporary, arrangement of place and form (Figures 1.8.3 and 1.8.4) attempts on the one hand to restore the connection with the wider landscape, while assuring that, as the new buildings are added, corrections are made to increase the comparative scale. On the other hand it allows the close connection with the Auepark to be established, in keeping with the new and much broader social function of the park. But while in the eighteenth century a lively interaction of old and new themes made the whole layout attractive and meaningful, the nineteenth century brought this to an end. Hasty technical and economic development – and especially development of the industrial quarter after 1866 – no longer allowed contemporary changes to develop the city’s structure in a responsive and organic manner. With the technical and economic development, the process of making insights about the whole and of finding forms could make no progress. Then, with the return to historically derived forms, concern shifted away from visions of the whole towards narrow-mindedness, seeing only the fragment locked into its own limited situation. It is characteristic of this age that economically important developments are unprecedented in scale and are allotted enormous sites, so that for example a single industrial complex can take up more land than was needed for the entire requirements of a medieval town. But this occurs – as if the overscaled degree of expenditure must be compensated for – at the expense of facilities for the general public. Here everything is very constrained and meanly organised. But, for public buildings too, site boundaries and site areas need to be considered. The landscape is given over to the service of technical developments, just as society and the law have to adapt themselves to technical necessities. And yet valuable structures of a cultural or natural kind could in future be rescued from the arms of this technical–economic development. Our view addresses the relatively narrow area in which decisions might yet be made with some certainty and accomplished within a reasonable time. So it must be understood as a phenomenon of

68 Translator Peter Blundell Jones FIGURE 1.8.3

Plan of the intended reorganisation adding the new theatre, by Scharoun and Mattern. This and earlier plans are set out north to top and the rectangle of Friedrichsplatz appears diagonally, the valley of the river Fulda bottom right Source: Adapted from published site plan, original in Scharoun Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

(above) Bird’s eye sketch of the whole situation, seen from the west, with the Fulda valley on the right and Friedrichsplatz on the left, dominated by the classical façade of the museum. The lower parts of the theatre were to be terraced into the hill, creating a platform with the valley view, and a pedestrian bridge led over the main road into the theatre

FIGURE 1.8.4

Source: From original in Mattern Archive, Technische Universität Berlin

(left) Isometric projection of Friedrichsplatz with the new theatre top left (north is at 8 o’clock)

FIGURE 1.8.5

Source: From publication in Bauwelt 3 November 1952

Hans Scharoun and movement: Kassel Project 69

the period that the thing redefined as a square had been really a part of the surrounding landscape. It must be understood too, that hand in hand with this narrowing of view went another tendency: single-minded primitive form-making, used as a presentation of power politics. The square was reconceived in terms of the axis. Direct on the axis closing the falsely reconceived square was placed the Wilhelmine Theatre [the previous nineteenth century building]. But it has now gone, and it is again a remarkable phenomenon of our time that we have the courage for a consequent and history-conscious realisation. As the immediate landscape relationships have been destroyed, there is no way to add a screen wall of convincing potency that could bring together Man and Nature, Autonomous and Heteronomous, in a new and tense relation. Here, aesthetic concerns founder under a necessary brutality. Since the Wilhelmine Theatre has fallen, the way is clear to create a new arrangement that reconciles the spatial and landscape givens with expressions of the new social structure. The planner must work as follows: first make an inventory: to investigate the landscape in its surviving worth and to incorporate it in the general frame of planning, to examine the existing and planned developments, to understand historic townscape areas in their living, organic relationships to each other, and to place new elements in relation to them; then, to consider the traffic system in its differentiation and as a technical means at the service of the Gestalt. For the placing of the technically and functionally conditioned through-road is bound to influence the structural form of the city, and if the city is not to be divided and destroyed, decisions must be made as to what is worth keeping and which elements belong together, despite recognising the inherent divisiveness of the task. With the help of the through-road, the rediscovered void that was the square can be divided into three parts: the terrace looking out over the Auepark, which stands on the remains of the old theatre, the road expanded to become a station for cars, and the retained representative square, placed directly next to the old town and centred on the Fridericianum museum (Figures 1.8.4 and 1.8.5). Into it flows the pedestrian street arriving from the station, which leads across the bridge to the theatre, the terrace and the park beyond. Thus do the many demands and essential conditions resolve themselves as if spontaneously. The technical/functional starting point can be solved in a way that organically unites the givens with the set task: the way to intuitive vision is open, and what follows on can take place as Pascal put it: ‘I could not have sought you, Lord, if you had not already found me’.3 The town planning solution as discussed leads to a clarification of questions of structure and Gestalt on the grounds of overall relationships and immediate conditions. This is one planning process. The other, more specialised, consists of the development of the focal point itself, of the organ developed according to its being [Wesen] and again in response to local conditions. On this issue something must be said of the theatre itself. The large theatre is conceived as an auditorium space, but in such a way that the differentiated conditions of action for the players and spectators in their contingency as Sein und Schein [being and image] are brought together and induced by the formal arrangement to confront one another. The realisation of this interaction also provides the means to create the necessary intimacy. It must free itself from the tradition of courtly representation. In order better to raise the opposition between Sein und Schein [being

70 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

and image] to consciousness, the audience will be brought in not from the side but from the rear. The encouraged intimacy also serves the purpose of bringing the spectator into stronger contact with the acted or poetic event, insofar as this can be done by means of a builderly or spatial kind. The particular meaning of different performances can be expressed through many variations – in quantitative terms by a variable room. By means of the specially altered atmosphere and appropriate handling of scale it will suggest the other situation and so through experience encourage a concurrence of thought . . . [Text on theatre staging omitted] So these aligned conceptions – in spatial and theatrical terms – provide a premise for the presentation of a lively confrontation between the world of Schein [image/appearance] and the world of Sein [being]. Spatial linkages, matters of scale, depth and width – as with the structure as a whole – follow their own being/essence [Wesen]. The guiding of spectators over the footbridge or from the dropping off point in the street below it, then on through foyer and cloakrooms into the auditorium, is not just functional, but serves their experience [Erleben] (Figures 1.8.6 and 1.8.7). All circulation and social rooms are optically connected to each other, while each retains its own identity. The rooms for movement unfold in the core-defining representative spatial progression, which includes foyer, refreshment room and smoking room. The refreshment room

FIGURE 1.8.6

(left) Plan of theatre foyer, revised version, lower level (redrawn and turned to match site plans)

FIGURE 1.8.7

(right) Plan of theatre foyer, revised version, upper level, with arrival off bridge top left (redrawn)

Source: Part plans, redrawn by Peter Blundell Jones from originals in the Scharoun Archive, Akademie der Künste

Hans Scharoun and movement: Kassel Project 71

faces the front garden, the smoking room the valley, also open to the wider landscape. The enclosed court serves as yet another element to free up and enrich the spatial sequence. The social task of the building is expressed additionally in the use of the theatre as festival site for the city. Therefore, the provision of daylight is included, with help of a skylight, and in front is an ambulatory, along which a promenade can be made in favourable seasons with a view across the valley. The necessary rooms for the artists, administration and business are given their own forms but assembled around a point of communication. The parts of the building are so laid out in response to ground and environment that the natural and the planned can combine in a new unity. To make this evident and understandable a path is intended from the terrace over the back stage and on down into the Auepark. Passage through the buildings seems to me above all an important means of integrating them into society, by visual means, and by passing beyond the visual.

Notes 1

2 3

Extracts from a text by Hans Scharoun in Pfankuch 1974, pp. 205–12, first published in Bauwelt 1952, vol. 44, p. 173ff. This translation includes most of Scharoun’s published text and aims at fluency. Not only is one obliged to change the structure of German sentences to make readable English, but one also has to choose between metaphors that lack a precise English equivalent. Scharoun tended to use somewhat abstract metaphorical language, evidently enjoying the ambiguities, but, if translated too directly, it can merely seem vague and imprecise. I have tried to catch its spirit rather than following the original slavishly. The Ottoneum was a small theatre at the corner of the medieval town, preserved today as a museum. It stands at a skewed angle in relation to the Friedrichsplatz, and therefore was seen by Scharoun and Mattern as holding a mediating role [ed.]. This seems to be a German version, if slightly altered, of: ‘Console-toi, tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m’avais trouvé’, Blaise Pascal 1623–62, Pensées 553, section VII [ed.].

1.9 MOVE TO THE LIGHT David Lea

Let us start with the idea that architecture is first of all the space within, rather than the object we see, as Lao Tzu suggested 2,500 years ago: Shape clay into a vessel It is the space within that makes it useful Cut doors and windows for a room It is the holes which make it useful1 The fundamental questions for me are: • • • • •

How do we form spaces appropriate to their use? How do we connect these spaces together? How do we guide and concentrate view and light, so that we wake up to a connection with nature, with the world of nature outside? How do we bring out the potential drama of the site? How does this drama unfold as we move through the building, like moving through a landscape?

I will describe some buildings from the past that I particularly like, before discussing these aspects of the design within the context of the Wales Institute for Sustainable Education at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT). In the north transept of Wells Cathedral, a stair rises up to the Chapter House, which dates back to 1320 (Figure 1.9.1). You want to follow the footsteps worn into the stone from 700 years of use. They all go to the left, where the handrail is: you tend to swing to the outside of a spiral staircase anyway. The entrance to the Chapter House is up to the right, where the stair divides. As you emerge from the doorway out of the transept, more and more of the roof is revealed, and you can see the structure of the vaults, a preview of what you will find in the Chapter House. As you come up the winding stairs, they seem to build up, like a wave about to break. The Chapter House floor is at eye level as you approach, and you can see, in a very concentrated way, how the central column is rooted in the ground, like a tree.

Move to the light 73 FIGURE 1.9.1

View up Chapter House stair at Wells Cathedral Source: Photograph by David Lea

About 130 years later, in the 1480s, the Ryoanji temple was built on the northern side of Kyoto in Japan, at a point where the ground gently rises. The temple contains a famous and beautiful rock garden, and Figure 1.9.2 shows its approach. The route up the gradual steps is very carefully considered. First, there are two steps, then three, and it gets steeper as you approach the entrance. The architect did not expect people to march up there on axis; it was a place to wander up, because you can see that it has been made comfortable, with flat stones, which lead on to steps, and then you end up on gravel. You are expected to stop and think a bit, and then move left and go on up, and the entrance is just at the top, where the white panels are. At that point is a glimpse into the rock garden, of pleasures to come, although you cannot actually enter. You progress further and arrive at a little network of courtyards, much more domestic in scale. That is the living accommodation. You glimpse it before you turn left to regain the courtyard view. Its gravel is raked every day, and the rocks are placed in the most mysterious relationships. You are encouraged to sit on the veranda and meditate. As you think about the rocks, they change their scale and become quite enormous in your imagination. Behind them is a fantastic wall, which is apparently a national treasure, and so nobody is allowed to touch it. It is just a rendered wall, aged in a beautiful way. If you turn through 180º, you can look right through the building, and you see something nice happening to the left, and so you are drawn around to the west-facing veranda. It is a wonderful place to sit. It tells you there is something worth seeing to the left, as you are encouraged to linger. It is well sheltered from the weather, which reveals something of the climate. The scale is beautifully judged: the rail above the sliding screens is a little over 6 ft (1.8 metres), and the extra height above gives the space a sense of generosity and nobility. It has a very

74 David Lea FIGURE 1.9.2

Ryoanji temple, Kyoto Source: Photograph by David Lea

FIGURE 1.9.3

Villa Barbaro, Maser, by Andrea Palladio Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

human scale, but also a grandeur about it, built with complete simplicity, no decoration at all, and all of clay and plants, and so infinitely recyclable. The view to the west is a counterpoise to the gravel and rock garden, beautiful in the evening, when the sunlight comes through the leaves of the birches to throw dappled light on the moss.2 The Villa Maser, by Palladio (Figure 1.9.3), was built about 1560, part of the redevelopment of the Venetian countryside. Mercantile power was under stress, and wealthy families were turning their attention to their own resources, inspired by the Roman ideal of harmonious living and working on the land. Palladio’s villas were derived from farmhouses. This is actually a very extravagant one: most were much more stripped down, in fact more like farmhouses. Maser is ennobled by symmetrical pavilions and by the porticos used for drying and storing food. It’s on a gentle hill confronting the landscape, and it suggests that you enter in the middle, but you do not. You actually enter down the side, down the porticos. The plan shows how that works. The most important living rooms occupy the central block, and the bedrooms occupy the cross wings. When you go along the colonnades, you see the staircase going up ahead of you to the piano nobile. Once you arrive there, you have a choice: if you walk left, you are up in the air, looking out over the well-farmed valley; go right and you enter a secret shady garden, embedded in the hillside. There is a fountain and a grotto, the source of water for the villa. The bedrooms open on to this completely private space. This villa has quite a wonderful spatial movement, progression and experience.

Move to the light 75

The WISE Project WISE was designed and built in partnership with Pat Borer and completed in 2010. It sits in a wooded valley, with its back to an old slate tip. You do not see much from the outside, and the scale is quite low and domestic. It rains a lot in North Wales, and the question is how to handle that, both functionally and poetically. When it was a slate quarry, a reservoir was constructed up the hill to the east, to drive the waterwheel and turn the machinery. We were going to collect the rain as it fell on the roof of the building, channel it from level to level into the courtyard and from there away down into the old waterwheel pit. We found two geometries on the site (Figures 1.9.4 and 1.9.5). One was derived from the existing buildings, and the other from the general line of the old slate tip. The pivot between these two geometries, coupled with the way you rise from one level to the next, was the key point in the layout. When the circular lecture theatre came into its position as a hinge, it made a place around which you could bend these two geometries. Then there was the idea that the first courtyard should be very enclosed and private for the education spaces, whereas the

FIGURE 1.9.4

WISE building: cut-away perspective drawing by David Lea, showing courtyard, round lecture theatre and the intended ramped entry

Source: Drawing by David Lea

FIGURE 1.9.5

WISE building: the final section of the building, east to west, showing courtyard with lecture theatre behind and bedroom wings surrounding upper terrace

Source: Computer Projection by Pat Borer

76 David Lea

FIGURE 1.9.6

The first in a sequence of eleven photographs following the route from the entrance to the top of the building: entrance court and glass wall on to hall/café

Source: Photograph by Tim Soar

View across hall to top-lit wall and stair rising to next level

FIGURE 1.9.7

Source: Photograph by Tim Soar

View through door at head of stair, courtyard to left

FIGURE 1.9.8

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

Move to the light 77

FIGURE 1.9.9

View back across foyer, with lecture theatre to right and court left

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

Top-lit stair leading to

levels above

FIGURE 1.9.11 Approaching landing: view of terrace emerges

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.9.10

78 David Lea FIGURE 1.9.12

Rear windows reveal old quarry face Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.9.13 (far left) Corridor leads to seminar rooms

Source: Photograph by Tim Soar

(left) Bedrooms approached by open gallery

FIGURE 1.9.14

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.9.15

Bay window in last room looks out to lecture-hall roof Source: Photograph by Tim Soar

Move to the light 79

courtyard on the next level would open out into the countryside, along the contours. Generally, we managed to hold on to those ideas throughout the design. An early sketch shows how this might work (Figure 1.9.4). The dotted line represents the back wall of the first room you come to, removed to show the courtyard behind. You can see the movement up to the half-level, up again around the courtyard and then up the main stair to the next level, from which you can look out to the surrounding countryside. At first, we planned the twenty-four bedrooms on a different site, much steeper and with better solar access. They were to be stacked into very narrow terraces, along the contours. A shallow stair would rise to a common room at the entrance level, and then on up to the bedrooms. Each bedroom would have a generous corner window opening into the trees – each bedroom a treehouse. That scheme involved an additional common room and was too expensive, and so, eventually, we wrapped two floors of bedrooms around the courtyard of the teaching blocks. The dining hall and main entrance grow out of the existing restaurant. From there, the route leads up to the foyer, the distributor for the 200-seat, circular lecture theatre and the teaching spaces around the courtyard, and out to the south. Up on the next level, there are offices for the CAT staff and the first floor of twelve bedrooms, then up again are the seminar rooms and the second floor of bedrooms. The journey through the building starts at the entrance court, which is contained on its north side by the restaurant extension. This can be opened out completely in the summer by the big glass doors being slid back. The visitor is welcomed immediately into a big, lively hall. There is a roof light along the back, so that the wall is lit even on a dull day and artificial light is seldom needed, and, when the sun comes out, the wall is illuminated by changing shafts of light (see Figure 1.9.7). The timber columns have entasis: a slight curving inwards towards the top, which makes them feel a little stronger and corrects the somewhat crude appearance of columns with parallel sides. This device has been used more or less wherever anyone has built columns, from China to ancient Greece. The bottom third is vertical, and the column curves in from there to a top diameter one-sixth smaller than the bottom. Those are Palladio’s rules, and they seem to work quite well. You can set it out with a thin and bendy wooden lath. From the entrance, you get a glimpse of the courtyard above and the different levels; you do not see much, but enough to give you an idea of what is in store. A very shallow stair rises to the next level – a ‘float-up’ stair – the shallowest permitted by the building regulations. We wanted to express that by showing the steps, and that is why there is a glass balustrade. At the head of the stair is a door to the left, leading to the first courtyard (see Figure 1.9.8). You see the stair going up to the next level ahead of you, top lit, and then the courtyard to the left. In the courtyard, water from the roofs cascades from the gargoyles down into the pools and then flows into a slate-lined chasm, the remains of the old waterwheel pit. It is paved with gravel and slate. There are very few plants, just three trees and ferns. You can see the bedrooms up above. Reflections off the water cast constantly moving, rippling light on the walls and the ceiling, particularly in the afternoon. The three teaching spaces around the courtyard are also top lit and full of light. All of them can be opened to the courtyard, allowing teaching with the windows wide open. I often use toplight in my buildings. Just as the courtyard lies to the left of the foyer space, so the drum of the rammed-earth lecture theatre lies to the right, and there is light coming down between the roof and the rammed earth. The wall was made in four separate sections, with gaps between for openings. The three rows of fixed benches are separated by 2 metres, to allow space for tables and

80 David Lea

chairs between them: the theatre can then be used for parties, gigs and wedding ceremonies, as well as lectures. The oculus in the ceiling, the main source of natural light in the space, can be closed by a big, circular shutter, the ‘moon-disc’, which pivots around and eclipses it. The CAT staff wanted a view and a way out into the gardens from the lecture theatre. They do not always use it, but it is nice to have the huge opening into the breakout space and the view of green beyond. The opening can be closed with a vast, curved, sliding door, slatted in the same way as the acoustic panels on the walls. Light from the other openings is controlled by angled slats, so that images on the screen are not overwhelmed. We wanted the projection screen to have a strong presence, like a kind of reredos at the back of an altar, and so we have alternating bands of dark green and white, with a very rich panel below, which has dark green slats against gold, and as you walk past the gold background is revealed. Returning to the foyer, stairs at the end rise up to the light (see Figure 1.9.10) and emerge on to a terrace with a view into the treetops, contained on the north side by staff offices. A left turn at the top of the stairs reveals a close-up view on to the slate tip – spoil from the old quarry – as it cascades down behind the building, focusing attention on the small trees that have established a precarious foothold. The gallery to the bedrooms leads off this space, and it is nice to have to go outside to get there. It does not seem to be any hardship, and people at CAT are quite used to it, but you can imagine that, in some institutions, people would have that glazed in, and then the whole thing would become something different. It would also have to be heated, and so costs would start to rise. The bedrooms are entered through small lobbies that provide a sense of protection and privacy within the room. The rooms look out over terraces and courtyards to the view across the valley. The upper rooms have window seats about 600 mm wide, and the windows can slide right back, so that it is like being on a terrace. On the lower floor, windows are full height, opening on to a landscaped deck. Returning to the head of the stair, a short corridor leads to the seminar rooms. The first two look east, with a close-up view of the slate tip. You don’t get much light off the slate, and so these rooms are mainly lit by a circular top light, which echoes the oculus in the main lecture theatre. As you emerge from these rooms, a little window allows a glimpse across the valley to the hills beyond. At the end of the corridor, a door opens into a larger, higher space. The facing wall is at a slight angle, and so the sun hits it before the rest of the room. Light is a magnet and draws you in. You do not see the window as you enter, only the light on the wall and the window seat going round into the opening. This window place is the culmination of the journey through the building (Figure 1.9.15). You can slide the window open and sit as if on a balcony, and from there you look back on the whole scheme and the mountains beyond.

Notes 1 2

Tzu 1963, p. 67 (although Lea cites another translation (ed.)). See the very good article in Architectural Design, March 1966, by Günter Nitschke called ‘Ma: The Japanese sense of place’. ‘Ma’ suggests relationship, and so the relationship between you and me is the place, the space between us.

1.10 ODYSSEUS AND KALYPSO – AT HOME Peter Wilson

As Vladimir Nabakov once wrote, it is not the conclusion of the story but how we get there that interests us. In the case of Ulysses, the saga of his wanderings, a monumentally frustrated return from Troy to Ithaca, took 20 years. It is a journey that functions as a sort of twelfthcentury BC ur-journey template for all subsequent journeying, dictated by the blind rhapsode, to ‘alphabet adaptors’ in the eighth-century BC. It marks a transition, a phase change from oral (bardic) to written narrative – ur-text as well as ur-journey. As topographical description of the unknown coasts and peninsulas of the western Mediterranean, The Odyssey can be read as a preliminary exploration, preceding the seventh-century Greek colonisation of southern Italy: Ulysses as Captain Cook in felt cap (Pilos, his tag). Homer’s Odyssey also served as the navigational chart for James Joyce’s 24-hour journey across Dublin. Joyce’s 1922 text is Ulyssean through its corporeal signifier, Bloom, who opens up the world: he blooms, in a commodious unfolding of alternative words and worlds. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 classic Le mépris (Contempt), a colour-coded film noir, also unfolds around the Odyssey narrative. It was shot in the heroic setting of Curzio Malaparte’s Capri villa, as backdrop protagonist (Figure 1.10.1). Appropriately, the actual Siren Rocks, the Galli, are visible from the mythological stage of the villa’s deck-like roof. As the film unfolds, characters slip in and out of various Homeric guises: Brigitte Bardot turns from Kalypso into Penelope, from black wig to blond bombshell, as she traverses her marital quarters, asking ‘where is the man I married’. Ultimately, she also becomes a siren as she swims off, naked, in the direction of the Galli. The German cultural theorist Friedrich Kittler has suggested that, in our media age, that of Hollywood, sirens no longer sing: instead, they abandon their bikinis. Michel Picoli, Bardot’s scriptwriter husband is, like Ulysses, held captive by the nymph Kalypso’s spell, but, in a cathartic homecoming, he reverts to the role of author (Homer). Fritz Lang plays himself, the famous film director, role-jumping at one point into the persona of the Emperor Tiberius, questioning, from the cliffs of Capri, the abandoned Penelope’s fidelity. In the final scene, Godard himself appears on camera, calls for silence and, with Lang, assumes joint command of the set, of the deck of the Villa Malaparte and its wide horizon. The media status of the Capri villa is both catalyst and locus of transition for symbolic transfers; Curzio Malaparte himself metamorphosed from his original name, Kurt Sickert, to his pseudonym and enlarged status as author of what he referred to as ‘A house like me’.

