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Activities as Patterns:
Lessons About Architecture from Planning
Page 2
"Think before you judge"
In 1952, I left South Africa to spend my fourth year--our architecture
school's practicum year--in an architect's office in London. I never went
back.
Instead, I entered the Final School at the Architectural Association in
London. I landed in post World War II England, amidst the look-back-in-anger
generation, a society in upheaval, where social activism was part of education.
A friend at the Architectural Association was on a scholarship from his
hometown, while his brother had left school, just before the war, at the
age of 14.
Social change of that magnitude affected everything, including
art. On the one hand, there was the frou-frou of the Festival of
Britain, and on the other, there was socialism.
Out of the clash came innovative social thought and ideas on rebuilding
London. The sociologists, Young and Wilmot, produced a study of the people
of London's East End describing what happened to them when they were moved
to new towns. Long before Jane Jacobs, they voiced complaints against human
removal via urban planning.
Loosely allied to the social thinkers was an assemblage of avant-garde
London artists called the Independent Group. Also allied with the
Independent Group was a proto Pop Art movement, dating from the early
1940s--and the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, founders of New
Brutalism, a movement of the 1950s and 1960s that related architecture
to social realism.
The Smithsons came from the north of England, another periphery. They became
involved in the East End, yet another periphery. In England in the 1950s,
an equivalent to the African "colonial vs. mother country" debate
was a "working-class vs. upper-class" cultural debate. This, too,
involved "is" and "ought" but here the reality to learn
from was the street life of the East End. The Smithsons talked about "active
socio-plastics," but only briefly; later they said you couldn't get
much help from sociologists and took another tack. I stayed with socio-plastics.
In my second year at the Architectural Association, I joined a group of
students whose views paralleled those of the Smithsons. They shared my interest
in early Modern architecture--as Peter Smithson said, we "caught a whiff
of the powder" of that earlier revolution. These students loved the
industrial architecture that Le Corbusier loved--the American grain elevators
and English 19th century factory buildings--but they were turning, as well,
toward commercial architecture, seeing there further opportunities for iconoclastic
vitality. We all started taking photographs. Long before visiting Las Vegas,
I was taking snapshots of popular culture and everyday landscapes in Africa,
Europe, and England.
The New Brutalists and Team 10 [an international group who shared the New
Brutalist architectural and social ideals] were energetically upending prevailing
architectural ideology. First, they returned to the early Modern "functionalist"
revolution, the one I had identified with. The German Moderns' word, neuesachlichkeit,
or new objectivity, describes what they were after and what I have continued
to strive for. In effect, they said, "If you look very straight at
a problem, the solution you find may be ugly, but that ugliness may be right."
Architect Louis Kahn later said much the same thing: "You hate it and
you hate it and you hate it, until you love it, because that's the way it
has to be." There's a moral case for this argument but there's an aesthetic
one too. Looking objectively at problems, considering the merits of ugly
but effective solutions, can help artists open their eyes, escape from aesthetic
ruts, and enhance their creativity. This approach suggests, "Don't
judge at first," but it was understood by some people to mean, "Don't
judge at all." For me it means, "Think before you judge,"
and it has played a large role in the development of my ideas about functionalism
in architecture.
I was influenced, as well, by Arthur Korn, my studio critic and advisor
at the Architectural Association.
Through his teaching and his book, History Builds the Town, he tried to show how the social life and
history of an era affected its building. And London architect Ernö
Goldfinger, for whom I worked for six difficult months, once yelled at
me, "You say you're a functionalist--this is
functionalism!" He was referring to how the plumbing worked in a
building. And that is an aspect of functionalism.
But my English friends were going from liking the uncomfortably direct solution
to relishing the uncomfortably indirect one: to Mannerism. Mannerist breaking
of rules seemed relevant, not as an expression of neurosis (an earlier interpretation)
but as a way of approaching the complexity of life. In a multilayered reality
all rules of all systems can't be followed at once or all the time. Combining
Mannerism and neuesachlichkeit suggested that breaking aesthetic
rules to meet functional exigencies could produce aesthetic excitement.
As Mannerists, we liked designs that abrogated architecture's compositional
dos and don'ts--that ignored the strictures against dualities, for example,
or questioned whether there was only one "human scale" and reveled
in jumps in scale. We enjoyed the contradictions in form, the broken rhythms,
and the inflected, fractionated building parts that resulted from the clashing
of complex urban systems.
"Our views on function in architecture were again rocked"
In 1956 and part of 1957, Robert Scott Brown, my first husband, and
I traveled Europe. We planned our itinerary around Mannerist and early
Modern architecture, and headed toward the CIAM Summer School in Venice. They held a summer school for recently graduated architects
from around the world.
On our travels, our views on function in architecture were again
rocked--this time by buildings that had been in use for hundreds of
years. In these ancient structures, bathrooms had of course been added
and utilities replaced. More significantly, many historic buildings no
longer served their original purposes. How do you define the function of
a building if it has housed a range of different activities over perhaps
500 years? How "functional" is it to plan for the building's
first uses (the client's program) and not consider how it may adapt to
meet change in the unforeseeable future?
In the winter of 1956 we worked briefly in Rome for architect Giuseppe
Vaccaro. This experience prepared us in
other relevant ways for urbanism in America. We returned to South Africa in 1957 and spent some months
traveling and working. Our photographs from that time are of Cape Dutch,
Natal English, and vernacular architecture; of African housing, rural
and urban, and of folk and popular culture. In 1958 we left Africa for
America.
"We couldn't believe we had lived our lives till then without what
we had just learned"
Peter Smithson said the only place to study in America was the University
of Pennsylvania, because Louis Kahn taught there. So Robert Scott Brown
and I went to Penn to study with Kahn. We arrived with our Brutalist rhetoric
and found Kahn knew all about it. He had met the Brutalists and Team 10
at a CIAM conference at Otterloo and, for awhile, there was a confluence
of ideas among them. Kahn's Richards Medical Laboratory seems to me to be
based on the Open Air School in Amsterdam, an icon of the Brutalists, by
Johannes Duiker.
We chose to enter Penn's Department of City Planning because in 1950s England
planning was considered the basis for architecture. If you were an interested
and talented architect, the next obvious move was to study city planning,
but the training in England was too prosaic for us. On reaching Penn, we
found, to our surprise, that Kahn did not teach in the planning department,
although he was listed in the catalog.
Architect and planner David Crane, our student advisor, said, "Don't worry,
I'll make sure you get the best of Kahn but, coming from Africa and talking
as you do, you should have city planning training. You need that for where
you're going." (We were going back to work in Africa as Africans.)
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