82 Peter Wilson

FIGURE 1.10.1

The Malaparte Villa, Capri, perched on its cliff above the Mediterranean, used as the setting for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Le mépris

Source: Photograph by Russell Light

This was taken up as the title of Michael McDonough’s 1999 book, which builds on the Villa Malaparte myth with an anthology of echoes: ‘A house like me . . . and me . . . and me . . . and me’.1 The list of mimetic Malaparte egos, all professing a strong associative yearning for the Capri cliff-hugger, includes Bruce Chatwin, Karl Lagerfeld, Tom Wolfe, Philippe Starck, Robert Venturi, John Hejduk, Steven Holl, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Mario Botta, Ettore Sottsass and Arata Isozaki. The last offers us a transcultural interpretation of the name Malaparte, reading it as ‘bad part’, a counter-figure to a healthier Bonaparte and analogous to the Japanese mythological figure of Onamaru – Ogre Boy. Alberto Moravia, Capri resident and author of the original Le mépris storyline, said of Malaparte, ‘I never believed a word he said, even when he was telling the truth’. Ulysses, the guileful trickster, also scraped through with mimicry, cunning and storytelling. There is academic controversy about how much influence the architect Adalberto Libera really exerted on the design of the Malaparte villa: he obtained the building permit certainly, but, when General Rommel passed by on his way to the African Front and enquired if the house was built or bought, Malaparte answered, ‘the severe cliffs of the Matromania, the giant rocks of the Faraglioni, Penisola Sorentina, the blue Amalfi Beach, the shores of Paestum shining behind it, all these scenes are what I designed ’. The Ulysses role, of journeyman, suffering hero, adaptive trickster, may provide an analogous role model for today’s ‘star architect’ – journeying to the end of the world, to the underworld even, to Troy to construct a horse, to China to construct a new city, a stadium, a TV station. What did Ulysses construct along the way: a horse, a raft and a bed? From these three modest products we could assume that, like Daedalus or Hephaestus, he was adept in ‘techne’ – the act

Odysseus and Kalypso – at home 83

of making wondrous objects to overcome the disorder of the world, objects embodying ‘metis’, the inanimate becoming magically alive, not representing but reproducing life. The Malaparte villa has no clear counterpart in the Odyssey narrative, except perhaps the deck of Ulysses’s ship, which he lost soon after negotiating the Siren Islands and surviviving the Maelstrom. The next 7 years he spent on the island of Ogygia (Gozo), captive under the spell of the immortal nymph Kalypso, Atlas’s daughter – a sex slave in today’s media jargon. We see them both depicted in Arnold Böcklin’s painting Odysseus und Kalypso of 1882 (Figure 1.10.2). Ulysses scans the horizon, suffering, homesick, wrapped in a dark cape, his back turned to the naked seductress, who sprawls daringly across a sensuous red cloth thrown over barren rocks. The same soulful figure we find again in De Chirico’s painting The Enigma of the Oracle of 1910, a symbolist homage (Figure 1.10.3), a silhouette migration to a high balcony overlooking a distant Aegean city. Perhaps this is also Ulysses, now back in Greece, where De Chirico spent his childhood. De Chirico is paying homage to his mentor Böcklin and to Nietzsche, who wrote, ‘we suffer to provide the poet with his material’ (‘wir leiden (um) der dichter Stoff zu liefern’). The critic Beatriz Colomina once wrote that the function of building architects is to provide objects (subjects) for the critic to dissect (an echo of Nietzsche). Feasting in the Hall of King Alkínoös, Ulysses sheds tears on hearing the blind rhapsode Demódokos sing of his Trojan feats (The Iliad). The Odyssey reports that: He sat on the rocky shore and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet scanning the bare horizon of the sea ... O, I long for home, for the sight of home.2

FIGURE 1.10.2

Arnold Böcklin’s 1882 painting Odysseus und Kalypso, redrawn by Peter Wilson after the original in the Kunst Museum, Basel FIGURE 1.10.3

Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Enigma of the Oracle, 1910, redrawn by Peter Wilson FIGURE 1.10.4

Ulysses stranded on the rocky shore, drawn after Le mépris, by Peter Wilson

84 Peter Wilson

Böcklin presents a psycho-gram of strained relations. His setting of Odysseus and Kalypso is more like ‘a sea cave where nymphs had chairs of rock and sanded floors’ (Homer’s description of Thresias)3 than Kalypso’s actual domestic arrangements. These were somewhat more commodious than Böcklin’s version, as observed by Hermes arriving with Zeus’s command for the soft-braided nymph to release her captive: Upon her hearthstone a great fire blazing scented the farthest shores with cedar smoke ... A deep wood grew outside, with summer leaves of alder and black poplar, pungent cypress. Ornate birds rested and stretched their wings ... Around the smooth walled cave a crooking vine held purple clusters under ply of green; and four springs bubbling up near one another shallow and clear, took channels here and there through beds of violets and tender parsley.4 The home of the nymph offers sensuous abundance, a Vitruvian comoditas, not present in Böcklin or in the sculptured Ogre Boy stronghold of the Malaparte villa. Another incessant Mediterranean traveller, the one-time Capri resident Bernard Rudofsky, published in the March 1938 Domus, ‘A country house for an open minded woman’, located on the island of Procida adjacent to Capri (Figures 1.10.5–1.10.7).5 Although unrealised, it followed on from two earlier coastal houses, designed in partnership with Luigi Cosenza, the Villa Campanalla Positano and the Casa Ora.6 Rudofsky was an incessant traveller and a lifelong champion of the Mediterranean lifestyle, which he saw as both a healthy and honest version of the modernist aesthetic and an earthy alternative to northern abstraction. The sensuality of Kalypso’s cave would not be out of place in his influential book Architecture Without Architects, a protest against functionalist hegemony.7 The house on Procida was almost contemporary with the Villa Malaparte: it was published in the same month that Adalberto Libera submitted the initial site plan, titled Progetto di Viletta di Proprieta del Sig. Curzio Malaparte, for a building permit – described by Libera’s biographers, Francesco Garofalo and Luca Veresani, as, ‘granted quickly and discreetly through an influential intervention’. The approved design was for an elongated, rectangular building with rusticated base and an upper living room at the outer end of the roof terrace. Perhaps Libera was distracted by the Esposizione Universale Roma Palazzo dei Congressi construction (he had won the prestigious competition in 1937), or perhaps his assertive client stepped in with disputed additions, such as the tapering staircase (Figure 1.10.8), often referenced to the Little Church of the Annunziata on Lipari, in front of which Malaparte was photographed in exile. In either case, work progressed slowly, and may or may not have been influenced by Rudofsky’s publications. A gender-specific dialectic pairs these built and unbuilt manifestos, the harsh metaphysical poetry of the male egoist clifftop villa finding its counterpart in the commodious atrium house projected by Rudofsky for his future wife Berta Doctor. Both mediate between an idealised occupant and the world, metaphorically using geometry to locate a microcosm of the specific, of individual experience, within the macrocosm (Heidegger’s fourfold of earth, sky, mortals and immortals). Rudofsky’s

Odysseus and Kalypso – at home 85

FIGURE 1.10.5

FIGURE 1.10.6

Bernard Rudofsky’s evocative image of the villa on Procida, published in Domus, March 1938, redrawn by Peter Wilson

(above, top) The essential presence of the courtyard – conceptual drawing of the villa on Procida, redrawn by Peter Wilson FIGURE 1.10.7

(above) Rooms of the villa with Rudofsky’s allegorical representation of daily life rituals, redrawn by Peter Wilson. The floor of the lady’s bedroom is all bed; the music room has an afternoon divan

FIGURE 1.10.8

Villa Malaparte, the external steps leading to the roof terrace Source: Photograph by Russell Light

86 Peter Wilson

atrium composition (although designed by a man) is a woman’s space, prioritising a sensuality not dissimilar to that of Kalypso’s place. For the Libera–Malaparte villa, windows are emblematic, providing views of the majestic Faraglioni rocks and introducing a surrealistic sense of vertigo. Mysterious and sublime largeformat glass rectangles (today’s signature of Swissness) conjure simultaneously both danger and refuge, prisons also for the cast of Le mépris who flutter before them, caged within their cinematically prescribed roles (Figure 1.10.9). Conversely, Rudofsky argued, ‘Ancient houses had few if any windows. The only opening deemed appropriate for a room was a door, because it was a passageway’; also, as if in affirmation of his manifesto’s counterpart, ‘stairs don’t belong in a country house. Stairs are the most important requirement of monumental architecture; they should be constructed outside as elements of landscape’. His was an argument for the Pompeian house format – a string of rooms arranged around an open central atrium (Fig 1.10.5–1.10.7). His theme is movement, daily domestic trajectories, from room to room, from within to without. Familiar functional codes are rescripted in his plan, which not only depicts the physical enclosure of walls, but also, with a radical and unconventional graphic invention of sketched allegorical figures, a prescribed choreography of each room, is the template of a sensuous Mediterranean lifestyle (Figure 1.10.7). Swiftly she turned and led him to her cave, and they went in, the mortal and the immortal. He took the chair now left empty by Hermes, where the divine Kalypso placed before him victuals and drink of men, then she sat down facing Ulysses, while her serving maids brought nectar and ambrosia to her side.8 Such vignettes extend outside: a dog beside the lady of the house, relaxing in a hammock or galloping on horseback across the sand of the adjacent beach. Rudofsky’s isometric sketch of this arrangement (Figure 1.10.5) is one of Mediterranean modernism’s iconic images – advocating an epicurean and sensual ‘comoditas’ (as did Le Corbusier’s sketched vignettes). Gio Ponti, who provided Rudofsky with his Domus platform, once stated, ‘The Mediterranean taught Rudofsky and Rudofsky taught me’. The two collaborated on a subsequent 1938 San Michele Hotel design – a spontaneous hotel, a cluster of houses/rooms to be scattered and invisible in the woods above a precipitous Capri cliff. Paths from the rooms (room of the angels, room of the doves, room of the sirens) converge at the village centre, ‘the residence of the gentleman who manages the place’. Arriving guests leave their clothes in a closet and are equipped with sandals, hats and other necessaries designed by the architects. At this moment, Rudofsky fled Fascist Italy for South America, Japan and New York, his own lifelong Odyssey, which left a trail of exhibitions and open houses, disseminations of the Capri code, unfolding into luxurious green terraces. These include the 1939 Arnstein or Frontini houses in São Paulo and the skeletal garden framework of the Nivola house, Amagansett, Long Island, NY. In September 1950, Le Corbusier also visited this, the house of the artist Constantino Nivola, leaving his usual tag – a mural unfolding over two livingroom walls (as he had at Eileen Gray’s Mediterranean-facing Cap Martin villa). On 28 September 1950, Le Corbusier took a lift back to New York with Nivola’s neighbour, Jackson Pollock – ‘A better driver than painter’, commented Le Corbusier. Pollock subsequently drove himself into a tree, no joyous homecoming for a modern arts Agamemnon.

Odysseus and Kalypso – at home 87

FIGURE 1.10.9

(left) ‘The cast caged within their cinematically prescribed roles’, drawn, after Le mépris, by Peter Wilson

FIGURE 1.10.10

(right) ‘Picoli and Ulysses pass either side of the rooftop wall’, drawn, after Le mépris, by Peter Wilson

Malaparte, like Ulysses, was an exile. Sent by Mussolini to the islands of Lipari (and later Ischia), he wandered and recorded war-ravaged Europe in his magnum opus, Kaputt (1943), before finally coming home to his Capri villa. Like Ulysses, his trajectory was a Gaussian random walk, his fate displacement, his goal return. Ulysses’s return was watched over and orchestrated, as always, by Pallas Athena; it began with the construction of a raft. He: fell to chopping . . . twenty tall trees were down. He lopped the branches, split the trunks . . . drilled through all the planks, and then drove stout pins to bolt them. . . . He made the decking fast to close set ribs before he closed the sides with longer planking, then cut a mast pole. . . . He drove long strands of willow in all the seams to keep out the waves. As for a sail, the lovely Nymph Kalypso brought him a cloth so he could make that, too. Then he ran up his rigging – halyards, braces – and hauled the boat on rollers to the water.9 Seventeen days he sailed, until vindictive Poseidon, angered that other gods had deemed to end Ulysses’s exile, churned the deep, smashed his craft and threw him in the storming brine to swim to the shores of the island Skhería. Here, Zeus’s daughter, grey-eyed Athena, arranged for Nausikaa to bring the battered castaway to be respectfully received in the court of her father Alkínoös, where Ulysses relates his frustrated homeward journey. Here also he hears the blind rhapsode’s valorisation of his own Troy exploits – experience translated into symbolic fiction, an encounter with a fictional self (re-enacted in the Godard film as the white-suited Michel Picoli and the film’s puppet-like Ulysses actor pass to either side of the Malaparte villa’s rooftop wall, a wedge between film and reality) (Figure 1.10.10). From Skhería, Ulysses is shipped homeward and, ‘put on Ithaka, with gifts untold of bronze and gold’. These Pallas Athena advises him to hide, then to enter Ithaka and even his own house in the guise of a beggar. Approaching his home, Ulysses passes Clearwater, a sensuous spring house (a water house):

88 Peter Wilson

where the people fill their jars. Ithakos, Nêritos and Polyktos built it, [island and mountain names – a topographical anchoring] and round it on the humid ground a grove, a circular wood of poplars grew. Ice cold in runnels from a high rock ran the spring, and over it there stood an altar stone to cool the nymphs, where men going by laid offerings.10 He finds his own home overrun, commandeered by a crowd of suitors revelling in the ‘gracious timbered hall’, competing for abandoned Penelope’s hand, feasting daily on ‘his cattle, oxen and fat sheep, and drinking up rivers of wine’. The arrangement of the house unfolds as Ulysses and son Telémakhos gorily dispatch the interlopers on their own final journey: The suitors’ ghosts are called away by Hermes . . . bearing the golden wand . . . He led them down dank ways . . . all squeaking as bats . . . all flitting criss-cross in the dark . . . over grey Ocean tides, the Snowy Rock, past shores of dream and narrows of the sunset, in swift flight to where the Dead inhabit wastes of asphodel at the world’s end.11 Ulysses’s house is arranged around ‘the pillared hall’, scene of the slaughter. Here Penelope sat, weaving by day, having promised to choose between suitors when the fabric was finished, unravelling by night (a potent metaphor for the trajectory of culture – a continual reweaving of the same material). At night, she withdraws to her high room (as does the Favorita in the Malaparte villa). Fragmentary details offer clues to the extent of Ulysses’s house, but not to its type or focus: A distant storeroom where the master’s treasure lay . . . . . . a women’s hall and inner rooms for 50 female slaves . . . . . . the packed earth floor of the pillared hall – Athena watched, in the form of a swallow perched on a black beam in the smoky air under the roof . . . . . . the courtyard of the beautiful house, a courtyard altar – the sanctuary of Zeus . . . . . . outdoors, a court, under the gate, between the round house and the palisade. Penelope instructs her maid to make up a bed for Ulysses ‘. . . and place it outside the bedchamber my lord built with his own hands’. This stings Ulysses to retort: No mortal . . . could budge it with a crowbar. There is our pact and pledge, our secret sign, built into that bed – my handiwork. . . . An old trunk of olive Grew like a pillar on the building plot, And I laid out our bedroom round that tree, Lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof, Gave it doorways and smooth fitting doors. Then I . . . hewed and shaped that stump . . . from roots up

Odysseus and Kalypso – at home 89

into a bedpost, drilled it . . . . . . and stretched a bed between – a pliant web of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.12 Here, the DNA of the Mediterranean house is specified, an irrefutable anchoring, the ‘techne’ of making and dwelling, the goal of the journey, or, as Rudofsky argued, ‘homes should be a cultural refuge, the aesthetic backdrop for our passions’. After Odysseus’s 20-year Odyssey, horizon-scanning windows seem less than necessary, for there is no more a distant goal.

Notes 1 McDonough 1999. 2 Homer 1992, Book V, l. 166. 3 Ulysses’s previous stop before Kalypso’s island and where his crew sealed their fate by slaughtering the god Helios’s cattle. 4 Homer 1992, Book V, ll. 65–78. 5 Domus, March 1938, p. 123 6 Domus, 1937, no. 109, p. 265. 7 Rudofsky’s 1970 [1964] book (and MOMA exhibition), Architecture Without Architects. 8 Homer 1992, Book V, ll. 203–8. 9 Ibid., Book V, ll. 251–70. 10 Ibid., Book XVII, ll. 262–8. 11 Ibid., Book XXIV, ll. 1–15. 12 Ibid., Book XXII, ll. 214–27.

FIGURE 2.0.1

Path made by human footfall and photographed in autumn, Bamford, Derbyshire

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

PART 2

Movement as experienced by the individual

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2.0 INTRODUCTION TO PART 2 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

This second part of the book considers the reader rather than the designer, beginning with the question of how we can apprehend and know space. Peter Blundell Jones lays a theoretical foundation in Chapter 2.1 by pointing out the primacy of bodily experience, the unbreakable link between body and mind, and the way we acquire awareness of space and direction through interaction with the outside world. This involves the essential and constructive role of shortand long-term memory, something normally taken completely for granted, but without which we could achieve no sense of time or space. He goes on to consider bodily movements as the foundation of metaphor in language, starting particularly with spatial concepts such as up and down, inside and out. He then shows how the body finds its place in the world by coordinating innate directions of back and front, left and right, with those given by the planet, understood as cardinal points. This introduction establishes the role of walking as the primary means, not just of traversing space, but also of understanding and knowing where we are and where we are going. Chapters 2.2 and 2.3 then present histories of walking. In Chapter 2.2, landscape historian Jan Woudstra outlines a history of parks and gardens, which were driven by evolving ideas about walking for health and leisure. Initially, this was mainly a matter for the upper classes, underexercised and overfed, and it led at first to the design of places conspicuous in their deployment of power and development of aesthetic intentions, though, with the development of public parks and sports grounds, these places gained a more common ownership and remain essential to the make-up of the modern city. In Chapter 2.3, by contrast, Doina Petrescu is concerned with the urban realm, and not as designed object but as existing accumulation of fabric and ways of life. For her, walking presents a way of taking possession of the city in all its messy vitality, from Baudelaire through the Dadaists and Surrealists to the Situationists, then on to contemporary groups such as Stalker and public works. This moves art out of the gallery into the realm of everyday life and moves architecture off the drawing board. Walking engenders mapping, recording, interacting. It also challenges rights to the possession of territory, and Petrescu applauds the seasonal reappropriation of streets in Madrid for the passage of animals. She presents walking as a critical instrument to test patterns of possession and power, and to challenge those visions of the city that tend to ascribe to it a perceived totality.

94 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

In Chapter 2.4, acoustician Jian Kang reminds us that the apprehension of our environment while walking is not only visual but also auditory. Sound tends to be taken for granted, and yet a good idea of its importance can be gained from trying to watch a film with the soundtrack turned down. Not only is the dialogue missing, but also many aspects of narrative that set the scene, sounds that forge necessary links across the visual cuts, and music that sets the mood. So far, quantitative acoustics tends to deal with noise as a nuisance or distraction, but sounds tell us both positive and negative things about our environment and what is going on in it, whether it is the sound of distant church bells, the chiming of the town-hall clock, rushing water, birdsong, the ice-cream van, an emergency siren, footsteps along a passage or a piano being played rather well, somewhere inside an upper window. A qualitative acoustics is needed to deal with the meanings of these things. The remaining chapters in this part deal with roads and traffic, for much of the modern world has been rebuilt for vehicles, even to the extent of making walking undesirable or difficult, and now we learn much of the world by car. In Chapter 2.5, Peter Blundell Jones begins with a discussion of walking as the original way of getting about, noticing Marcel Proust’s use of walks in the laying down of memories and the construction of narratives, and that Proust found this could continue in a carriage. The experience of movement in vehicles is, therefore, not to be denied, but must be considered alongside the development of roads, railways and other infrastructure that has gradually effaced the landscape, ending with air travel, the experience furthest from our Stone Age ancestry. The haptic experience of take-off in a plane is still thrilling, but the speed of flight is hard to grasp, and the sound, smell and temperature of the world outside have gone, while time is distorted, giving credence to the idea that one has left one’s soul behind. Getting to and from the plane is often grim, and the airport has become both a new kind of city and the epitome of the non-place. Roman roads led from one city to another, usually as directly as possible, but the ring road goes nowhere, and there are harrowing stories of people getting lost and going round and round, such as the 82-year-old man reported to have spent 30 hours on the M25 in 2011.1 In Chapter 2.6, Stephen Walker ponders the experience of the ring road, playing with the dual meaning of the word ‘transport’, which can also mean ‘transported with desire (or fear)’, and compiling readings that draw on theories of the sublime. This is a wake-up piece to counter automatic assumptions about the merely technical nature of the ring road, revealing it as something stranger and more mysterious than we thought, but showing it also as the expression of rules and conventions that we, perhaps, take too much for granted. Following on, in Chapter 2.7, Alan Lewis discusses the genesis of a particular ring road, that of Sheffield, as proposed in the 1940s. This case study in the history of British planning reveals how interdisciplinary arguments developed between the city architect, city planner and city engineer, and Lewis shows how the engineer gained the upper hand by pursuing techniques founded largely on scientific ideas about safety and traffic flow. This discussion is prefaced by a Husserlian critique of the precise sciences and their inherent tendency to reduce and idealise. This last piece in this part, Chapter 2.8, derived from a lecture by a current practitioner, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, whose work challenges the hegemony of traffic in the urban realm. He too is critical of the assumptions about safety and speed of traffic flow that automatically favoured vehicles in most twentieth-century planning, and also of the pedestrian environment produced: streets cluttered with ever more barriers, markings and signs, pedestrian movement increasingly constrained. Yet wide streets and big visibility splays only encouraged the traffic

Introduction to Part 2 95

to go faster, and controlled pedestrian crossings encouraged drivers to assume the right of way and to ignore people crossing elsewhere. Hamilton-Baillie is a leader in the movement to reverse all this by removing boundaries and signs and giving the street back to pedestrians. In some places where this has been tried, it has resulted, not only in a reduction of the accident rate, but also an improvement in traffic flow. It reveals an urgent need to rethink the relationship between drivers and pedestrians.

Note 1

see www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-16193588

2.1 THE PRIMACY OF BODILY EXPERIENCE Peter Blundell Jones

As Alva Noë has amusingly observed, science-fiction accounts about brains in jars soon have to start replacing parts of the lost body, for the brain must be given eyes, ears, a voice, just in order to play its fictional role.1 This would, in reality, not be easy, no one-way cable connection, for the eyes would need muscles to direct the gaze, the voice a larynx, mouth and passage of breath. Not only is the nervous system an extension of the brain, but it deals in two-way traffic, gaining constant feedback from its actions. Normally, too, in these stories, the brain has lived a life, and so it has already accumulated a personality and some memories, but a baby’s brain would require a set of senses and an ability to flex muscles and act upon the world just in order to develop.2 A mind without a body, therefore, makes no sense, even if our ability to think, dream and remember makes us aware of goings on that seem independent of the physical world. René Descartes is usually blamed for the mind–body dichotomy, but, long before him, there existed beliefs in body and soul, well founded in phenomenal experience, that perhaps provided a foundation for this division. Witnessing the death of a close relative, for example, combines mute presence of a lifeless body with feelings of grief and memories of that person, and their aura seems still strongly present. However, the spirit, the personality, all possibility of real interaction, have gone, and so the soul must have fled. Among some African and East Asian peoples, the soul is even thought to leave the body during sleep, which explains for them both the experience of dreams and the absence of consciousness that is witnessed by others. Illnesses too, particularly mental disorders, are attributed to loss of the soul, ritual processes being enacted to encourage its return, such as a mother on the threshold of the house making an offering addressed to the errant soul and urging it to come back.3 Such beliefs are supported by an underlying logic, for they register a world of mental events that seems obviously separated from the physical. Yet much of it is due to our taken-forgranted mastery of time. We possess only the present moment, but we are convinced of continuity with a past that no longer exists.4 Our confidence is not misplaced, for the causal chains we read in the world must have some basis,5 and, if we failed to trust our memories and our ability to locate ourselves in time and space, we could no longer live and act.6 However, we remember only such things as our minds are able to sustain and recall, by transforming

The primacy of bodily experience 97

them into schemata, and memory is far from permanent, complete or accurate.7 We can check it against the memories of others, but, as the years go by, comparison reveals that we have retained increasingly diverse accounts, for we re-edit our memories as we recall them.8 We can also check our memories against persisting material records, such as writings, buildings and photographs, which are important precisely because they provide the most seemingly objective evidence, but they too are subject to loss and damage, as well as requiring interpretation. We are embodied, and our lives unfold in sequences of time, consciousness being perhaps the means of linking space with time. Walking involves both: the physical activity requires muscles, balance and rhythms of movement that are largely automatic, but we must know, too, where we are going and manage to find our way, in which all our senses are engaged, not only sight, hearing and smell, but the haptic sense of how we are moving, how our muscles respond to our commands. Our experiences have a necessary but varied duration, for not only must we make full strides just to complete rhythmic movements and retain balance, we also register obstacles ahead – a stile, a tree across the path – and mend our pace accordingly.9 The necessity of retaining short-term duration is starkly exemplified by music: a single note means little, although it is all that we hear in an instant, and so a sequence of notes must be remembered before the pattern of sound can be registered, tested for familiarity and compared with the already known.10 Such durations can be a matter of seconds, as with a single birdcall, but human songs and dances usually have durations of several minutes. They tend to consist of repetitive phrases, and we quickly register structure and variation. Written concert pieces are more extended and complex, but even they are normally broken into movements of 20 minutes or less.11 The Ring Cycle lasts days, but it is driven by the narrative of an overarching story that can be broken down into episodes. Wagner enthusiasts can both summarise the whole thing and recognise which part of the unfolding spectacle is taking place. Memory seems, therefore, to be involved in different ways throughout our thinking, from the few seconds taken to recognise a musical phrase to the days or even weeks over which a long event unfolds. Long measures of time are anchored to the rotation of the Earth. A long walk, taking days or weeks, may be structured by changing terrain and stopping places for food or rest, but normally it is broken into days, because of daylight and the need for sleep, the brain’s period for transmuting short-term memories into longer-term ones.12 It can also be divided into weeks, but the week is an artificial creation, perhaps the reason it needs so much backup in Genesis: some societies have a 5-day week, some no week at all. The month, by contrast, is called after, and supposed to follow, the moon.13

The child’s acquisition of space and direction Our understanding of the world starts with the interaction of body and space. As infants, we build a relationship with the world by making bridges between our senses, so that we see things that we feel, starting with the breast and sucking, exploring with the fingers, and then attempting to crawl about.14 Present from the beginning, even within the womb, is gravity, which causes things to fall, holds us to the surface of the planet, makes it necessary to balance when standing and gives us the vertical axis proved by the primary right angle: that between the plumb line and the spirit level.15 There are also potential axes within the horizontal plane, and, as our eyes develop and vision begins, we differentiate between what is before us and our unseen behind, at first appreciating what it means to be face-to-face with mother

98 Peter Blundell Jones

and other human beings. As soon as we can stand and move around, we have a front and a back, and we move towards or away from things. It is difficult to propel ourselves other than forward, and our eyes are directed to what is ahead: we use them, not for full peripheral vision, as with herbivores on watch for danger, but for binocular vision, to predict depth and distance. We can move our heads to look up, down or sideways, even back over the shoulder, but the normal gaze is straight on, and we are blind to the rear. The approximate symmetry of the body and apparently identical limbs and eyes allow identification of the centre-line as axis of symmetry. Not only we, but also most other animals, insects and birds, are symmetrical in full face, asymmetrical in profile and move forwards on their centre-line. This makes the primary axis, front to back, essentially different from the secondary one, side to side, for there is an expectation that the primary axis must be the axis of symmetry. With animals whose body runs horizontally, such as cats, it is also the spine, linking head and tail to distribute commands. However, the mirror image of the body is only approximate: left is not equal to right. Not only are the internal organs irregularly disposed, but the left side of the face does not exactly match the right, so that a photo of each side added to its reversed double gives us two slightly different faces. More crucially, the limbs of the right side dominate those of the left, the right hand being predominantly stronger and more skilful, the right foot ready to lead off. The limbs are cross-wired to opposite brain hemispheres, which, though interconnected, have become specialised in different kinds of task, the left to do with language and logic, the right more spatial. Many people are left-handed, and in rare cases the bodily organs can even be disposed to opposite sides, heart on the right, but the majority are right handed, and most, if not all, societies give priority to the right as the side of honour, dexter in Latin producing dextrous. The left hand is sinister, borrowed by English for its negative and uncanny connotations.16 The anthropologist Rodney Needham edited a book on left and right that included an early and fascinating essay by Robert Hertz, who tried to show that right-handedness was culturally constructed, and there is indeed much cultural construction, but based, it now seems, on an underlying biological preference for the right.17 Iain McGilchrist has seen the dominance of right-hand–left-brain as productive of an excessively rational society, which he considers is to blame for many of our cultural ills.18 He shows, at least, what a rich and suggestive edifice of theory can be constructed around this topic. When we stretch out our arms sideways and look forward, our bodily axes are set at right angles, echoing the 90º between horizontal and vertical, and so generating a three-dimensional world. Readers will by now have noticed that, in putting together top–bottom, front–back and left–right, I have extracted the three dimensions of space from the body, following Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘the body as geometer’.19 According to him, the understanding of spatial transitions and inversions also starts with movements of the body, rather than with the abstract Cartesian coordinates that were added later as a cultural superstructure. In addition to the three bodily directions, there is also a fundamental experience of inside and outside. The body develops in relation to an outer world, which is at first that of the womb, which it must leave, the primal experience of moving from inside to outside. The sense of inside and outside gives rise to recognition of the contrast between centre and periphery, and to the familiar notion of things being ‘inside-out’, as a direct parallel to the notion of them being ‘upside-down’ or ‘back-to-front’.

The primacy of bodily experience 99

Bodily movements as the foundation of metaphors In and out, and the traversing of thresholds of one kind or another, are fundamental experiences reflected deeply in our use of language, for the prepositions we use daily, such as on, in, at, by, over, under, across and through, are all positional and rooted in physical experience, even if much of the time we use them metaphorically. The verb ‘to move’ seems also to start with bodily movement, before we begin to move other things, or even speak of ‘a move’ in chess. So ‘a move’ occurs metaphorically in some more abstract strategy, but it returns to the body when we ‘are moved’, and emotions are also movements. When we speak of progress and regress, literal or metaphorical, the pro- and re- give the directions forward and back, while the gress is transition. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made a strong case that much of our language depends on ever larger and more elaborate constructs of metaphors, which are all fundamentally derived from physical experience.20 The word threshold, for example, refers to a door sill and derives from memories of the precious harvest held within the door, but we have temporal thresholds, thresholds of sound, thresholds of pain, thresholds of consciousness, thresholds of life, even thresholds on the computer to enter metaphorical files and folders that we speak of as real. Just as prevalent in everyday usage as the couple ‘in and out’ are the metaphorical uses of ‘up and down’, for we speak of high quality and low quality, of being elevated to the peerage and sent down from university, of rising to a challenge and falling into debt. When you begin to explore the question, metaphors involving height are hard to avoid.21 Concepts of back and front move swiftly on from people and animals to buildings, books, pictures, cars, furniture and just about anything that can have a ‘right way round’. Goffman’s school of space-based sociology revolved around the concepts of ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’, which can be applied metaphorically to almost any institution.22 Left and right tend to be more specifically directional, but have acquired a familiar political usage that started with the assembly at the French Revolution, though, long before that, the hands acquired culturally specific social functions and associations, and we still shake hands and eat with the right.23 In many societies, gendered physical spaces have been left/right divided.24 The whole rich framework of increasingly abstract metaphors can thus be seen as taking reference from a foundation in bodily experience. George Lakoff, writing later with Rafael Nunez, extended his language studies to suggest even that mathematics is entirely a metaphorical system.25 All this serves to confirm the primacy of embodied experience, of the body in space.

The body engages the world The conquest of the sky is recent in human history. On a Stone Age world initially perceived as flat, the above was seen as another world, from which came uncontrollable forces of light, heat and weather, and it is understandable that people conceived heavenly bodies as controlling agents and sought to address them in prayer. The sky’s movements also gave us our natural division of time by days and years. Below was the Earth, with caves, waterholes and a potential underworld of indeterminate depth. With these earthbound values, it is hardly surprising that, in culture after culture, heaven is up, and hell is down, often with many layers, that temples are on mountains to get closer to the powers above, and that there is a widely understood polarity between the attic and the cellar.26 For the same reason, kings and judges occupy the highest seat, usually on a dais, and shrines and altars are usually up steps, whereas it is tombs

100 Peter Blundell Jones

that involve descent. As regards movements across the Earth, we have already noted that, discounting the limits of topography, the body can move in any direction. However, people must always have been aware of the turning of the heavens together with all the heavenly bodies: sun during the day, moon and stars at night. They provide direction and tell the time, and were read long before clock and compass were invented. The evident east–west axis implied by the solar path is easily demonstrable with a gnomon27 and is complemented by a north–south one marked by the Pole Star, always valued for its stability. Thus, the Earth offers axes that become the cardinal points, which were celebrated and accreted specific values in many early cultures.28 In Chinese Daoism, dating back to around 300 BCE, for example, the cardinal points played a major role in a cosmological system that embraced the whole order of things, but, perhaps surprisingly, the ‘four directions’ were equally present among itinerant native American cultures.29 Delving into anthropological examples, one soon finds concern for orientation to have been almost universal, but the values attributed to directions differed and were culturally specific.30 In a world devoid of roads and yet unmapped – and also less protected from the hazards of weather and seasons – it was important to be able to situate oneself and to find one’s way about. Self-orientation has always been a matter of matching the three directions emanating from the body-as-geometer to the three given axes of the Earth, which is of course what we do when walking with a compass, or even just with awareness of the sun. Journeys have always played an essential part in human life and gave rise to some of our earliest narratives, such as The Odyssey. They also support a host of metaphors, such as ‘I have come a long way’, or ‘I have made headway despite my difficulties’. Life is often seen as a journey, death as a journey of another kind. This theme is further addressed in Chapter 2.5.

Notes 1 Alva Noë 2009. The part about the idea of a brain in a vat is on pp. 10–14, and is reiterated on p. 181. The theme of the book is that consciousness, ‘is achieved in action, by us, thanks to our situation in and access to the world we know around us’ (p. 186). 2 Piaget and Inhelder 1969, pp. 4–13. 3 On the Azande in Africa, see Evans-Pritchard 1937, p. 136. On the Dong of China, see Geary et al. 2003, p. 171. 4 The most compelling evidence is when this fails, as with unfortunate persons with brain disorders, unable to remember what happened a few minutes ago: see Oliver Sacks 1985. 5 But what it is, apart from our readings and interpretations, we shall never know, and the world supports conflicting versions: I follow Kant and the Neokantians on this: see Nelson Goodman 1978. 6 This is an essential point made by Kathryn Schulz in her book Being Wrong (2010). 7 David Lowenthal has put this well: The prime function of memory is not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present. Far from simply holding on to previous experiences, memory helps us to understand them. Memories are not ready-made reflections of the past, but eclectic, selective reconstructions based on subsequent actions and perceptions and on ever-changing codes by which we delineate, symbolize and classify the world around us. (Lowenthal 1985, p. 210) 8 The classic work on the construction of memory is Bartlett’s Remembering (1932); for a more recent general study, see Draaisma’s Metaphors of Memory (2001). 9 On the problem of duration, see Bergson 1916, pp. 99–111. 10 Meyer 1956. 11 The complexity of brain activity in dealing with music is well explored by Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia (Sacks 2007).

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12 Hobson 2002, p. 131. 13 Before the age of artificial light, moonlight was necessary to get about, hence the Lunar Men of the eighteenth century. Our year-based calendar leaves the moon relatively unpredictable, but the traditional Chinese calendar follows it precisely, operating on a 60-year cycle that brings movements of sun and moon together again. 14 Piaget and Inhelder 1969, pp. 13–19. 15 Life without gravity is for most of us unthinkable, and weightlessness is achieved only briefly in a falling aircraft. In nearly all science-fiction films and stories, the travellers encounter the same gravity as on Earth, which would be unlikely, but the effect of doubled gravity would be impossible to mimic with human actors on Earth. 16 Even worse in French, for sinistre can signal a catastrophe. 17 Needham 1973. 18 McGilchrist 2009. 19 Bourdieu 1977, pp. 114–24. 20 Lakoff and Johnson 1980. 21 Ibid., pp. 14–21. 22 Goffman 1971. 23 In the French National Assembly of 1789, those sympathetic to the king sat to the president’s right, and revolutionaries sat to his left. Thus, the political division reflects an earlier custom that seated a more highly honoured person to the right of the host, and the right wing, always conservative, gained precedence over the left. 24 For example, gendered sides to the Native American tipi and the Mongolian yurt. 25 Lakoff and Nunez 2000. 26 Bachelard 1969. 27 A vertical stick creating a shadow and, therefore, an arc centred on south, the standard orientation instrument before the compass. 28 Rykwert 1976; also Wheatley 1971. 29 For the cardinal points in relation to Daoism, see Needham 1956. For orientation among North American peoples, see Nabokov and Easton 1989. For a rich case study, see Neihardt 1932/1979. 30 For a particularly elaborate example that is also highly specific, see the vintana of the Betsileo in Madagascar: Susan Kus and Victor Raharijaona, ‘Domestic space and the tenacity of tradition among some Betsileo in Madagascar’, Chapter 3 of Susan Kent 1990, pp. 21–33.

2.2 FROM HEALTH TO PLEASURE The landscape of walking Jan Woudstra

When the Englishman Richard Ford published A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), he claimed that, ‘No Spaniard . . . ever took a regular walk on his own two feet – a walk for the sake of mere health’.1 In this, he not only pinpointed cultural differences between the two nations with respect to attitudes towards walking, but also the long-held British belief that walking was beneficial to physical and mental health. As early as the second half of the sixteenth century, there had been a renaissance in the acknowledgement of the health benefits of walking: following classical examples, it was thought to encourage the ability to think, as well as to encourage better physical health. This chapter investigates how a renewed interest in walking affected the design of landscapes, both private and public. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of a walk as a recreational activity in the countryside was somewhat of an enigma, and the main venue for such exercise was the garden. The reason was the condition of roads, dusty in summer and dirty in winter. To provide a firm surface for carriage wheels, good roads were ‘metalled’ with crushed stone or gravel to form hard surfaces. But, whatever the efforts, road surfaces remained a problem, as described by Robert Phillips in his 1736–7 Dissertation on the topic: Now between wet and dry (for Example, when a Day or two of Rain there succeeds a Week or a Fortnight of dry Weather) the Sun, by drying, makes hard dry Ridges between the Rutts before it can evaporate all the Water in the Rutts, which every Shower of Rain fills again, tho’ it cannot soften the hard Ridges; but then it softens the Bottoms of the Rutts, so that Carriages sink still deeper into them. When the Weather becomes warmer, and the Days longer, as the Rutts begin to grow dry, they grow so stiff and heavy that they make a great difference in the Draught, at least that of one Horse in five. The Wheels go so hard, that when the Rutts are at the deepest, it is so dangerous and difficult to go out of a Track, that Carriages can hardly pass by one another without overturning.2 It is clear that this was a potent mixture, even without the horse and farm-animal excrement that was inevitably mixed in with it. Despite the fact that there was a tradition of leaving space for pedestrians along the sides of high roads, these were frequently soiled also (Figure 2.2.1).

The landscape of walking 103

FIGURE 2.2.1

Standard road section

Source: J.C. Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Agriculture, 1835, London, p. 568

FIGURE 2.2.2

This patten was tied underneath shoes to prevent them becoming spoiled Source: Sheffield Museum Services

The state of the roads inhibited any pedestrian activity that was not necessary for transport or work related and, therefore, associated with the working classes (Figure 2.2.2). The activity of walking for the upper classes, therefore, took place where dry and smooth surfaces could be assured with gravel walks. Gravel originating from the Kensington and Blackheath areas became famous for the construction of London walks that were primarily found in gardens in the south of the country.

Peripatetic walks Some of the earliest surviving gardens of the mediaeval period were in monasteries, as cloisters surrounding courtyards, which, like ambulacrums in academic institutions, must have been intended for contemplation and philosophising. This kind of peripatetic walking – up and down, or round and round – was inspired by reports of Aristotle’s lyceum, where members met in the peripatoi, the covered walkway or colonnade. An ambulacrum was incorporated into the north side of the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden, which, though without doors, had glazed windows, to provide some comfort and protection from the elements. The openings provided direct access to the garden, so that, presumably with better weather, the walk could continue outside. Here, the pathways were shared with those approaching the plants in order to study them (Figure 2.2.3).

104 Jan Woudstra

FIGURE 2.2.3

Cloisters surrounding courtyards, like those of the ambulacrums in academic institutions, were intended for contemplation and philosophising; examples at Colégio do Espírito Santo, Évora, built 1574–90

Source: Photograph by Jan Woudstra

Constitutional walks By the time they were being rediscovered in the second half of the sixteenth century, English spa towns provided another reason for walking. Besides taking the water and the dietary requirements, there was a ritual for walking, sometimes at the beginning of the day or at the end. In 1626, evening walks at Knaresborough were taken ‘into the fields, or Castle-yard’, and provision was generally increased, special walks being created for the purpose. The new walk followed the River Nidd and included the famous Dropping Well, where, according to legend, Mother Shipton, an English prophetess, was born. Such destinations must have contributed substantially to the pleasure of walking. Walking was considered conducive to health; in his essay ‘Of regiment of health’, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) emphasises the importance of exercise, which included walking in ‘Alleys, enough for foure to walke abreast’. Between 1597 and 1599, Bacon laid out Gray’s Inn Fields, London, for this purpose. It consisted of a series of parallel walks lined with elm trees, with one central, wide avenue and narrower ones to either side. These walks on the edge of the city, with good views northwards, became a popular destination, particularly after the ravages of the plague at various intervals during the seventeenth century, as good air could be appreciated there.3 The issue of walking was also addressed in the redesign of St James Park by Charles II after the Restoration in the 1660s, when he instituted so-called constitutional walks, probably intended as a pun on the Constitution, but meant for his constitution (and that of the Court) instead. The name Constitution Hill, the avenue between the present-day Buckingham Palace

The landscape of walking 105

and Green Park, is a reminder of these daily walks.4 The Mall, laid out as a double avenue as part of these changes, also became and long remained a popular destination for promenading. The central avenue was dedicated to the game of pall mall, or paille maille, played with wooden hammers on long sticks. Promenading took place in the narrower avenues on either side of the track, which was fenced off with low boarding. By this time, walking had become so much part of a healthy Puritan life that it was generally incorporated. John Worlidge’s Systema horti-culturae (1677) included two hypothetical designs for walled gardens including walks as the predominant element. One scheme was a circular garden based on foreign models, where the walk that, ‘circundates that Garden is not unpleasant, for that you may walk as long as you please in it always forward without any short turning’. He believed nevertheless that, ‘The Square is the most perfect and pleasant form that you can lay your Garden into’, because this form of garden, with straight walks, was much easier to navigate as a pedestrian (see Figures 2.2.4a and 2.2.4b): The delight you take in walking in it being much the more as you are less careful: for when you walk in a round or circle, you are more subject to trespass on the borders, without continual thoughts and observations of your Ground.5

a FIGURE 2.2.4

b

John Worlidge produced two theoretical models for gardens: the circular one (a) was designed so as to enable continuous walking, without the need to turn corners, but the disadvantage over the square garden (b) was that one was more likely to step into the borders

Source: John Worlidge, Systema horti-culturae, 1677, London

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Promenading Although the initial intention of these latter walks may indeed have been for constitutional improvement, as they became fashionable they drew a new audience, more interested in social rather than health benefits. It was here that the tradition of promenading, defined as a ‘leisurely walk, esp. one taken in a public place so as to meet or be seen by others’6 began. The tremendous popularity of the initial walks soon encouraged further examples, designed for this combined purpose of health and social venue. These were the public walks designed for towns such as Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Nottingham, Shrewsbury, Lincoln, York, Knaresborough (Figure 2.2.5) and Scarborough, mostly along rivers and planted with avenues of trees. The enduring success of Pall Mall for promenading ultimately ensured its adaptation in the form of the shopping mall.

Bewilderment As the grandest of gardens, conceived from the 1660s onwards, Versailles became a prototype for the baroque garden and was emulated everywhere. It was a landscape designed to impress, as an expression of the power of its owner, Louis XIV. The palace and gardens were conceived on a grand scale to belittle the visitor, who is thereby overwhelmed. The primarily geometric layout encourages the idea that it was conceived to be seen from above, but the full experience could only be had by moving through the landscape. This was normally done on

FIGURE 2.2.5

One of the requirements in spa towns was the provision of public walks; there was an early example along the River Nidd in Knaresborough that incorporated Mother Shipton’s Cave and the Petrifying Well, which was first opened to the public in 1630

Source: Photograph by Jan Woudstra

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foot, but the walks were wide enough to accommodate small chariots, or roulettes, also. In order to be able to show the gardens to his visitors, Louis XIV provided the programme for a route by which the gardens were to be shown, published as ‘La manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles’. Gardeners would be on hand to change the planting in the parterres even during a visit, to create a different perspective on the return, but mainly they served the turning on and off of fountains as the visit progressed, so that they could all be appreciated.7 One of the main features of the baroque garden was the bosquet, the woody part, referred to in English as the wilderness. Initially, such wildernesses were laid out in the maze-like patterns that also served for the layout of flower gardens; they progressed to simpler geometric patterns and ultimately were designed with winding walks throughout. The idea was an element of surprise. Whereas André Mollet had referred to going to the wilderness ‘for studious Retirement, or the enjoyment of Society with two or three Friends, a Bottle of Wine and a Collation’8, the main object in the cooler climate of England was to have a feature where one might be ‘bewildered’ through surprise walks. This could only be experienced by a moving walker. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the formal garden had given way to the landscape park of Capability Brown, but the idea of a garden as the main space for walking predominated, although it was renamed as pleasure ground when conceived in its ultimate form. The main purpose of a garden for walking is emphasised by Thomas Whately in his Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), which served as a guidebook for the new style. His section ‘Of a garden’ is wholly dedicated to the creation of walks. He noted that gravel walks contribute to the appearance of a garden, and he emphasised the need for the highest standards in their construction and maintenance, noting that, ‘a field surrounded by a gravel walk is to a degree bordered by a garden’, and that many ‘gardens are nothing more than such a walk round a field’. Various guidelines for the creation of walks were provided that were illustrated with a case study of Stowe, noting that: The whole space is divided into a number of scenes, each distinguished with taste and fancy; and the changes are so frequent, so sudden, and complete, the transitions so artfully conducted, that the same ideas are never continued or repeated to satiety. This referred to a number of themed walks, which in the case of Stowe were celebrated for the garden buildings and temples,9 which also shaped the iconographical programme of the gardens.10 The general design varied from place to place, affecting both rides and walks. At Blenheim, for example, there was a ride ‘round the park for occasional visitors’ of more than 3 miles around the perimeter of the park and ‘describing a wide circle round palace and gardens, which are casually and advantageously seen through glades in the progress, and exhibiting many magnificent pictures over the park and country round’. It was noted that: [this ride] has ever been considered as the first of natural charms that BLENHEIM supplies, and as a coup d’oeil and compendium of all the rest; and as it may be taken in a carriage or on a horseback, it is neither accompanied with fatigue or delay. It may be taken in any weather.11 In contrast, the walks consisted of pebbly gravel, ‘of the most beautiful texture and regularity’, which was found to blend ‘utility with ornament’. These walks wound through ‘to the east

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between rising plantations, and clumps of trees and shrubs in various shapes, at intervals is opened to highly embellished lawn’. The main, or ‘Home-walk’, through the gardens was delightful and ‘sheltered by the winding of its direction from every blast’, and it possessed ‘sufficient variety in every part, with an aspect continually improving’. This walk ‘conducts to a Temple’ – in a ‘diverticle from the principal walk’, the visitor is ‘drawn aside to the contemplation of the FLOWER GARDEN’, which is included within a ‘thick grove’ – past the Palladian gate that forms the entrance to the kitchen garden, back on to the Home-walk and the Sheep-walk and past an open grove, at which point the visitor catches ‘a glimpse of the south front of the Palace, which is thrown into various perspective as we advance’ and various other views to features outside the park etc., providing the whole range of sensory experiences, visually open or closed, revealing views and interesting features and scents and sounds (see Figure 2.2.6).12 These experiences comply with those promoted by William Chambers in his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1773) as originating from the Chinese, but which were, in fact, the canon that he would have liked to promote in the design of pleasure grounds. It also affected the directives for walks that express a range of visual and emotional experiences, to be summarised as follows: •

Walks are to lead ‘to all principal buildings, fine prospects, and other parts of the composition’ and in such a way ‘as it were by accident, and without turning back, or seeming to go out of the way, to every object deserving notice’.

FIGURE 2.2.6

Walks in the eighteenth-century landscape park were normally incorporated within the pleasure grounds that contained a range of features; this example at Croome Court, designed by Capability Brown in the 1750s

Source: Photograph by Jan Woudstra

The landscape of walking 109

•

• •

•

The distances between straight and winding walks are to be varied, with ‘closely planted thickets’ to hide and reveal views, to create ‘suspense with regard to the extent, as [well as] to excite those gloomy sensations which naturally steal upon the mind’, and more thinly planted areas. Here, the ‘ear is struck with the voices of those who are in the adjacent walks, and the eye amused with a confused sight of their persons, between the stems and foliage of the trees’. Various walks are unexpectedly turned into the same open spaces, so that, ‘the different companies are agreeably surprized to meet where they may view each other, and satisfy their curiosity without impediment’. Walks ‘en cul de sac’ are to be avoided in order to prevent ‘unpleasant disappointments’, but if they are necessary, they should always terminate ‘at some interesting object’. Walks are not to be designed ‘round the extremities of a piece of ground’, with the middle left ‘entirely open’, for though at first glance conceived as ‘striking and noble [so] the pleasure would be of short duration’. In smaller places, it might be appropriate to leave the larger part of the space open but taking care ‘to have a good depth of thicket, which frequently breaks considerably in upon the open space, and hides many parts of it from the spectator’s eye’. The projections of these thickets create variety, because they alter ‘the apparent figure of the open space from every point of view; and by constantly hiding parts of it, they create mystery which excites the traveller’s curiosity’. In places with a greater depth of thicket, recesses may be created for ‘buildings, seats, and other objects, as well as for bold windings of the principal walks, and for several smaller paths to branch off from the principal ones’. This disguises the idea of the boundary, ‘and affords amusement to the passenger in his course’, and, as it is impossible to ‘pursue all the turns of the different lateral paths, there is still something left to desire, and a field of imagination to work upon’. Crooked walks on flat, featureless land must either be ‘made by art, or be worn by the constant passage of travellers’. In general, unnatural windings must be avoided, and walks must only be turned for some apparent excuse, ‘either to avoid impediments, naturally existing, or raised by art, to improve the scenery’. Striking features for turning aside include a ‘mountain, a precipice, a deep valley, a marsh, a piece of rugged ground, a building, or some old venerable plant’. If ‘a river, the sea, a wide extended lake, or a terras commanding rich prospects, present themselves’, they may be followed ‘in all their windings’.13

This reveals the intricacies and degree of detail with which walks within gardens were considered.

Public walks Acknowledgement of the health benefits of walking and the lack of public facilities for it led, in 1833, to the appointment of the Select Committee on Public Walks that was ‘to consider the best means of securing Open Spaces in the Vicinity of populous Towns, as Public Walks and Places of Exercise calculated to promote the Health and Comfort of the Inhabitants’. The Select Committee found that, ‘the means of occasional exercise and recreation in the fresh air are every day lessened’ with the fast increasing population of towns, and that, despite the fact that some towns had public walks, ‘even at these places, however, advantageously situated in this respect, as compared with many others, the accommodation is inadequate to

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the wants of the increasing number of people’. As a consequence, the Committee reported in favour of the provision of public walks and open places, ultimately leading to the provision of public parks, which generally incorporated a much wider range of facilities than mere walking14 (Figure 2.2.7).

FIGURE 2.2.7

Tom Browne’s caricature of visitors to Victoria Park, London, emphasises the significance of walking and promenading as a purpose for the laying out of public parks

S c a lc o f Feet

P

u b l i c

C

a r d e n s

B U XT ON.

FIGURE 2.2.8

The layout of the Pavilion Gardens in Buxton Spa by Edward Milner, in 1871, emphasised not only the need for walking as a health requirement, but also walking for pleasure, in that the circuitous walks led to and from the bandstand, which was always near enough for the music to be heard

Source: H.E. Milner, The Art and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1890, London

The landscape of walking 111

Not all ‘public’ parks were freely accessible, and a town such as Buxton Spa reveals the progress of public walk to public park. As in other spa towns, a public walk had been created here, designed by Jeffry Wyatville in 1818, especially for those taking the waters, in an area along the River Wye and then the Slopes opposite the Crescent, which was a topographically challenging site for the infirm, and so there was soon a requirement to embellish the walk along the river, which was executed by Joseph Paxton in about 1850. In 1871, the nearest section to the town was extended with the Pavilion Gardens, designed by Edward Milner. The latter was a public facility open for a charge, and was a good example of combining walks as a health requirement with pleasures. A conservatory to one side enabled an indoor walk during inclement weather, but it also contained a beautiful floral arrangement, tea-drinking facilities and, ultimately, an opera building designed by Frank Matcham, in 1903. Parallel was a broad outdoor terrace, elevated above the rest of the park. The garden itself had a centrally placed bandstand, with circular walks leading to and from it. These would have enabled circuitous walks that could be varied and were never too far from the music for it not to be heard. They would also have provided various choices and combinations of direction, the promenaders also presumably stepping to the music (Figure 2.2.8). The municipal parks laid out from this time on also provided many additional facilities beyond providing for walkers, typically including sports and leisure. Although the latter have long had predominance, because they have organisations to represent them, walking continues as the majority use of public parks today.15 With the current political, social and environmental issues, from obesity to climate change and with respect to the use of the car and home entertainment, the need to promote walking for health has never been greater.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank David Jacques and Peter Goodchild.

Notes 1 Ford 1845, I, i, p. 52. 2 Phillips 1637, p. 4. 3 David Jacques (1989) ‘The chief ornament’ of Gray’s Inn: The walks from Bacon to Brown, Garden History, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 41–65. 4 Weinreb and Hibbert 1983, p. 194. 5 Worlidge 1677, pp. 16–18. 6 The Oxford English Dictionary. 7 Christopher Thacker (1972) La manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles by Louis XIV and others, Garden History, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 49–69. 8 Mollet 1672, p. 13. 9 Whately 1770, pp. 206–27. 10 Clarke et al. 1997. 11 Mavor 1793, pp. 96–7. 12 Mavor 1793, pp. 59–85. 13 Chambers 1773, pp. 34–6. 14 Chadwick 1966, pp. 50–1. 15 Greenhalgh and Worpole 1995, p. 42.

2.3 ARCHITECTURE OF WALKING Doina Petrescu

Walking can be considered as a tool to experience, analyse and represent space in relation to subjectivity. Looking beyond its value as an everyday life activity, artists, philosophers, writers, architects and activists have seen its value as an aesthetic, political and relational practice. We trace this legacy of walking within the emergence of an alternative architecture and urbanism connecting movement, site and subjectivity, suggesting that this is rooted in those artistic practices and civic actions of the modern era that, starting in the nineteenth century, took up walking as an ontological, aesthetic and political knowledge tool. Revisiting some of them, we will ask what the role of walking might be in enabling a more intense experience and more precise reading of the city, how this might change the way we plan and build the city, and what the promise of walking is for future architectural and urban practice. In his book Walkscapes, Francesco Careri suggests that the production of space began with human beings wandering in the Palaeolithic landscape, following traces, leaving traces.1 A slow appropriation of territory was the result of this incessant walking. Taking ‘walking’ as the beginning of architecture, Careri proposes an alternative history: one not concerned with settlements, cities and buildings, but with movements, displacements and flows. It is an architecture that speaks of space, not as contained by walls, but made of routes, paths and relationships. Careri suggests a common factor in the system of representation found in the plan of the Palaeolithic village, the walkabouts of the Australian aborigines and the psychogeographic maps of the Situationists. If, for the settler, the space between settlements is empty, for the nomad, the errant, the walker, this space is full of traces: they inhabit space through the points, lines, stains and impressions, through the material and symbolic marks that are left in the landscape. Nomads were perhaps the first alternative urbanists, starting to organise space by tracing routes and paths. This sort of ‘urbanism’ is based on a particular logic: planning with the unknown, planning through experiencing, planning not place, but displacement. Not merely a functional means, walking became an aesthetic frame to discover the world. World literature is full of travel narratives dating back to antiquity, but one could say that walking became a truly aesthetic experience only within modernity. Portraying Paris in the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire, and later Walter Benjamin, showed how the modern city provides the

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ideal physical and cultural context for the experience of displacement, discovery and wandering.2 Writing about walking as a way of experiencing the city, they identified the emergence of a new urban subject, who walks across the modern city with its numerous facades, streets and displays as if crossing an unknown landscape, not crossing forests, but walls and streets among crowds. They recognised walking as a psychological and cultural experience, a product of the quality of the urban space and the subjectivity of the city dweller. Baudelaire identified a particular figure to express the dynamic physical and cultural condition of the modern city: the flâneur. He is a new type of city user, produced by the crowded condition of the modern city. So he goes, he roams, he seeks. What is he looking for? With a sure aim this man I have depicted, this solitary person gifted with an active imagination, who is always traversing the vast desert of humanity, has a goal more elevated than that of the pure stroller [flâneur], a more general goal, quite apart from the fugitive pleasure of the moment. He searches for something we can call modernity, for there is no better word to express the idea in question. For him it is a matter of disengaging fashion from a poetic content founded in history, and instead finding the eternal within the transitory.3 With the flâneur, walking becomes a structural practice of modernity, concerned with seizing the ‘eternal within the transitory’.

Walking as aesthetic practice The Dada artists, and after them the Surrealists, also celebrated this aesthetic quality in their organised visits to the city and its outskirts. This was the first time that art rejected the gallery to reclaim urban space. The ‘visit’ was one of the tools chosen by Dada to achieve that transition. Starting in 1924, they organised trips to the open country, discovering the dreamlike, surreal aspect of walking. They defined déambulation as a sort of automatic writing in real space, capable of revealing unconscious zones of space, the repressed areas of the city, in direct correlation with repressed areas of the psyche. The Surrealists continued this practice, organising group visits and meetings in particular urban places. They sought ‘places that had no reason to exist’ and, at the same time, they were also interested in the terrains vagues of creativity. Their narratives, and other aesthetic productions such as found objects, art installations and poetry, described the city in a new way.4 In 1950, the Lettrist International developed the Theorie de la dérive. For the Lettrists, the dérive was different from déambulation; it was not just physical and psychological, but also political and ideological: a deviation, a way of contesting. The Situationists pushed the dérive and its subversive dimension further: it became a method to discover and to validate an alternative city, another architecture, not built through axes and frames. It was a way to disorganise and fragment the city through the experience of ‘drifting’, which would allow the psyche to reconstruct it in different ways. Dérive was defined by Guy Debord as not only an artistic but also a scientific practice: psychogeography, ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals’.5 The Situationists directly attacked modern urban planning. They championed the pedestrian over the car, criticising the car-produced city and its specific urban forms: parking, highways, suburbs. They criticised the obsession with utility and function and, implicitly, the idea that

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form should be determined by function: the key principle of modern architecture and urbanism. Contemporary with, and in opposition to the Athens Charter, which stated the principles of modern urbanism, they proposed a New Urbanism, which encouraged the symbolic destruction of modern urbanism and its principles, recommending instead an unmediated approach to the city, through life experience and the invention of new urban practices within the everyday: The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action. The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants.6 For engendering ‘situations’, walking was an everyday life practice that opposed the principles of modern urbanism. It was not cars, but pedestrians, walkers, wanderers, who were able to construct situations. In 1957, Constant Nieuwenhuys designed the camp of nomads of Alba as a model, and Guy Debord and Asger Jorn drifted into a ‘construction of situations’, experimenting with playful creative behaviour and creative environments. ‘Constructed situation: A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.’7 Nieuwenhuys developed this idea of constructed situations almost literally and reworked the Situationist theory into the realm of architecture, proposing a nomadic city: The New Babylon, a city in which human activity and culture do not relate to use anymore but to uselesness: ‘The new forces orient themselves towards a complex of human activities that extends beyond utility: leisure, superior games. Contrary to what the functionalists think, culture is situated at the point where usefulness ends’.8 Such a city also creates other types of user, whose activity is continual movement and play.

Walking as a way of being in the world Contemporary with the Situationists, philosopher Michel de Certeau wrote, in his book Practice of Everyday Life, about walking as an everyday life practice, a practice difficult to define and represent in terms of urban practice, because it is at the same time a fundamental ontological experience: ‘a way of being in the world’.9 For de Certeau, the walking body moves in the city in search of something familiar. He invokes Freud, saying that walking recalls a baby’s moves inside the maternal body: ‘To walk is to be in search of a proper place. It is a process of being indefinitely absent and looking for a proper place’.10 De Certeau writes of ‘the spatial language’ of walking, but criticises the way it is representated in the urban cartographies of the time, as they do not represent the act of walking, which is no simple movement, but ‘a way of being in the world’. Difficult to represent also is the banality of the everyday. Walking is one of the most banal experiences, located at ground level of our urban dwelling condition. But it is exactly in this difficulty that the power of walking as critical practice lies. It is owing to the street and the banality of everyday life that walking offers a radical way of conceptualising the city: a way of knowing to challenge the systematic, rationalising and functionalist ideas of the city imposed by the urban planners and managers. Because of its direct contact with the lived environment, walking is both a mode of being in the city and a way of knowing it. Drawing on Foucault’s critique of power, de Certeau finds in walking a form of resistance to distanced and privileged

Architecture of walking 115

ways of visualising the city as a unified whole.11 Unlike Baudelaire, de Certeau refers to walking as a mass practice: the ‘“wandering of the semantic” produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear while exaggerating others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order’.12 It is the ‘forest of gestures’ produced by the walking of the many that opposes the immobility of the city.

Walking as politics There is a history of walking as critical mass practice in political struggles, of which protest marches are a part, one of the most emblematic being the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 28 August 1963. It involved all black civil rights and union leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr, and led to the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was a landmark event for the early civil rights movement, with over 250,000 demonstrators converging on Washington, DC, to attend what became the largest public protest in the history of the United States.13 The power of marching as criticism and resistance has also been used in direct action events and artistic urban protests. Reclaim the Streets, a global movement in the 1990s, was a move to retake public space from cars and commerce for reuse in partying and strolling. It merged the direct action of Britain’s anti-road-building movement with the carnivalesque nature of the counter-cultural rave scene and served as catalyst for the global anti-capitalist movements of the late 1990s. Besides the protest element, its street parties also provided a prefigurative vision of what city streets could be in a system that prioritised people over profit, ecology over economy. The street critical mass anti-capitalist movement took different forms, using creative forms of protest and growing in scale: a global street party in seventy cities occurred in May 1998, coinciding with the G8 summit. A year later, the Carnival Against Capital on 18 June, coordinated by Reclaim the Streets and the People’s Global Action network, saw simultaneous actions in financial districts across the world, from Nigeria to Uruguay, North Korea and Australia to Belarus. In 2000, a carnivalesque mass street action shut down the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, an event that turned into the comingout party for the anti-globalisation movement.14

FIGURE 2.3.1

Reclaim the Streets, Camden High Street, UK, 14 May 1995

Source: Nick Cobbing

116 Doina Petrescu

Walking as architectural and urban practice Walking is both an urban practice and an alternative mode of urban knowledge. As suggested by the Situationists, it announces the possibility of an alternative urbanism that is more dynamic, more critical and grounded in everyday life. Some contemporary architectural practices are pursuing this, such as Stalker, an architects’ collective in Rome, which was started in 1995 after the architects, as students, had occupied Rome University. One of their first projects was an exploration of Rome called ‘Through the actual territories’,15 which involved combing the uncertain territories of the city in a Situationist vein, making discoveries. As they felt they were re-enacting in a contemporary form transhumance (seasonal pasturage), they called their practice transurbance. It centred on the relation between the transitory urban subject and the city with its territories, but their practice was at the same time an everyday practice, a protest against traditional architecture. It offered a different way of reading and interpreting the city from the point of view of roaming. Not only the group was moving – other forms of movement were discovered latent in these territories: social and economic mutations, nomadic installations, temporary settlements. Along with the walk, they organised broadcasting sessions from the territories crossed, allowing their reading to be revealed and documented in real time. ‘Territory’ is also a political and geographic term, suggesting large-scale spatial politics and notions of power and control. In biology, it relates to spatial appropriation behaviour, defined geographic areas defended by an animal against others. In reaction against this, Stalker proposed another way of reading urban territories: instead of appropriating and controlling them, crossing them. The attempt to ‘control’ territories is a fundamental principle of modern urbanism and probably of Western culture in general. In their tour of Rome, Stalker discovered the emergence of the uncontrolled within the core of a highly organised city that had been based on principles of control and appropriation. Most dynamics would take place at the edge, the margin, the border, on the fringe of defined territorial entities, where rules are softer and ecosystems overlap. Like Dada and the Surrealists, they discovered and celebrated the terrains vagues of the contemporary city. There are many terms for terrain vague: abandoned field, no-man’s-land, vacant lot, wasteland, friche (urban leftover). Walking across the empty plots and the voids of the city was a way to acknowledge abandonment as a form of preserving territories, a way of conserving entropy within the city. Terrain vague is a place of life, an urban wilderness, a way of preserving what has developed in the shadow of human behaviour. There is a connection between disuse and a sense of freedom. Terrain vague tends to be inhabited by species that enjoy freedom, that resist control and domestication: weeds, wild birds and also, sometimes, populations wishing to resist the system; it is the emergence of the margin in the centre. Stalker’s practice shows the importance of including the evocative, paradoxical power of the terrain vague in the perception of the contemporary city. Terrain vague represents (sometimes literally) the entropic, degenerate, troubled element that is opposed to the authority of architecture. The vagueness of the terrains vagues stands against the planned hygienist vacuity of modern urbanism. Stalker’s urban stroll across the terrains vagues celebrates the city’s resistance to urbanisation. Their walking reveals the city as a process and concentrates aesthetic and ethical questions raised by contemporary society, such as how we can preserve life within the city, and how we can value what is not under our control. Stalker propose precise techniques of observation and mapping: ‘A nomadic research, a mode of capturing the act of crossing without regimentation, ratification or definition of the object examined, so as not to prevent its becoming’.16

Architecture of walking 117

FIGURE 2.3.2

‘Through the actual territories’, Rome 1996, project by architects’ collective Stalker in Rome to explore uncertain territories of the city in a Situationist vein

Source: Stalker

Public works is a London-based art and architecture practice that traces an ancestry in avant-garde practices of the 1970s, by groups such as Archigram, Superstudio, Coop Himmelblau and Bernard Tschumi. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, they built mobile kiosk-like devices – urban toys, as they call them – which were programmed and used by residents in public space. Public works’s projects often take place within the radius of a neighbourhood, which means within an easily walkable distance. Their practice has been a matter of hanging out, engaging in conversations, speaking to people and encouraging them to appropriate space and articulate their ideas about the public realm. Public works suggests that the only way for architecture to meet its users is to go out and walk itself. The architects were also walking, but they were walking alongside slowly moving architectural objects. Walking with an object is more performative than walking alone, as it also changes the role of the walking subject. Meeting someone while walking with an object is different from meeting someone on the walk, as others meet the object first before they meet the subjects. The movement and its meaning are then centred less on subjectivity than on the object’s possibilities. Such experience of walking concentrates on the roaming object and the different relationships emerging from its movement. In 2004, at the invitation of the Serpentine Gallery, known for commissioning temporary pavilions by star architects, public works proposed instead a roaming stall within Kensington Park, creating relations between the park’s many users. The Park Products project questioned existing spaces for cultural production and distribution and suggested new ones, which arose through the practice of taking walks in the park and meeting people.17 The outcomes from those meetings – the ‘park products’ – later took on the same mobility, moving again through the park. They joke about their ‘pavilion’, which, in contrast with the usual ones, was conceived as a gathering of people and objects, rather than as an iconic piece of architecture. It was a provocation, making the static institution of Serpentine go for a walk in its own immediate environment. The project reclaimed space through strolling, playing and chatting, but it was also a way to subvert the symbolic value of the profession of architect as normally constructed

118 Doina Petrescu

FIGURE 2.3.3

The Park Products, Mobile Porch, London 2002 project by public works

Source: public works

FIGURE 2.3.4

Transhumance at Ferme du Bonheur, Nanterre, 2012

Source: C. Petcou

around the idea of building. This is a vital message: the discovery that there are people out there, that space is never abstract and static, but that it always exists in relation to those who use it. For public works, the architecture of walking is a form of relationality. It is a more ecological and democratic way of creating space.

Walking as post-humanistic practice Walking has retained its value as a way of discovering the city. Many cultural and architectural institutions now organise walks with residents as part of their outreach programmes, as a form of pedagogy that aims at teaching architecture in the outside world, beyond the boundaries

Architecture of walking 119

of the institution, allowing for informal postures within the learning process. Some civic organisations propose forms of walking derived from old traditions and cultures. In Madrid, for example, after much political and ecological struggle, the migration of livestock through the city has been reauthorised, with the temporary closure of certain streets to cars.18 The ancient transhumance paths pre-existed the city, so that this change restores a historic right. This success also registered the need to see the city from another perspective, to make visible the presence of animals, fellow species that also walk. Such practices allow us better to understand the city as an ecosystem, as a space to be shared with others – animals, plants – and to find new ways of thinking about it, planning it in a more ecological and post-humanistic manner. From this perspective, walking is one of the most resilient practices involved in the servicing of the ecosystem: a form of civic care, of preservation, not just of human otherness but of all ‘more than human’ others – meaning, not only other species, but all of non-human materiality, including bacteria, minerals, air, rivers etc. – ultimately, anything that contributes to our own settlements.19 The architecture of walking offers reflection in open-ended ways: its study opens up the possibility to review existing situations to learn from a city and its practices, rather than imposing preconceived notions of what a city should be. It offers an alternative knowledge of the city, to be shared and performed by many. It bears the promise of a grounded, sensitive and democratic production of space that was always there as a fundamental practice, but that can be rediscovered, preserved and refined by future urban and architectural practices.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Careri 2002. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris the capital of the nineteen century’, in Benjamin 2002. Baudelaire 2010, p. 12. Breton’s Mad Love is only one of the best-known examples of such creations. Guy Debord (1955) Introduction to a critique of urban geography, in Les Lèvres Nues, vol. 6. Ivan Chtcheglov (alias Gilles Ivain), Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau (1953), reprinted in (1958) Internationale Situationniste [Situationist International], vol. 1. Available online at: www.cddc.vt.edu/ sionline/si/definitions.html (accessed 15 June 2013). Unsigned, ‘Definitions’, in (1958) Internationale Situationniste [Situationist International], vol. 1. Available at: www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html (accessed 15 June 2013). Armando A. Alberts and Har Oudejans Constant (1959) First proclamation of the Dutch Section of IS, in Internationale Situationniste, vol. 3. De Certeau 1984, p. 109. Ibid. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 102. Shepard and Hayduk 2002. cf. Stalker manifesto. Available at: http://digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/manifesto/ manifesting.htm (accessed 9 June 2013). The ‘actual’, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is not what it is (the present) and not what it will be (the virtual), but what it is going to be, what it is in the process of becoming. See Deleuze and Guattari 2004. Stalker manifesto. Park Products is a project by Kathrin Böhm and Andreas Lang from public works, commissioned by Sally Tallant for the Serpentine Gallery, London 2003–4. Every year in November, thousands of sheep cross Madrid during one day, on their way to the South. The event is called Fiesta de la Transhumancia (Transhumance Festival) and is sort of homage to the farming community and the migration of livestock. The migration of livestock to the South has happened for centuries – the weather is warmer in the winter, and farmers move their livestock from

120 Doina Petrescu

the cooler mountainous regions, which soon become covered with snow. The warmer weather of the South allows the livestock to feed on grass during the winter. Until the seventeenth century, there were 5 million sheep crossing the pensinsula twice a year; now, there are only 1 million. 19 These ideas are supported by currents of post-humanist humanities, with representative thinkers such as Val Plumwood from the ecological humanities, or Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and other thinkers on the technology of nature.

2.4 SOUNDSCAPE AND MOVEMENT Jian Kang

This chapter investigates the role of acoustics in shaping the experience of movement in buildings and landscapes. Two case studies, one outdoor space and one indoor space, are used to explore the ways in which sound provides a full and nuanced understanding of one’s environment. The experience of threshold, often articulated in architecture and landscape with material and spatial transitions, is also experienced in large part through changes in reverberation time and levels of ambient noise. Changes in the surrounding materials can transform the sound of one’s own footsteps, and moving through a threshold can suddenly introduce ambient sounds that transform one’s perception of a place. Drawing on extensive research in the quantitative description of soundscapes, the author presents current acoustical research in terms of our understanding of the ways that sound shapes the experience of movement.

Factors shaping our sound experience: sound, space and listener Our sound experience is affected by various characteristics of sound sources. The overall sound level is certainly a critical factor. It is also important to consider the characteristics of the sound spectrum. For example, noise annoyance could be increased with more tonal components. Moreover, with a given energy summation, noise annoyance may increase with a larger amplitude fluctuation or emergence of occasional events. Other factors that affect noise annoyance include regularity of events, maximum sound level, rise time, duration of occasional events, spectral distribution of energy, and number and duration of quiet periods. The movements of a sound source, or listener, can change the relative positions of source and receiver, changing all the above factors correspondingly, which, in turn, will change our sound experience. Sounds that are far away, close up or moving in juxtaposition to a listener may provide different information and thus affect the experience. It has been shown that psychoacoustic qualities differ between stable and passing sounds. In addition to sound-source characteristics, the acoustic effects of a space are also vital for our sound experience. When sound impinges on a boundary, it may be absorbed partly or totally, or be reflected in one direction or another, and so various sound fields can be formed.

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Reverberation time, the time for a relatively loud sound to become inaudible in a space, is an important index for the acoustic environment in indoor as well as outdoor spaces, such as streets and squares. It has been demonstrated that, with a constant sound level, noise annoyance is greater with a longer reverberation. On the other hand, a suitable reverberation time, say 1–2 seconds, can make street music more enjoyable. Whereas, in a regularly shaped, fairly reflective enclosure, the sound field may be relatively even, both sound level and reverberation being consistent across the space, there are spaces offering significant changes in sound level and reverberation, so that, when the listener moves, he or she enjoys a varied sound experience. Compared with visual space, aural space is more spherical and all surrounding, with less feeling of boundaries, and it tends to emphasise the space itself, rather than the objects in the space. Sound provides dynamism, helping people to get a sense of the progression of time and the scale of space and encouraging involvement. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that correlations between sound evaluation and acoustic factors are often not high, whereas non-acoustic factors relating to listeners play a major role. According to Guski, the noise annoyance to inhabitants depends only on approximately 33 per cent of acoustic parameters such as acoustic energy, number of sound events and length of moments of calm between intermittent noises.1 It is important to consider the sound sensitivity of individuals, as well as the meaning of sounds for them. Moreira and Bryan suggested that those with high noise susceptibility might be persons who show interest in and have sympathy with others, have a great awareness of their environment and are intelligent and creative.2 The perception of noise significantly depends on attitude, including fear, cause of noise, sensitivity to noise, activity, perception of the neighbourhood and the global perception of the environment. The effects of various social and demographic factors are also of great importance. For example, the assessment of the sound quality of an urban area depends on how long people have been living there, how they define the area and how much they have been involved in local social life. Expectation is another issue in sound evaluation. In fact, noise regulations are based on an assumption that people expect a different noise environment depending on the quality of the place. Behaviour and habits are important too, including, for example, the opening and closing of windows and the use of balconies or gardens. Season and the time of day may also influence sound evaluation. It has been reported that noise annoyance is greater in summer than in winter, and greater in the evening and at twilight. The idea and experience of an environment are historically conditioned refractions of cultural life. If there were no traffic noise, the soundscape in cities might be filled with church bells, from every direction, day and night. All those factors are related to movement, in terms of time, place and community, for example. On the other hand, people’s attitude could be affected by sounds. For example, it appears that loud noise reduces helping behaviour and induces a lack of sensitivity to others.3

Soundscape on the move: Sheffield Gold Route For centuries, the development of Sheffield was shaped by waterways. In the recent citycentre regeneration, starting in the 1990s, great efforts were made to ensure that the reconnection with the rivers continued to be fostered, and their role in the history of the city celebrated. Waterscapes and squares were embedded into the city for their vibrancy with respect to the history of Sheffield. Along the Gold Route, as shown in Figure 2.4.1a, a diversity of waterscapes was developed. A series of field questionnaire surveys in selected locations

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FIGURE 2.4.1A

The Gold Route in Sheffield, showing the waterscape and the city: (1) Sheaf Square, (2) Howard Street and Hallam Garden, (3) Millennium Galleries and Winter Garden, (4) Millennium Square, (5) Peace Gardens, (6) Town Hall Square and Surrey Street, (7) Barkers Pool Gold Route are shown in Figure 2.4.1b.4

Source: Jian Kang

FIGURE 2.4.1B

Source: Jian Kang

Changes in waterscape sound levels with frequency and time at different locations of the Gold Route, measured at 1 m from each water feature

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showed that water sounds are the most preferred sounds in the soundscape.5 Correspondingly, the changes of waterscape sound levels with frequency and time at different locations of the Sheaf Square provides interesting and enjoyable soundscapes. There are a number of water features, and the measurements show that they vary considerably in terms of spectrum and dynamic process. It is interesting to note that the steel barrier efficiently reduces noise from the busy road, as well as generating pleasant water sounds. It is a successful soundscape element, creating an interesting sense of movement in terms of sound source and space. The water features at Howard Street have relatively large dynamic ranges, and the spectra are also rather different from other water features along the Gold Route. Together with the visual effects, the water features greatly enhance the richness and diversity of the waterscapes and soundscapes along the Gold Route. Although the sound of water features is normally pleasant, helping to distract people’s attention from unwanted sounds such as traffic, silent water features in the Millennium Square, with their significant visual effect, can play a similar role. Because of the low sound level, people often turn their attention to such water features, even from a distance, as they move forward trying to hear the sound. Their attention is attracted, producing an effective attention masking. At Peace Gardens, there are two main sound sources, the fountain in the middle of the square and a road with traffic on one side. The transformation of soundscape is demonstrated in Figure 2.4.2a, with a soundscape map showing sound pressure level and overlapping sound fields from different sources. With the movement of a listener, the soundscape changes can be perceived in terms of sound level as well as sound meaning. To further analyse soundscape maps, a comparison of spectra is given in Figure 2.4.2b, with the measurement made close to the sound sources. It can be seen that there are considerable differences between the spectra, and, when moving across the square, a listener can experience a rich soundscape, changing gradually from a water spectrum to a traffic spectrum, for example. The perception of the soundscape is more complicated than just level and spectrum, for the first noticed sound may not be the loudest one; rather, it would be the water sound as a soundmark, based on a largescale questionnaire survey in the square.6 Schafer (1977) defined sounds as keynotes,

Town Hall

/TownyHall Extension

Shops

(D em olished) Sound Level dB(A) 155.0 160.0

>Shopa

165.0

FIGURE 2.4.2A

170.0

Change of soundscape in the Peace Gardens

175.0 0

10

20

30

40

50m

180.0

Source: Jian Kang

Soundscape and movement 125 80 75 70

SPL (dB)

65 60 55 50 45 Urban traffic Fountain in the Peace Gardens Peace Gardens General

40 35 30 16

31

63

125

250

500

1k

2k

4k

8k

16k

Frequency (hz)

FIGURE 2.4.2B

Spectrum comparison between different sounds in the soundscape of the Peace Gardens

Source: Jian Kang

foreground sounds and soundmarks.7 Keynotes are in analogy to music, where a keynote identifies the fundamental tonality of a composition, around which the music modulates. Foreground sounds, also termed sound signals, are intended to attract attention. Sounds that are particularly regarded by a community and its visitors are called soundmarks, in analogy to landmarks. The soundscape at Barkers Pool is also rich, and, interestingly, the water feature has distinguishable low-frequency components, as can be seen in Figure 2.4.1b. It is interesting to examine the change in soundscape when moving away from the water feature, as shown in Figure 2.4.3, in terms of spectrum and dynamic sound-level changes with time. The richness of soundscape within a relatively short distance can be clearly seen, which gives considerable scope for soundscape design.

1 m from source

Am from source

9 m from source

19 m from source

FIGURE 2.4.3

Change of soundscape when moving away from the water feature in Barkers Pool

Source: Jian Kang

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Indoor soundscape: long enclosures A common indoor space type that is closely related to movement is the long enclosure, where one dimension is very long, and the other two are relatively short. Such spaces include, not only underground shopping streets and subway stations, but also corridors and concourses in public spaces. In long enclosures, it has been shown that reverberation time generally increases with increasing source–receiver distance, which is fundamentally different from that based on classic formulae, which attribute a single value to the whole space. In terms of sound distribution, fundamental differences between a classic sound field and the sound field in long enclosures have also been demonstrated. That is, instead of becoming stable beyond the reverberation radius, the sound level in long enclosures decreases continuously along the length. Another influencing factor concerns the boundary conditions. For example, between sound fields resulting from geometrical and diffuse boundaries, there are considerable differences. In the case of multiple sources, it has been demonstrated that the reverberation is dependent on the number and position of the sources.8 Those basic acoustic features, in terms of changes in reverberation and sound level, can greatly enhance the sense of movement when a listener is moving through such spaces. The richness and variation in soundscape are further enhanced by the presentation of various kinds of sound source. A large-scale questionnaire survey was carried out in two typical underground shopping streets in Harbin City, China, namely Jin-Jie and Hong-Bo. Figure 2.4.4 shows the first sounds noticed by interviewees. It can be seen that there are considerable differences between the two sites. For example, in Jin-Jie, the most noticeable sound was ‘speech from PA systems’ (31.4 per cent), whereas, in Hong-Bo, the most noticeable sound was ‘speech between customers’ (46.9 per cent). The differences might have 50 45 40

Jin-Jie Hong-Bo

35 %

30 25 20 15 10 5

Air-conditioning

Sewing machines

Jin-Jie Escalators

Television

Music from shops

Speech from PA system

Music from PA system

Sounds from plastic bags

Footsteps

Arguments

Sounds from putting goods in order

Loud shouting

Shopkeepers’ selling-shouting

Bargaining (customers and shopkeepers)

Speech between customers

0

Type of sound

FIGURE 2.4.4

Most noticeable sounds in the two underground shopping streets

Source: Jian Kang

Soundscape and movement 127 TABLE 2.4.1 Evaluation (%) of the acoustic environment and echoing in the two underground

shopping streets Scale

–2: very quiet –1: quiet 0: neither quiet nor noisy 1: noisy 2: very noisy

Subjective loudness Jin-Jie

Hong-Bo

0.0 7.6 33.3

0.0 11.1 30.1

47.0 12.1

51.4 6.9

Scale

–2: very strong –1: strong 0: neither strong nor weak 1: weak 2: very weak

Echoing Jin-Jie

Hong-Bo

4.5 13.6 34.8

2.8 13.9 30.6

31.8 15.2

38.9 13.9

been caused by variations in sound sources and/or in the profiles of interviewees who were paying more attention to particular sounds, but it could also be caused by the effects of sound fields on the propagation of different sources. It is, therefore, important to design the sound fields in terms of sound attenuation along the length, considering the spectrum change due to boundary absorption and diffusion at different frequencies. In other words, improvements in soundscape could be made by better balancing different sound sources in terms of their levels and spectra, and this could be different on a route of movement. It also proved useful to examine the evaluation of soundscape and sound preference in underground shopping streets. Table 2.4.1 shows the evaluation of the general acoustic environment in the two underground shopping streets cited above. Both sites were rated by about 60 per cent of the interviewees as ‘noisy’ or ‘very noisy’. This means that, in such spaces, noise control is still an important issue, for which it is essential to consider the special acoustic features of long enclosures. In Table 2.4.1, the evaluation of echoing is also shown. Fewer than 20 per cent of the interviewees selected ‘strong’ or ‘very strong’, suggesting that, generally speaking, such spaces are not reverberant, and the control of reverberation may not be the top priority in designing the soundscapes.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

R. Guski (1998) Psychological determinants of train noise annoyance, Proceedings of Euro-Noise, Munich, Germany, vol.1, pp. 573–6. Naomi Moreira and M. Bryan (1972) Noise annoyance susceptibility, Journal of Sound and Vibration, vol. 21, pp. 449–62. Gifford 1996; Richard A. Page (1997) Noise and helping behavior, Environment and Behavior, vol. 9, pp. 311–34. Jian Kang (2012) On the diversity of urban waterscape, Proceedings of the Acoustics, Joint meeting of the French Acoustical Society and UK Institute of Acoustics, Nantes, France. Wei Yang and Jian Kang (2005) Soundscape and sound preferences in urban squares, Journal of Urban Design, vol. 10, pp. 69–88. Wei Yang and Jian Kang (2005) Soundscape and sound preferences in urban squares, Journal of Urban Design, vol. 10, pp. 69–88. Schafer 1977, 1994. Kang 2002.

2.5 FROM FOOT TO VEHICLE Peter Blundell Jones

Walking, throughout our history, has been the way to couple the short distances traversed daily at home with longer ones to other places. It is the most basic and natural way of measuring out the ground, and it is hardly surprising that our inherited measures begin with feet and yards (paces) and then jump to miles to make a day’s walk countable: long distances can also be measured in days. Our walking feet register the changing textures of the ground, and covering it step by step informs us of the effort and distance, as well as employing our senses of smell, sight and hearing in the manner for which they evolved. Rain and wind are felt directly, and the sun and stars provide a guide of direction to complement the unfolding of the landscape. We encounter along the way the plants and animals and other people with whom we share our world. Before modern transport, walking was the principal means of getting around, and people thought nothing of covering substantial distances on foot for purposes of daily life. In Lark Rise to Candleford, for example, Flora Thompson writes of children walking 3 miles to school,1 and, in Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, one of his informants reports 4 miles, and a woman walked 20 miles to market once a week, and even 4 miles to a spring for water during periods of drought.2 That was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Walking was also a way of crossing countries and even continents. In As I Set Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee describes breaking out of the narrow routine of rural life in Slad at the age of 19, in 1934: I was going to London, which lay a hundred miles to the east; and it seemed obvious that I should go on foot. But first, as I’d never seen the sea, I thought I’d walk to the coast and find it. This would add another hundred miles to my journey, going by way of Southampton. But I had all the summer and all the time to spend.3 Lee could have taken a bus and then a train, but that would have been expensive, and, at that time of few cars and no motorways, it was still possible to trudge from village to village, finding nourishment and conversation along the way. The land, still farmed by hand, was full of workers who walked about, and so there were tracks or footpaths everywhere. In contrast, walking across the country today is beset with obstacles, the landscape dominated

From foot to vehicle 129

by roads crammed with speeding traffic and no sidepath to retreat to, and pedestrians are banned altogether from motorways and railway lines, with few points at which to cross. Repeating Lee’s walk would need careful planning to avoid such obstructions and to enjoy the few rural bridleways that still exist, open for leisure, without constituting a reliable network. In 1974, the film director Werner Herzog decided to walk from Munich to Paris, because his heroine, the film critic and expert on Expressionist film, Lotte Eisner, lay dangerously ill. He undertook this journey as an act of personal pilgrimage that he believed would save her life. He kept a diary, later published as Vom Gehen im Eis, describing his experiences along the way, interrupted by strange encounters, and ironically remarking, ‘Only if it was a film would I take it all as true’.4 The author of Aguirre the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and several documentaries about determined and eccentric people has always been interested in the wild and in human beings struggling against nature, but his walk across modern Europe revealed not just a battle against the winter elements. It was a section taken through a discordant and ruptured landscape, a secret landscape no longer intended to be seen by anyone. This has some parallels with the work of the architect–filmmaker Patrick Keiller (see pp. 244–50), whose Robinson in Space, a modern homage to Daniel Defoe, traverses the British landscape to assemble an unlikely juxtaposition of places and functions that remind us how much of an illusion is the cosy image of old-world Britain that we think we know.5

Orientation and memory Herzog started by picking his way across the land guided by a compass, though he was soon compelled to take detours. We all have to know where we are going, as it is dangerous to get lost, especially if lacking food and water. The modern world’s ubiquitous paths and signposts are recent, as is even the subdivision of the landscape into fields and woods. Ten thousand years ago, we were hunter-gatherers, without roads, fields or footpaths, apart from tracks trodden clear by frequent human or animal use. The Australian Aborigines provide an example of such an existence. They survived, before European intervention, in a relatively barren landscape at very low densities, and yet maintained contacts over vast distances through marriage customs that compelled distant alliances and mutual respect. They were able to navigate right across their continent by relying on a socially constructed interpretation of the landscape that was mapped in symbol and performance. It was learned at initiation by the ‘walkabout’, a season-long tour on foot, visiting distant groups.6 The Aborigines’ reading of the landscape identified hills or waterholes as having been formed by ‘Dreamtime’ heroes, giant animals from whom they thought themselves descended, and whom they revered in holy cults. Their mythology, passed down in song, dance and drama, efficiently tied knowledge of plants and animals to their reading of the landscape and landmarks. It was, therefore, both a practical knowledge, concerning hunting, rivals and predators, and a way to map a kind of terrain that would appear to us wild and chaotic. Their uncanny ability to read tracks, to sense direction and to recognise the personal footprints of every tribe member provoked in some European observers the claim that they had ‘a sixth sense’, but it is surely enough to recognise a highly developed, but now unfamiliar, skill. Over the hundreds of thousands of years that modern humans have existed, they have mostly been hunters and gatherers, evolving presumably with this kind of skill to understand and interact with the landscape.7 Knowing where we are is a skill we take so much for granted that it is only when it is lost through brain disorders, or when we travel to very unfamiliar places, or when we try to

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design robots to do it, that we see it as a problem. Yet many of us can fly off to a foreign city, walk the streets for an hour or two and find our way back to our hotel, even without a map. It is more difficult when the cityscape is repetitive, but we are able to pick out representative landmarks and to remember them as a hierarchy and in sequence. London cab drivers are trained to recall an extraordinarily large number of streets, and the brain area involved in such memories expands in consequence.8 A telling feature of spatial memory is that it is used by memory-feat competitors, who set in their minds an image of a remembered building or landscape, and then imagine placing the items to be remembered in its rooms or along its paths, so classifying them in a retrievable way.9 In a similar manner, Marcel Proust, when retrieving his childhood in his famous novel about memory, A la recherche du temps perdu, structured it around a pair of family walks. The title of the first section, Du côté de chez Swann, is usually translated Swann’s Way, but this hardly reveals that it was a walk, and furthermore one of two alternatives: There were, in the environs of Combray, two ‘ways’ which we used to take for our walks, and they were so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also ‘Swann’s way’ because to get there one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann’s estate, and the ‘Guermantes way’ . . . Since my father used always to speak of the ‘Méséglise way’ as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the ‘Guermantes way’ as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belong only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them seemed to me a precious thing exemplifying the special excellence of the whole, while beside them, before one had reached the sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material paths amid which they were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal river landscape, were no more worth the trouble of looking at than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets that run past the walls of a theatre. But above all I set between them, far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind that not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them on different planes.10 Proust’s walks were contemplative walks, regularly taken, sometimes with other family members, sometimes alone, but returning generally within a few hours to their starting point. Accounts of such walks taken for recreation go back at least to classical times, and the idea that walking helps thought as a complement to philosophy was well established among the ancient Greeks, reflected in the very names of the Peripatetics and the Stoics, and even connected with the origins of theory in theoria, ‘a form of travel that was a cross between tourism and pilgrimage’.11 Heine claimed that Kant’s walks were so regular that people could set their watches by him, and Nietzsche castigated Flaubert for sitting at his desk, claiming that, ‘only peripatetic thoughts have any value’.12 Whether it is the exercise or rhythm of the walking that stimulates the brain, or whether the walk helps by charting a narrative parallel to the progress of thought, walking does seem to have had a widespread reputation as an accompaniment to thinking, good conversation and solving problems.

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Travel in vehicles If philosophers ever solved problems on horseback, they have been remarkably silent about it, and the remark of Chinese politician Lu Jia that one can conquer a country on horseback but not rule it from a horse just confirms the contradiction between the active and the contemplative life.13 Concentrated thinking on horseback seems unlikely, as the landscape passes so much faster than on foot, and so much more attention has to be paid to keeping one’s balance and controlling the animal, let alone finding the way and looking for obstacles. Conversation also is more difficult. Being on or in a vehicle progressively removes sense impressions of walking at one’s own speed, cutting off the feedback of the haptic sense of movement and then isolating smell and sound and proximity, but it can at least open a changing view and allow a passenger ease and relaxation. So, vehicles do not necessarily negate the experience of travel: they may even accentuate the sense of progress and the presence of landmarks. Litters and sedan chairs have existed for millennia, and upper-class Chinese houses had special courts and halls for visitors to descend from them.14 Haussmann’s Paris boulevards, smashing through the medieval city fabric, improved policing and communications as intended, but they also made space for the horse-drawn carriage, and for a city thereafter best perceived from the carriage window at the carriage’s pace, a city that simultaneously became larger and more boring to traverse on foot.15 In Britain, the nineteenth-century country house, into which so much imperial wealth was sunk, had lodges to mark the edge of its territory, and the drive to the house was not kept short for ease of pedestrians, but lengthened to increase the impression of the estate seen from a horse-drawn carriage and to allow the unfolding of carefully contrived views. Despite the importance given to his walks, even Proust was not averse to a ride. Having noted the presence of church steeples in the course of his regular walks around Combray, he sees them in an entirely new way when caught out late and given an unexpected lift by the local doctor, in his pony and trap: At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure which was unlike any other, on catching sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, bathed in the setting sun and constantly changing their position with the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road, and then of a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, appeared nonetheless to be standing by their side. In noticing and registering the shape of their spires, their shifting lines, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not penetrating to the core of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal. The steeples appeared so distant, and we seemed to be getting so little nearer them, that I was astonished when, a few minutes later, we drew up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for the pleasure I had felt on seeing them upon the horizon, and the business of trying to discover that reason seemed to me irksome; I wanted to store away in my mind those shifting, sunlit planes, and for the time being to think of them no more. And it is probable that, had I done so, those two steeples would have gone to join the medley of trees and roofs and scents and sounds I had noticed and set apart because of the obscure pleasure they had given me which I had never fully explored.16 The text runs on, and Proust reflects further on the impression, adding a glimpse of the steeples, black against the sky, as he and the doctor begin their return journey. Then, he describes

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how he felt impelled to write of his experience and includes the resulting text on the next page. Sitting up on the driving seat of the trap, beside the doctor, he had a full and constant view forward, without having to keep an eye on the ground and without the interruptions of the bobbing of his head: furthermore, he was higher up for a better view, and the vehicle brought them forward at surprising and unaccustomed speed. That a full ‘Proustian moment’ could arise out of a view from a vehicle reveals the experience as by no means devalued in relation to walking, despite lack of contact with the ground and lack of control of movement. In fact, being conveyed rather than conveying oneself can free the self for a different kind of contemplation. Railway trains linked cities and changed the scale of continents, and also the understanding of time. They allowed hitherto unseen views of the countryside, but they had to stay on their rails, dividing the landscape with a new kind of visual corridor. Even so, the experience could be pleasantly contemplative, even allowing enjoyment of the very detachment it brought. Philip Larkin wrote one of his most famous poems, ‘Whitsun weddings’, about a view from a railway carriage,17 and journeys by rail have often carried a degree of romantic excitement. It is not for nothing that the architect Hugo Häring, writing in the 1920s on the functions of windows, referred to a specialised viewing window for a house as a Pullmanwagenfenster.18 Even though trains have become faster, better insulated and air conditioned, restricting experience to the visual alone, and even though high-speed lines are routed less for view than for straightness and speed, the changing panorama remains impressive. In contrast, underground trains in cities, blind as moles, have reinvented the city as a series of locations that grow out from the places of emergence, so that it becomes a pleasant surprise to discover on foot the point of transition between one station’s territory and the next, reassembling in one’s mind the space of the city. Like ascent in a lift, though, the real distance travelled by tube is difficult to gauge. The advent of the motor car brought a wonderful freedom to choose one’s own path through the city and enjoy it at speed in one’s own time, until too many others started to do the same. It also allowed free touring in the open country, enjoying villages and views, stopping and moving on at will. The term Gran Turismo, shortened to GT, was applied to elegant and powerful cars with which to fulfil this fantasy of mobility and exploration, in desperation recently extended by taking to 4  4s across moor and field.19 For normal roads have become clogged, ordinary driving a bore. Driving is even a risk, for a car requires constant attention to the road ahead and coordination of the controls, and it is dangerous to attempt a phone call, let alone to indulge in contemplation or a reverie.20 The view of the landscape has also deteriorated, for traffic jams prompted the invention of bypasses and ring roads, breaking up the ancient route from town to town. Instead, towns were altogether avoided, to let motorways link cities at headlong speed. They were a wonder for a few decades, but gradually the whole landscape has become knotted up with them, and the old road networks have been broken up and abolished. The direction one takes, heading west to go east or north to go south, is no longer related to the points of the compass, the sun or what we can see and recognise. Just in time, satellite navigation has arrived, so that we need no longer worry about how to get there or what kind of country we pass through on the way, but will it worry us not to know, in the old way, where we are? Within the city, traffic planning caused the divorce of commerce from communication, breaking the relationship that had been the very essence of the city, although, in large cities, pedestrianisation has revalidated progress on foot, while exacerbating problems of parking

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and servicing. The walked city is often now a special enclave of historic fabric, commerce and entertainment, but it has also been artificially reinvented in the form of the shopping mall, a substitute that lacks its uncommercial elements. Pedestrianisation preserves the walker’s rights, but it poses an urgent problem of how and where to rejoin the car, for roads and walkers do not mix, and, where cars arrive, they must be parked, which usually means a desert of tarmac and a lack of clear pedestrian routes, because people have to park in so many different places. Seldom have city parking silos been anything other than bleak storage racks, often portrayed as places of crime, and leaving the architect the problem of making a façade where there is nothing to reveal. As in the train, exciting views can be perceived from aircraft, but people are increasingly less interested in looking out of the windows than at the movie screen now universally provided to ‘entertain’ them. It must be admitted too, that, although the large-scale topography can be breathtaking, making out what is happening on the ground from 35,000 feet while travelling at 500 miles an hour gives only the slimmest degree of contact. Transition into and out of vehicles has never been so protracted as with air travel. Railway stations were the nineteenthcentury gates to big cities, but airports lie far outside, becoming the most universal, international kinds of place, and generating some of the largest buildings on earth. They are driven largely by the exigencies of getting you to the distant aircraft, while processing you through security checks and segregating you from unprocessed others, and there has been no easy option but to cover substantial distances on foot. Yet this is not usually a pleasant or an enlightening experience. It seems to lack Proustian moments, and its atmosphere is too urgent for contemplation. Jacques Tati, in his satirical film Playtime, chose it 40 years ago to represent the worst and most confusing aspects of modern life, and Marc Augé has singled it out as a key example of a ‘non-place’,21 and yet airports have become substitutes for the capitals they serve and are rapidly turning into cities in their own right. Let us hope they can yet develop some more convincing delights.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Thompson 1954, p. 184. All these distances include both directions, there and back. Blythe 1972, pp. 36, 50. Lee 1971, p. 12. Herzog 2009 (original German edition 1978) There is also a book: Keiller 1999. Spencer and Gillen 1899. Chatwin 1986. Opinions vary, as evidence is thin, but the consensus is that we had language at least 100,000 years ago, before we dispersed across the globe, that the brain had reached more or less its current size by 500,000 years ago, and that we used fire for processing food from about 800,000 years ago. On genes, languages and migrations, see Cavalli-Sforza 2001. See: www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=london-taxi-memory (accessed 3 February 2013). Draaisma 2004, Ch. 7. Proust 1983, pp. 146–7. O’Sullivan 2011, p. 98. Ibid., p. 4. Minister in the Han Dynasty, around 200 BCE; see: www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Han/ personslujia.html (accessed 14 August 2014). For description of an arrival by sedan, see Xueqin 1973, pp. 87, 88. Girouard 1985. Proust, pp. 196–7. Larkin 1964.

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18 Blundell Jones 1999, p. 79. 19 An early 2013 edition of the notorious BBC television programme Top Gear took the new Range Rover, price £72,000, to the Nedava Desert to test it against a military vehicle, the presenters admitting that the 5.5-litre engine was ‘a bit thirsty’, and they drove through a swamp apparently without first checking the depth. Meanwhile, in the Peak National Park in the UK, local residents are trying to stop off-roaders because of the disturbance they cause and the damage that their fun causes to the landscape. 20 In his book Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt provides a whole chapter on driving psychology: ‘How our eyes and minds betray us on the road’, Vanderbilt 2008, pp. 74–101. 21 Augé 1995.

2.6 MOVING ROUND THE RING ROAD Stephen Walker

Filmstrips Photographs of the Sheffield ring road taken by the author in 2011

Downwards we hurried fast, And entered with the road which we had missed Into a narrow chasm. The brook and road Were fellow travellers in this gloomy pass, And with them did we journey several hours At a slow step. (Wordsworth 1805, p. 240)

Two hundred years after Wordsworth, we can continue to hurry fast at slow step, and to enter the road that we had missed, as we try to approach, circumnavigate, bypass or leave the city. I want to explore the extent of this continuity, broadening the ways in which the ring road might figure both as a site of actual experience and as one within thought. Although it is usually understood as the product of rationalised planning, the ring road can also be regarded as an instance and a site where rationality is exceeded. I approach it both as a site of sublime experience and as a figure for that experience, drawing on its ambivalent location between city and country, between artefact and nature. Its ability to be traversed in several directions simultaneously can cause theoretical as well as physical discomfort. In common with the sublime nature of Wordsworth’s time, it can elude our perceptual and imaginative grasp, while providing exhilarating transport. This sublime ‘failure’ can be observed anecdotally in real(?) experience on the road, but also in the movement of various attempts by disparate disciplines to pin it down with theory.

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Modes of transport (‘1. Take or carry goods or people; 2. Overwhelm with strong emotion; 3. Cause someone to feel that they are in another place or time’, OED) From its earliest record in fragments such as On the Sublime, a Greek treatise probably written in the first century AD,1 interest in the sublime has long been associated with its ability to transport us, rather than to persuade us rationally. Indeed, the modality of transport has proved to be a particularly enigmatic aspect of sublime experience. Peter de Bolla argues that, not only are the sources of movement many and various, but the transportation that these set in train involves discontinuous movement between states of mind and proves difficult to anticipate or contain: ‘The rhetorical force of “transport”’, he writes, ‘is not confined to the arts of oratory and persuasion; “transport” as a trope not only stands for the heightened sensation of the sublime, it also produces sublimity’.2 The consequences of this irrational and productive transportation have frequently been too frightening to accept, and discussion has been forcibly returned to ‘proper’ objects.3 The possible similarities between the transport available through the sublime and that experienced on the ring road can be approached through a consideration of their spatial and cultural dimensions. Both enjoy a certain slipperiness of spatial location and complexity of cultural claims; sublime transport in both cases can involve a tendency towards excessive production; and both have been subject to attempts by authority to cover over this excess. de Bolla suggests that much eighteenth-century aesthetics can be considered an attempt to bound or limit the power of this sublime trope. Theories of the sublime had to deal with ‘the problem of locating an authority or authenticating discourse . . . Such a discourse’, he states, ‘would need to control the transport resulting from the sublime experience, and to determine the limits of the transportation, from where and to where, with whom and by whom’.4 In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant asserts that this experience could be delimited – or unified, to use his own terms – when each person, through the exercise of will, puts their own disposition to one side to ‘take a standpoint outside of himself in thought, in order to judge the propriety of his behaviour in the eyes of the onlooker’.5 This movement outside oneself to provide a viewpoint for judgement is a particularly important mode of transport. The tacit assumption is that propriety needs to be measured against previously established rules; the correct viewpoint for judgement is attained by assuming the viewpoint of the ‘creator’. Henri Lefebvre is critical of the ‘lucidity’ predicated on these assumptions, a situation he explicitly links to the planners and urbanists who ‘create’ the ring road: The fact of viewing from afar, of contemplating what has been torn apart, of arranging ‘viewpoints’ and ‘perspectives’, can (in the most favourable cases) change the effects of

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a strategy into aesthetic objects . . . All of this corresponds only too well to that urbanism of maquettes and overall plans which is the perfect complement to the planning of sewers and public works: the creator’s gaze lights at will and to his heart’s content on ‘volumes’; but this is a fake lucidity.6 Although the arguments used to push through the construction of ring roads are usually made on highly rationalised grounds and according to the logic of a systematising thought, I would suggest that they also provide an instance where the experience of our designed environment opens up to a different reading. Just as eighteenth-century writers on the sublime failed to agree on whether the experience was universal, culturally particular or individual, so contemporary interest in the ring road produces a spread of irreconcilable approaches. Generally, ring roads are without clear definition (unlike motorways, whose requirements are clear in legal terms) and they are awkward to classify. The exemplars would be the orbital motorways, beltways, périphériques or via cintura that can be found around some of the world’s great cities, though many smaller towns are similarly ringed. Although the ring road is not a motorway (designed for high capacity and high speed), it does not provide for frontage access, pedestrians or stopping. This awkwardness about the ring road’s definition is shared by a variety of interested parties, from those involved in their planning through to those minded to analyse how they are used after construction, and again revolves around the issue of judgement. In a discussion of how the engineer establishes criteria for judgement, for example, Gavin Macpherson observes how difficult a task it proves to be: ‘One of the problems faced by the highway engineer is that his creation will normally be required to perform a number of different, sometimes conflicting, functions’.7 A related difficulty of definition is raised by the UK Department of Transport’s criteria for highway link geometry, according to which the ring road would be classified as ‘rural’ rather than ‘urban’.

On the ring road As I’ve tried to suggest, experience of and theories regarding the sublime failed to coincide as comfortably as their theorists might have liked: the right road sought by Burke et al. proved harder to journey along than they would care to admit. It is around this uneasy coincidence that the analogy between sublime objects and the ring road can be pursued. Physically and psychologically, the location of the ring road has frequently been taken as a limit: limit of the city, limit of nature. However, this boundary need be neither complete nor physically peripheral. Though the ring road might be considered a site mediating between city and nature, it can be various things to various people. It allows them (us) to approach,

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circumnavigate, queue, cruise, bypass, reclaim or leave the city. Just as it provides an easy figure for this boundary, it is hard to locate, in a full sense of the term. Despite the various guides offered to aesthetic reflection, the sublime moment always signalled an occasion when reason and understanding were exceeded. Owing to this limitlessness – which might apply to the sheer magnitude of the sublime object, or the ambiguous location of the ring road, being neither whole nor fragment, neither in nor out of the city – it is not possible to identify an object per se that provokes the sublime experience. Nevertheless, in order for our understanding to grasp or determine the experience, it needs to bound or limit that experience in some way. It needs to be objectified, turned into or provided with a sublime object: reason demands it. Limitlessness has been dealt with in various ways, by various theorists. Most feared it. Few asked much of it on its own terms, or sought to explore what might lie beyond. Some dealt with it by developing strategies to bound it: For Kant, there was no sublime object as such, yet, paradoxically, the sublime experience depended upon the provision of some objectivity to move it beyond the ‘mere’ fright provoked by limitlessness. His solution to this theoretical problem was to offer up a ‘super-added thought of its totality’8 – an objectivity on loan to subjective experience – which could allow judgement to step outside and thus complete the experience. On the ring road, one might again observe that there is a requirement for a super-added thought of its totality to make sense of the journey; what is the ring road but a succession of nodes of decision making (turn off, don’t turn off) interspersed with periods of removed transportation, periods of distraction, where the surroundings rarely give anything to the journey by way of features (or indeed distraction) that can sufficiently bound experience to permit judgement? To counter this experience of limitlessness, the ring road frequently offers information from beyond its present, information perhaps to provide orientation, that makes us think we have crossed a boundary, that we have arrived somewhere (Welcome to A . . ., You are now entering B . . ., Twinned with C . . .). These couple with mediations of the thought of totality, thanks to the endless signage that accompanies such a journey; how can we make a judgement based on the experience of simply being there, when what we need are the signs of an objective reality outside or beyond this formless space? In addition to the limitlessness precipitated by the sheer scale and ambiguity of location, the engineering of the ring road’s link geometry undermines another aspect of everyday aesthetic experience, resulting in a need to respond counter-intuitively to demands that we get in the left-hand lane to turn right, head north to go south, and so on. Ring roads are almost by requirement the imposition of a different order of space on the landscape, famously insensitive to ‘place’.

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Off the ring road The sublime operates in conjunction with fear and pain; the spaces of the sublime demand enigma, an advanced decontextualisation to instill the fear that underwrites any sublime experience. It is to the particularities of sublime fear that we must now move. Fear was, for many writers, a central ingredient of sublime experience. The particular nature of this fear was carefully delineated by those seeking to distinguish between the sublime and the beautiful. Sublime fear had to be pleasurable. The ring road offers multiple, simultaneous and possibly conflicting fears. There are fears associated with speed, disorientation, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, GPS navigation, of missing one’s turning, of not seeing it or seeing it too late. Also, perhaps, there is fear of driving, fear of being driven, fear of delay, fear of crashing, fear of others, road rage, fear of engineering. Some fears are associated with the use of the road, whereas others are produced by simply being there – I’m on the ring road and I don’t like it, it makes me scared. Whitlock’s 1971 analysis of fear on the road reports a quasi-sublime fascination in attitudes surrounding road deaths, arguing: ‘Doherty is possibly correct in suggesting that horror fascinates rather than acts as a deterrent to rising road-accident rates.’9 Whether a straightforward fear for one’s own life, on the ring road or in any other situation, would be sufficient as a sublime experience is a moot point. Burke, for example, steered the sublime experience through a middle ground between painless, ‘benevolent’ pleasure (which he linked to feelings of the beautiful) and the simply painful. The sublime pleasure available on this middle ground, he argued, involved feelings of self-preservation, but came with the proviso that these do not ‘press too nearly’.10 Kant, too, qualifies the involvement of fear in his account of the sublime, permitting it ‘only in . . . so far as it does not convey any charm or emotion arising from actual danger’.11 A couple of sections later, Kant is more specific regarding the perception of such danger, arguing that, ‘without the development of moral ideas, that which, thanks to preparatory culture, we call sublime, merely strikes the untutored man as terrifying’.12 Just as the feeling of the sublime was only available to the initiated, so the experience of the ring road is only available to those literate in the ways of road travel; the Highway Code(X) is the letter of this law. Learn the rules of the road and you’ll be OK; you can take your place in that microcosm of society, the community of drivers. Ordinary, physical orientation is no use at these speeds, and familiarity with place provides no guarantee of successful judgement, for such physical referents as personal or communal landmarks do not necessarily relate to the route and may give it an unfamiliar aspect, if they give it anything at all. Speed also mitigates against recognition or comprehension. A different modality of perception is required, for locals as well as strangers. If we are not initiates, we might just get scared. Yet, what happens if we don’t read the book, don’t subscribe to that superadded thought of totality? Are we just left with a scary experience? Such awkwardness might actually point

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to another aspect of sublime experience, available on the ring road and beyond, which reveals another way of using the architecture of our surroundings. It might forcibly reveal the fragmented way in which architecture is consumed; after all, fragments are all we ever get, despite the best intentions of most architects and planners, whose attempts to ‘naturalise’ architecture by unifying it imply a notionally omnipresent view. This fragmented, excessive moment of travel allows us to return, over- or underdetermining the possibilities presented by the road that the planners conceived on uber-utilitarian grounds, to viewing space from afar, conceiving grand schemes for traffic circulation, zoning, high or low occupation density, the green-belt and out-of-town, brownfield and inner-city. Here, the ring road can stand as an exemplar of free movement, not axiality, not Haussmann, not from A to B, not concentricity or annularity, but as a site for and of an inadequate representation that the work of the mind cannot complete. On the road, traffic can exist between memory and fantasy, between use according to the rules (the Highway CodeX) and use not against, but merely without, the rules; this could be a sublime event that the city’s ring road offers. As Virilio observes, ‘to go nowhere . . . now seems natural for the voyeur–voyager in his car’.13 Thanks to its sublime possibilities, the ring road can offer two new experiences: it can be a notional site from which the difference between city and nature continues to be figured, and from which an experience of the sublime might be gained, at least to the extent that this would involve an emotional pleasure brought about by a juxtaposition of forces that can accept oxymoronic components and resist the desire for total comprehension. More importantly, it suggests a broader modality for architectural experience than architects have traditionally been prepared to acknowledge, one that occurs over time, in pieces, involving a mobile relationship between the observer and the observed. All of these experiences, of course, supplement our more straightforward uses of the road. From the depths of an engineering textbook, the following advice on curve geometry seems to offer an appropriate conclusion: ‘A good balance between the demands of horizontal curvature gradient is necessary to achieve economy and aesthetic satisfaction’.14

Notes 1 See Dionysius Longinus, On the Sublime (William Smith, trans.) (1996), in Ashfield and de Bolla 1996. This is reprinted in an abridged version from Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime: Translated from the Greek, with notes and observations, and some account of the life, writings, and character of the author, by William Smith (the second edition, corrected and improved), London, 1743. It is agreed that On the Sublime was written in the first century AD, although Longinus is now believed to have been a Neoplatonic philosopher and rhetorician active during the third century AD. Although the real author is now frequently referred to as Pseudo-Longinus, the majority of texts on the sublime from the eighteenth century onwards attributed On the Sublime to Longinus, a confusion I perpetuate here.

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2 de Bolla 1989, p. 37; italics in original. 3 For example, Kant floats the possibility of an experience where the imagination fails to account for an idea and falls back from this attempt, but nevertheless, ‘in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight’, which he connects with ‘a representation . . . that lets us see its own inadequacy, and consequently its subjective want of finality for our judgement’, but he declines to discuss this situation (‘At present, I am not disposed to deal with the ground of this delight’); Kant 1952 (original 1764), section 26, p. 100. 4 Ibid., p. 37. 5 Kant 1960 (original 1764), p. 75. 6 Lefebvre 1991 (original 1974), p. 318. 7 Macpherson 1993, p. 145. 8 Kant, op. cit., section 23. 9 Whitlock 1971, p. 7. He is citing Terence T. Doherty (1965) Facts versus emotion in traffic safety, Medicine, Science and the Law, p. 5. 10 Burke 1958 (original 1757), Part 1, section XVIII. The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately effect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. (Ibid.)

11 12 13 14

There is similar stuff on pain and terror in Part 4: see, in particular, section VII, ‘exercise necessary for the finer organs’, where Burke states that, ‘delightful horror . . . which as it belongs to selfpreservation is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime. Its highest degree I call astonishment’. Kant, op. cit., section 23. Ibid., section 29. Virilio 1991, p. 67. Baston 1968, p. 71. A little later, the authors seem to steer away from the sublime to more beautiful aspirations, suggesting that, ‘curvature and gradient add considerably to the aesthetic value of a road, and when not used to excessively large values make a positive contribution to safety’ (p. 71).

2.7 THE GEOMETRY OF MOVING BODIES Alan Lewis

The idea that towns and cities should be rebuilt along scientific lines, although widely held by British architects and planners during the mid twentieth century,1 was by no means universally supported. The following account explores the nature of a disagreement between Sheffield City Council’s technical officers in the 1940s. At its heart was a dispute about whether the positive sciences should underpin reconstruction efforts, or whether other ideas based on the subjective experience of space had validity. This dispute tells us much about the diverse ways in which movement is conceptualised in architecture and planning. Specifically, in the examples below, we will see how, in urban planning, movement through the city can be considered in terms of the pedestrian’s experience, but it can also be considered in terms of mathematics, particularly in terms of Newtonian mechanics and statistics.

The limitations of science Better to understand the nature of the dispute between Sheffield’s planners, we might consider Edmund Husserl’s critique of the positive sciences. In his final (unfinished) book, The Crisis of European Sciences, which was written between 1934 and 1937 and published posthumously,2 Husserl attempted to show that the scientific attitude is a product of history, by charting the emergence of ideals of objectivity and rationalism in European philosophy.3 He admired the achievements of science, but was concerned that the world as described by the sciences does not reflect our actual experience. Galileo was identified by Husserl as the originator of the modern scientific approach to nature, and he wrote of ‘Galileo’s mathematization of nature’.4 Galileo’s innovation was to conceive of the world as ‘a mathematical manifold’,5 as if nature’s secrets were written in a mathematical code that could be deciphered through scientific investigation. Husserl observed that the ‘mathematization of nature’ had continued into modern times, so that ‘numerical magnitudes and general formulae’ became the centre of interest in all ‘natural scientific inquiry’.6 For Husserl, Galileo was ‘at once a discovering and a concealing genius’.7 On the one hand, Galileo discovered ‘mathematical nature’ and ‘the methodical idea’.8 On the other, this ‘mathematical nature’ can ‘be interpreted

The geometry of moving bodies 143

only in terms of the formulae’.9 Nature, as described through mathematical formulae, does not reflect our actual experience of the world. Husserl distinguished between ‘morphological essences’, for which there can be exemplars (such as ‘cat’ or ‘government’) but which are not defined in mathematical terms, and ‘exact essences’, which are ideals that can be only approximated in reality and which are mathematical (such as straight lines and perfect circles).10 As exact essences are ideals, they are not given to perception but are conceived in the mind. For worldly phenomena to be made the subject of scientific enquiry, they must be described in ‘exact’ terms, that is, in terms of precise measurements or statistics. This necessarily requires some degree of translation from the morphological to the exact, in a process that Husserl called ‘idealisation’,11 and means that all aspects of the world that cannot be quantified are beyond the scope of scientific enquiry. Consequently, the world as described by modern science is unlike the world as experienced, in that it consists of idealised forms of reality, devoid of all morphological essences. However, as Husserl noted, all too often the descriptions of the world put forward by the sciences are purported to be ‘the true world’.12 The limitations of the scientific approach are unacknowledged, and the gap between the world as described by science and the world as experienced is forgotten. Husserl referred to this as: ‘the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable – our everyday life-world’.13 Husserl wanted to counter this error by providing an account of the sciences that placed them in the broader context of everyday lived experience, in which the scientific viewpoint is incorporated as just one possibility among many. As will be demonstrated below, Husserl’s critique of the sciences helps us to understand the possible source of the dispute between Sheffield’s technical officers that started in 1942. Some of those involved in the dispute seemingly prioritised mathematical descriptions of the world over subjective experience.

Urban planning in Sheffield prior to 1942 The two planning schemes at the centre of the dispute between Sheffield’s planners had a complicated genesis.14 Sheffield started as a small market town, before industrial development caused it to expand rapidly from the eighteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the city centre consisted largely of densely populated housing intermingled with polluting workshops. Concerns that overcrowded and insanitary conditions would have an adverse effect on people’s health prompted a number of initiatives, including the appointment, in 1936, of Sheffield’s first planning officer, Clifford Craven.15 Among his first tasks was to draw up a planning scheme for the city centre to address the perceived need to separate housing from industry, and to ease traffic congestion, which was becoming a problem as car ownership increased.16 A draft version of this planning scheme was complete by September 1939,17 but the outbreak of the Second World War in the same month temporarily brought planning activities in the city to a halt.18 Craven was sent into the armed forces, and his staff were reassigned to Air Raid Precaution work, leaving only the chief assistant to handle any urgent work.19 Town planning only became a priority again following a severe enemy air raid on the city in December 1940, which caused extensive damage to Sheffield’s centre.20 Within weeks, the city council was inundated with applications for permission to rebuild,21 and it was decided that Craven was needed back in his post as planning officer on a full-time basis.22

144 Alan Lewis

The Diagonal Road Scheme Although damage to Sheffield was not as severe as in parts of London, questions were raised within the city council as to whether the bombing had invalidated Craven’s planning scheme. The council looked to national government for guidance, and, in April 1941, the city was visited by the Ministry of Health’s chief town planning inspector, George Pepler. He asked the city council to consider whether the bombing had created the opportunity to create a better town, and reiterated the sentiments of Lord Reith, minister of works and buildings, to ‘plan boldly but not recklessly’.23 It soon became apparent that Craven was reluctant to make major changes to his planning scheme.24 The amended plan, submitted to the council in late 1941, featured only minor revisions, intended to take advantage of the bomb damage.25 It became difficult for Craven to maintain this position when, in March 1942, efforts to revise the scheme were formalised with the creation of a Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, as an offshoot of the city council’s town planning committee.26 Further pressure came later that year when, in the absence of any visionary new proposals from Craven, the city architect, William Davies, submitted his own proposal to the city council.27 Davies’s proposal, known as the Diagonal Road Scheme, envisaged a new boulevard cutting diagonally across the existing street grid, from the city’s main railway station to the Moorhead shopping district (Figure 2.7.1). A new, 350-foot diameter ‘circus’ was to mark the termination of the new road at the Moorhead. Another new road led from the Moorhead circus to the existing City Hall, aligned with the centre of City Hall’s classical façade. The scheme proposed new buildings, including law courts, a technical college and municipal offices. Essentially Beaux Arts in style, the Diagonal Road Scheme featured formal devices such as axial ordering, regularly shaped spaces and use of symmetry. The aim was to create a sequence of spaces to form ‘a dignified and direct approach, of easy gradient’, from the bus and railway stations to the city centre, thereby enhancing the pedestrian’s experience of moving through the city.28 The formal devices employed were intended to be appreciable by a person ‘on the ground’; Davies emphasised the importance of the vistas to be created, particularly that of the City Hall from the Moorhead circus.

FIGURE 2.7.1

The Diagonal Road Scheme

Source: Sheffield will look like this when re-planned, Sheffield Star, 20 October 1942, p. 3. © Sheffield City Council

The geometry of moving bodies 145

The competition Craven gave his support to Davies’s proposal,29 and Sheffield City Council approved the Diagonal Road Scheme in December 1942.30 However, it did not receive universal support. In particular, the city engineer, John Collie, claimed it ‘falls so short of providing what I considered to be essential for traffic requirements’.31 During the following months, as the technical officers worked to find a way to incorporate the Diagonal Road Scheme into a larger city plan, relations between the officers became so strained that the city council decided they could no longer work together. To resolve the problem, the city council arranged a competition between the planning officer, the city architect and the city engineer, in which an adjudicator would select a single planning scheme for the city centre.32 Herbert Manzoni, Birmingham’s city engineer and surveyor, was given this role.33 The three technical officers submitted their proposals anonymously in January 1944,34 and, in May, Manzoni reported that he had selected a winning entry,35 which was later revealed to be the work of John Collie, the city engineer.36 After some modifications, the winning scheme was adopted by the city council in June. It superseded all previous planning schemes, including the Diagonal Road Scheme.37 Craven resigned his post, and Collie was appointed as planning officer, in addition to his responsibilities as city engineer.38 After further amendments, Collie’s scheme was published in 1945, in a book entitled Sheffield Replanned.39 It included images of a new Beaux Arts-style law courts building, terminating a grand boulevard, to be called New Chester Street. Closer inspection reveals that the 1945 plan did not follow the Beaux Arts model: New Chester Street would not have connected two civic spaces, its other end leading to nothing more than a traffic roundabout. Unlike those in the Diagonal Road Scheme, the civic spaces proposed under the 1945 plan were ill defined and irregular (Figure 2.7.2). The pedestrian’s experience was generally neglected. In particular, passengers leaving the railway station were expected to cross a busy arterial road, before entering a subway tunnel with no visible exit (Figure 2.7.3). This contrasts sharply with the dignified route from railway station to city centre that had been envisaged in the Diagonal Road Scheme.

FIGURE 2.7.2

FIGURE 2.7.3

Detail of the plan published in 1945, showing the proposed Civic Circle ring road encircling the city centre and the proposed New Chester Street leading to a new law courts building

The proposed exit from Sheffield’s main railway station, as seen from the station roof

Source: Town Planning Committee, Sheffield Replanned. © Sheffield City Council

Source: Town Planning Committee, Sheffield Replanned. © Sheffield City Council

146 Alan Lewis

The geometry of moving bodies So, if the 1945 plan was not intended to enhance the pedestrians’ experience, what were its author’s aims? According to a statement in Sheffield Replanned: The initial requirement is to produce a road layout which . . . relieves . . . traffic congestion, and removes the danger created by uncontrolled traffic in heavily used streets. Any street layout which does not achieve this has failed in its primary purpose, however attractive or symmetrical it may appear on plan.40 Providing for motor vehicles was given priority over and above the arrangement of space. Motor cars first appeared in Britain in around 1894,41 and by 1938 there were nearly 2 million licensed cars on Britain’s roads.42 This increase led to traffic congestion. For example, in 1938, approximately 1,750 vehicles per hour were recorded as passing along Sheffield’s High Street during peak periods.43 The rising number of cars produced more traffic accidents. The approximately 1,700 road deaths nationally recorded in 1919 more than quadrupled to 7,343 by 1934.44 To address these problems, from 1930 onwards, the Ministry of Transport issued guidance on the design and layout of roads.45 This recommended that fast-moving through traffic be separated from slower-moving local traffic and from pedestrians. One consequence of this segregation was that roads for through traffic, the so-called arterial roads,46 could be designed following different formal rules from those applied to local roads, to enable the arterial roads to accommodate vehicles moving at relatively high speeds. A car travelling through a bend experiences a centrifugal force, which can cause it to skid or overturn.47 The speed of the car and the radius of the curve determine the magnitude of this centrifugal force, and it was understood that this force could be reduced by ensuring that every bend had a constant radius of sufficient magnitude.48 An additional recommendation was that transition curves, which do not have a constant radius, be introduced between straight and curved sections of road, so that the centrifugal force would be applied to the car gradually.49 The resulting geometry, featuring large-radius curves and clearly visible in the drawing for Sheffield Replanned, is different from that used in Beaux Arts planning. It was also believed that, within cities, arterial roads should be laid out using the ‘wheel and spokes’ model of city planning, in which radial roads were bisected by ring roads, so that through traffic could be directed away from the city centre.50 The Ministry of Transport used financial incentives to promote ring-road schemes in the 1930s,51 and Manzoni selected Collie’s scheme precisely because it was the only one to propose a ring road around the immediate centre of the city.52

Conclusion A number of possible causes for the dispute between Sheffield’s technical officers can be identified. Town planning was not yet fully established as an independent discipline, and Craven seems to have been held in low regard by his colleagues. Prior to Craven’s appointment, it was the city engineer’s responsibility to prepare planning schemes, and the dispute was partly about who should wield this power. It was also a dispute between architects and engineers, for Davies, as city architect, found his plan rejected by Collie, city engineer. For Collie, the imperative was to find a solution to the problems caused by the rising number of motor vehicles, an issue the Diagonal Road Scheme failed to address. However, this concern does

The geometry of moving bodies 147

not explain why Collie’s team so effectively ignored the pedestrian’s experience in devising the 1945 plan. Perhaps the dispute between Sheffield’s technical officers is best characterised as a disagreement about which forms of knowledge have validity. Collie and his team prioritised an approach to planning based on mathematically verifiable knowledge, such as statistics on traffic density and accident rates, and the forces acting on a vehicle moving through a bend. By contrast, the Diagonal Road Scheme was based on principles that had their origin in the classical world, not in modern science. Collie and his team seemingly did not accept the (morphological) principles on which the Diagonal Road Scheme was based; moreover, they neglected the pedestrian’s experience. Arguably, this is because the rationalistic approach lends itself to design for the movement of motor vehicles. By contrast, the bodily, sensual experience of moving through the city as a pedestrian is not easily described in mathematical terms.

Notes 1 See, for example, Gordon Cherry and Penny Leith on the authors of the Advisory Handbook published by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in 1947 (HMSO 1947); Cherry and Leith 1986, p. 96. 2 David Carr, in the Foreword to Husserl 1970, pp. xvi, xviii. 3 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 4 Ibid., p. 23. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., pp. 47–8. Also see p. 45. 7 Ibid., p. 52. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 53. 10 Husserl 1982, p. 74. 11 Husserl 1970, pp. 24–8. 12 Ibid., p. 51. 13 Ibid., pp. 48–9. 14 For a more detailed account of these events, see Alan Lewis (2013) Planning through conflict: Competing approaches in the preparation of Sheffield’s post-war reconstruction plan, Planning Perspectives, vol. 28, pp. 27–49. 15 Special Committee re: Town Planning and Civic Centres (1936) First report, 19 June, with City Council Minutes [hereafter cited as Special Committee, Report]; Special Committee (1936) Third report, 28 August. 16 C.G. Craven (1938) Sheffield: The example of the replanning of a central area, Local Pamphlets, vol. 5, no. 3, 042 SQ, Sheffield Local Studies Library, 2. 17 Sheffield City Council (1939) Town and Country Planning Act 1932: Draft Sheffield (Central) Planning Scheme. Local Pamphlets, vol. 5, no.14, Sheffield Local Studies Library. 18 Sheffield City Council (1939) Minutes of the Council, 6 September, Sheffield Local Studies Library [hereafter cited as City Council, Minutes]. 19 Planning officer in letter to city engineer, 10 November 1939, City Engineer’s Files, CA655(1), Sheffield City Archives [hereafter cited as CA655(1)]; Special Committee (1941) Eighteenth report, 21 April. 20 Philip Healy, ‘Sheffield at War’, in Binfield et al. 1993, pp. 243–5. 21 Letter from city engineer to town clerk, 31 December 1940, City Engineer’s Files, CA655(16), Sheffield City Archives. 22 Special Committee (1941) Eighteenth report, 21 April. 23 Ibid. 24 Raids worry planners, but 1939 Sheffield Plan still valid, Sheffield Telegraph, 17 February 1942, p. 3. 25 Special Committee (1941) Twenty-second report, December. 26 Town Clerk in letter to members of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 20 March 1942, Minutes of the Special Committee re Town Planning and Civic Centres, 21 November 1938,

148 Alan Lewis

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48

49 50 51 52

CA674(54), Sheffield City Archives [hereafter cited as CA674(54)]; Special Committee (1942) Minutes, 16 March, CA674(54). Handwritten notes on the first meeting of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 27 March 1942, CA674(54). City architect (1942) City of Sheffield – Proposed revision of the Sheffield (Central) Planning Scheme, 19 October, CA674(54). Planning Officer (1942) City of Sheffield – Proposed revision of the Sheffield (Central) Planning Scheme, 19 October, CA674(54). City Council (1942) Minutes, 2 December. City engineer in letter to town clerk, 8 July 1942, CA655(1). Report of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 13 November 1943, City Engineer’s Files, CA655(2), Sheffield City Archives [hereafter cited as CA655(2)]. Ibid. Report of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 8 November 1943, CA674(54); for confirmation of city engineer’s submission see letter from city engineer to town clerk, 1 February 1944, CA655(2). Minutes of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 20 May 1944, CA655(2). Manzoni actually submitted his own planning scheme to Sheffield City Council, based on John Collie’s scheme. Minutes of the Special Committee re Town Planning and Civic Centres, 12 June 1944, CA655(2). Manzoni plan approved in principle, Sheffield Telegraph, 8 June 1944, p. 3. Town Planning Committee, 4 August 1944, Minutes of the Council, Sheffield Local Studies Library [hereafter cited as Town Planning Committee, Minutes]. Town Planning Committee (1945) Sheffield Replanned (Sheffield: Sheffield City Council). Town Planning Committee, Sheffield Replanned, p. 36. Webb and Webb 1913, p. 240. Hass-Klau 1990, p. 44. The precise number was 1,944,394. Traffic figures for Central Area, 7 December 1943, CA655(2). Hass-Klau 1990, pp. 40, 44. See summary of the guidance issued by the department in HMSO 1943, p. 3; also see HMSO 1930. The term ‘arterial road’ has been used in different ways by different writers. In particular, the Ministry of Transport, in the 1946 publication Design and Layout of Roads in Built-Up Areas, used the term to refer to ‘Roads serving the country as a whole, or a region of the country, and linking up the main centres of population’. Roads in built-up areas were labelled ‘through roads’. I use the term ‘arterial road’ here because it evokes the circulation of blood in the human body, and so encapsulates the notion of a road as a conduit for circulation, rather than a multipurpose space. Batson 1950, p. 41. Edric Tasker (1928) Superelevation, Proceedings of the Institute of Municipal and County Engineers, vol. LIV, 17 March: 1135; H. Criswell (1930) A simple treatment of superelevation, transition curves and vertical curves, as used on the Great North Road in the County of Rutland, 1925/26, Proceedings of the Institute of Municipal and County Engineers, vol. LVI, no.15, 21 January, p. 820. Criswell, Simple treatment of superelevation, p. 826. Cherry 1974, p. 25. City engineer’s account of meeting with Mr Knight of the Ministry of Transport, 15 July 1937, City Engineer’s Files, CA655(3), Sheffield City Archives. Minutes of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 20 May 1944, CA655(2).

2.8 PEDESTRIANS AND TRAFFIC Ben Hamilton-Baillie

One False Move and You’re Dead! This alarmingly stark and simple message stands alongside a close-up of a teenager’s feet on the edge of a kerb, on the huge billboards of the 1980s government road-safety campaign poster (Figure 2.8.1). The clarity of the image is enhanced by the absence of any surrounding context – there are no buildings or other people or activity in the background. It is a message about everywhere and nowhere. It was part of an ambitious campaign to improve pedestrian safety by influencing walking patterns and removing children from the threat of traffic, reinforcing the notion of a strong conceptual boundary to separate the world of the pedestrian from the world of traffic. The penalties for transgressing this boundary were severe indeed! The One False Move campaign represents one memorable manifestation of the principle of physical and psychological separation that dominated architecture, urban planning and traffic engineering for much of the twentieth century. The appearance of the motor vehicle in significant numbers during the 1920s prompted a fundamental re-evaluation of the relationship between movement and public space. Traditionally, streets and the spaces between buildings had served the simultaneous demands for both movement and the exchanges and human FIGURE 2.8.1

One False Move UK road-safety campaign, 1980s

ONE FALSE M OVE AN D YOU’RE DEAD.

BEFO R E YOU CR O SS TH E ROAD.

Source: Department for Transport Archives

150 Ben Hamilton-Baillie

interactions that constitute civic life. For Le Corbusier and other delegates at the CIAM Congress of Athens of 1933, there was ‘no place for the street with its traffic’ in the modern city.1 Nowhere was the principle of segregation of traffic from civic life more clearly articulated and persuasively argued than in the 1963 Traffic in Towns, the report of the committee chaired by Colin Buchanan to advise government policy on urban planning and transport.2 The central conclusion of this influential study called for systematic segregation between pedestrian and vehicular worlds. The pedestrian precinct, overbridges and underpasses, barriers and physical separation emerge as essential components of urban form. It was a message strongly endorsed by government policy and professional institutions in many countries. ‘Segregation should be the keynote of modern road design’ was the first sentence of the UK government’s 1965 Roads in Urban Areas. It seemed a self-evident truth that the requirements for efficient and safe movement of traffic were fundamentally incompatible with the qualities of urban space. Notions of public space and pedestrian boundaries had to be redefined. Hence, the need for the safety campaign to restrain the movement of teenagers – One False Move and You’re Dead! As we approach the second century of motorised movement, our understanding of the relationship between driver behaviour, traffic and the qualities of public space is changing rapidly. The publication in the UK of Manual for Streets 2 in 20103 and the emergence of shared space and integrated streets as design concepts have begun to establish a fundamentally contrasting paradigm for streets and urban spaces, in place of separation and segregation. This chapter looks at some of the theoretical and practical background to this change, and its implications for the relationship between architecture, urban design and traffic engineering. It is a change that builds on a growing understanding of behavioural psychology and the influence of place and context on human interaction and movement, and especially the relationship between drivers and the complex, unpredictable and fragile world of pedestrian activity. Drive a car into Exhibition Road in Kensington, West London, and you will find that, although you are still on the public highway, most characteristics of the familiar urban street have disappeared (Figures 2.8.2 and 2.8.3). Road markings, pedestrian crossings, traffic signals, signs and high kerbs have been replaced by a new layout and spatial arrangement. The diagonal paving pattern of the surface materials continues unbroken from building to building across the street. Boundaries between the carriageway and the pavement are more subtle, and street furniture, lighting and paving combine to create a single, unified space. For the driver, the experience can be slightly unnerving, especially where bicyclists and pedestrians are milling around and where the museums, Imperial College and the other great institutional buildings spill out into the space. As a driver, you have to concentrate and remain alert. Your speed drops, not because of the 20-mph speed limit, but because there is so much to take in. Conventional separation of the carriageway from urban life has vanished, leaving some ambiguity about priorities, ownership and permission. Exhibition Road is unusual. Its recent transformation was the ambitious and expensive outcome of London’s leading politicians’ and the Mayor’s determination to create a street of appropriate cultural significance in this richly endowed corner of the capital. But Exhibition Road is not an isolated example. It represents a more widespread and growing realisation of a new paradigm for traffic in towns. It demonstrates an approach equally relevant for the design, management and maintenance of small, rural high streets and village centres, and reflects an attempt to minimise the adverse impacts of traffic on the economics, social fabric and quality of life, wherever movement and civic life are expected to coexist.

Pedestrians and traffic 151 FIGURE 2.8.2

Exhibition Road, London: an experiment in combining traffic and pedestrians Source: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

FIGURE 2.8.3

Exhibition Road, bus and milk float move slowly through a space also used by people Source: Photograph by Ben Hamilton-Baillie

The widespread problems associated with traffic and the built and natural environment have been well documented. The Save Our Streets campaign of 20084 reflected the extent to which traffic impact dominates local concerns in almost every neighbourhood and community. Take a walk in almost any urban, suburban or rural settlement, and the immediate experience is dominated and framed, not by the architecture or landscape, but by the signs, signals, markings, bollards, barriers and linear asphalt of the traffic world. Pedestrian movement flows are constrained to limited peripheral space and occasional formal crossing points. As David Engwicht has pointed out in Mental Speed Bumps,5 drivers adopt speeds depending on the degree of psychological retreat of human activity from streets. This establishes a vicious circle, as people withdraw from trafficked space, generating higher speeds and further withdrawal. Reversing this cycle is critical to establishing a less damaging relationship between traffic and public space. The need to re-evaluate the balance between traffic and urban quality reflects much more than concern for aesthetic sensibilities. There is an urgent economic imperative. With the dramatic changes in trading and retailing prompted by out-of-town superstores and the Internet,

152 Ben Hamilton-Baillie

the purpose of many of our streets and public spaces has fundamentally changed. No longer necessary for the functional necessities of trade and distribution of goods and services, town centres have become places that only exist to fulfil higher-order expectations for human interaction and enjoyment. It is no longer possible for towns to exist solely as functional frames for market activity; they have to be able to attract human presence through intrinsic qualities. This change is prompting the search for new ways to reconcile traffic movement with the future purpose of urban space. Development of new techniques and principles for integrating traffic movement into civic life owes much to pioneering work in Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden and especially the Netherlands, from the late 1970s onwards. Engineers such as Joost Váhl began to explore new models for residential streets, leading to the concept of the woonerf in places such as Delft, Gouda and Culemburg. In the north of the Netherlands, the late Hans Monderman introduced a remarkable palette of measures for streets and intersections in his position as head of road safety for his native Friesland. Starting with the aim of quieter village centres, Monderman developed a range of techniques that extended traffic engineering to encompass all aspects of landscape, history, geology and architecture. He sought to re-integrate the driver into the normal civilities of the pedestrian world, and, to his surprise, he found that the alterations he made appeared to improve both the safety and efficiency of traffic movement, even when applied to busier urban junctions and high streets. At the core of Monderman’s alterations lie a number of principles that apply an understanding of the influence of context and place to the experience of movement among drivers and pedestrians. He and his colleagues were unusual as traffic engineers in extending their understanding of the influences on traffic beyond the confines of the highway boundary, to encompass every detail of place, as well as the driver’s perceptions and expectations. They established principles that combined to reduce speeds, create greater driver awareness, integrate traffic movement and produce adaptable, efficient public space. Three principles are especially noteworthy. The first concerns the design and presentation of transition points between the higher-speed ‘highway’ and the lower-speed public realm. Rather than placing road signs and nameboards without reference to the architecture, the intention is to create clear, distinctive gateways or entry points to neighbourhoods, towns or villages, through a combination of materials, landscape, lighting and dimensions that reinforce perceptions of transition (Figure 2.8.4). Measures to highlight changes in scale and a shift from linear continuity towards spatial complexity often require the elimination of centre-lines and road markings, with an introduction of visual narrowing to announce the transition. The identification of transition points requires special attention to, and exploitation of, natural features, such as bridges, notable buildings or changes in the landscape, as these help influence driver awareness and decisions. The second principle involves the application of place-making design to significant reference points along a street, especially to intersections and key junctions. Rather than placing signals, kerbs and highway furniture without reference to the context, the new traffic engineering and place-making draws on the distinctive characteristics and specific geometry of potential spatial landmarks. The elements of successful place-making are infinitely varied, but common characteristics include a focus on some central element (perhaps a statue, lamp or tree), or a simple frame in paving or lighting to define a space. It can be merely the careful positioning of lamps, street furniture or planting. Place-making techniques can contribute to

Pedestrians and traffic 153 FIGURE 2.8.4

Skvallertorget, a square in the Swedish town of Norrköping: the paving pattern reasserts the identity of the square as outdoor room Source: Tyrens, Sweden

FIGURE 2.8.5

Drachten, Friesland, Netherlands: coexistence of cars, cyclists and pedestrians Source: Photograph by Ben Hamilton-Baillie

the creation of clear transitions and are critical to creating legible sequences that, in the driver’s perception, reinforce the distinction between highways and public space. The third principle involves the relationship between buildings, the activities they generate, and the design and configuration of the street. Establishing a conversation between the traffic environment and adjacent events appears to contribute to more responsive driver behaviour and to lower speeds. Thus, a street running past a church or a pub, a school or a park, a town hall or a theatre will exhibit subtle differences in alignment, materials or arrangement to form a visual and psychological connection between traffic space and context (Figure 2.8.5). This approach marks a notable shift in the analysis and representation of streets. Conventional highway-engineering drawings show streets with little or no reference to surrounding buildings, entrances or visual landmarks, often limited to the formal highway boundary. By contrast, projects such as Exhibition Road and New Road in Brighton have been conceived and drawn as an urban continuum. Building in small clues related to the context appears to improve the response of drivers to the complexity of urban situations, by breaking down the linear anonymity of featureless streets with a series of punctuation marks. The potential for such an integrated approach to street design has implications for a wide range of typical urban spaces, junctions and street types. The disconnected, hostile experience of the ring road, observed by Stephen Walker (Chapter 2.6), could be reconnected to the

154 Ben Hamilton-Baillie

city, while still serving its transport function. The transformation of the former ring road around Ashford in Kent of 2007 is one example. A former one-way, three-lane segregated highway has been returned to low-speed, two-way movement and redesigned to create a rich and varied sequence of places through which the high volume of traffic moves at lower, smoother speeds. Underpasses, signals, barriers, signage and road markings have been removed, and drivers find themselves negotiating their passage through a distinct and, at times, deliberately ambiguous series of boulevards and spaces. The street is no longer a road or highway, although it continues to fulfil its traffic function, with less congestion and fewer serious accidents than before. The monitoring of the first 3 years’ operation revealed a reduction in injuries of around 40 per cent.6 Many observers of this new approach to traffic movement and design speculate on how far the principles might be extended to busier streets and routes. To date, we have insufficient case studies to know the answer. However, there are encouraging signs that the principles of place-making and context-specific street design may help to tackle problems where heavy traffic tends to divide and isolate communities. Poynton, a small market town in Cheshire, is built around a crossroads on the busy route between Manchester and Stoke (Figures 2.8.6 and 2.8.7). Over 26,000 vehicles a day pass through Fountain Place, the name once given to the junction at the heart of the town, fronted by the post office, shops and magnificent church that define the centre. Over the years, extensive traffic signals, multiple approach lanes and highway clutter reduced Fountain Place to a hostile, congested highway intersection, with little human life or economic value. In 2012, the crossroads was reconfigured. Traffic signals were removed, carriageways were simplified, strong entry gateways were created, and a clear spatial identity returned to Fountain Place through new paving materials, planting and lighting. To date, the junction appears to cope more successfully with the volume of traffic and has reduced pedestrian delays. The reduced congestion and low-speed environment are allowing civic activity to return to the town centre. The emerging understanding of this potentially improved relationship between traffic and the built environment has important implications for the relationship between architecture, urban design and traffic engineering. Conventionally, these have been separated into distinct and distant disciplines. Integrated streetscapes require much greater understanding among architects of the constraints, of vehicular tracking, movement patterns and the pedestrian interactions that determine the dynamics of traffic. Likewise, the world of traffic engineering could profit from an ability to exploit and adapt the potential of architecture and place-making to influence driver behaviour and integrate vehicular flows successfully into urban environments. Our understanding of movement and its relationship to space is undergoing a profound revolution. Many of the assumptions underpinning the segregation of traffic from civic life are now being challenged by the evidence emerging from schemes such as Exhibition Road, Ashford and Poynton. Understanding the experience of movement and the influence of context opens an important new field of research and experimentation, one that holds the potential to address the adverse effects of the segregation of traffic from civic life. Low-speed design and close integration with the distinctive characteristics of place may help foster new patterns of urban life and vitality. Moving away from the mechanical, deterministic views of twentiethcentury segregation allows a human-centred street-movement pattern to emerge. One false move, and you remain very much alive.

Pedestrians and traffic 155 FIGURE 2.8.6

Fountain Place, Poynton, Cheshire, UK: replanning of the traffic route by HamiltonBaillie Associates Source: Photograph by Ben Hamilton-Baillie

FIGURE 2.8.7

Fountain Place, Poynton, Cheshire, UK: replanning of the traffic route by Hamilton-Baillie Associates Source: Ben Hamilton-Baillie

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (1933) 1973. HMSO 1963a. Department for Transport (2010) Manual for Streets 2, CIHT. English Heritage (2008) Save Our Streets. Engwicht 2007. Kent County Council (2011) Ashford three-year monitoring review. R. Bright (internal document).

Spirit path leading to the East Royal Tombs, Qing dynasty, discussed in Chapter 3.5. This view looks back from the second paifang or ceremonial gateway towards the main entrance. The spirit path follows an axial route centred on a special pointed mountain (see Chapter 3.5, pp. 185–95)

FIGURE 3.0.1

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

PART 3

Movement as social and shared

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3.0 INTRODUCTION TO PART 3 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

In Part 1, we looked at movement from the point of view of the designing architect, and in Part 2, in terms of the individual’s experience and his or her reading of place, but as soon as two or more people are involved, there is a relationship. They must confront each other, cooperate or at very least observe each other, and no human being is viable alone for long, Crusoe myths notwithstanding. Apart from the sick, the occasional prisoner or the Carthusian monk, we all move about, not only making journeys, as discussed in the previous sections, but also changing territory and, with it, our role: academic till 6 o’clock, father and husband at 7. Roles are like theatrical parts, often with changes of dress to match, and tend to belong each to a setting that acts like a theatrical set, offering necessary props. Goffman’s metaphor of frontstage versus backstage was mentioned in the general introduction and is readily applicable to buildings of almost all kinds.1 We are always, to some extent, putting on a show for others, and each setting we inhabit has its rules, explicit or implicit, that we mostly take for granted. It also has a membership: the university, the ticketed train passenger, the family home extended only to invited visitors. Institutions have names associated with familiar building types: school, home, shop, restaurant. Within them are rooms, also named, normally by functional associations, so that estate agents classify dwellings in terms of living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms. Such names also appear on architects’ plans, everyone assuming we all know what they mean. These designations carry cultural values and expectations – summed up by Pierre Bourdieu in his concept habitus – which can be defined briefly as, ‘the socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures through which the habitat is engaged’.2 That is to say, we each possess a set of beliefs, values and habits that govern our expectations of the world, and that need to mesh with the meanings and arrangements of the habitat, so that the two can reinforce each other. This process of recognition can change considerably from place to place. In Europe, the idea of bed is fairly entrenched, and it is one of very few pieces of furniture explicitly described in The Rule of St Benedict, dating from about 530, which also prescribes that there should be one monk per bed, and they should sleep together in one room.3 In contrast, the Japanese have long held the custom of folding out bedding and sleeping on the floor, so avoiding the need to switch rooms between day and night. In some cultures,

160 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

even the orientation of the sleeping place is important; for example, in Thailand, it has long been unpropitious to sleep with one’s head towards the west, the direction connected with death.4 If such readings of pollution seem strange, we are not free ourselves from such values and expectations, as exemplified by changing attitudes to bathrooms and kitchens in European societies. Defecating in the house was long avoided, but, even after the introduction of sewers and water closets, the lavatory often faced outwards, into the open air. In Dora Tack’s reminiscence of childhood spent in Brixton, London, the family moved in the 1930s to a flat with a fitted bath, but her policeman father refused it, setting a board on top and using it for storage. The filling of a movable tin bath in front of the living-room fire, habit of their previous existence, continued.5 The kitchen has changed greatly with the disappearance of servants, the heightened status of women and the sharing of food preparation, not only becoming larger, more prominent and more central to the house or flat, but also subject to nearly a century of design revolution, involving fitted units and innumerable gadgets. It is now a fashion statement to be shown off to friends, renovated at frequent intervals for change of style, and a key element in selling a house. Taking up the contrast again with Thailand, their traditional vernacular kitchen, along with the washroom, was considered an especially dirty place, set on the side of the deathly west with the lowest floor level.6 In our society, by contrast, it aspires to the allure of being spotlessly clean, not just hygienically but spiritually pure.7 Hosts of both genders cook and are proud of it, and so the kitchen has crossed the boundary to become a polite space, but, even now, nobody shows off their lavatory, even if they ensure it is clean for guests and well provided with paper, soap and towels. It is important for guests to find it and to be able to recognise it when they see it, even when visiting for the first time, because it is embarrassing to ask. There is a symbolic implication here, and nobody who has read Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger can continue to attribute cleanliness to hygiene alone.8 She shows that our attitudes of repugnance and avoidance are every bit as constructed and structured as those devoted to more positive aesthetic matters. Such are the changing territories of everyday life that we move through, only partly cognisant of their implied values. They are differentiated by contrast, and patterns of movement have shaped them, especially kitchens and bathrooms, which sustain endless gestures and postures as bodies go about their everyday tasks. In recent history, these passed through an obsession with ergonomics recorded in government publications such as Space in the Home, which now seem both excessively reductive and socially presumptuous (Figures 3.0.1–3.0.4).9 But who sits where in the living room or at table remains significant, and even more so who sleeps where. These territories still have their rules and membership, which their architecture helps to declare. We must enter and leave, and move between them, crossing thresholds and making appropriate gestures of greeting or parting. For clarity and convenience, all this has been so far described in terms of domestic examples, but the same principles apply to bigger institutions, even to whole cultures. In the chapters that follow, these relationships between space, use and meaning are explored through a wider range of contrasting examples. In Chapter 3.1, Peter Blundell Jones sets out some general cross-cultural principles, concentrating first on the idea of centre versus periphery, and second on linear paths that give direction, generating roads and implicit spatial axes. Taking the example of the Australian Aborigine circumcision ground, a temporary theatre, he shows how a space can be prepared for and defined by social action, so that it becomes both a temporary record of that action and a necessary means of sharing it. He also discusses the inevitability of thresholds, which,

Introduction to Part 3 161

6.30 p .m .

T he evening meal may be the only tim e during the week when the family sit down together. They m ay like to eat away from the kitchen area.

7.00 p .m .

W hen Father makes o r repairs something, he needs to be out o f M other’s way in the kitchen and where he will no t disturb sleeping children.

FIGURE 3.0.1A

Space in the Home, government publication of 1963: daily activities on a timeline: 6.30, mother cooks while father relaxes

FIGURE 3.0.1B

Space in the Home, 1963: 7.00, Mother serves them all at table

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