Space and Anti-Space

Table of Contents

Introduction

MICHAEL DENNIS

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Foreword JONATHAN BARNETT

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PART ONE ARCHITECTURAL AND URBAN SPACE

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A. MODERN SPACE

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—The Dematerialization of Architecture and Ineffable Space

B. ALTERNATIVE IDEAS OF SPACE Prologue

Space & Anti-Space Subtexts

1. Post-Modern and Neo-Rational

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45 47 72

2. Las Vegas and Le Corbusier

3. The Fundamental Dichotomy—Space or Anti-Space

4. A Brief History of Space

5. Cubism—The Turning Point

6. Palazzo Barberini—Negative Space

7. The Invention of Virtual Thickness

PART TWO THE URBAN FABRIC C. ROMA INTERROTTA: CONTINUOUS DESIGN FIELDS

Colin Rowe—Towards a Standard Model of Urban Form

D. THE ELEMENTS OF URBAN FORM Urban Design Tactics

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110 112 144

PART THREE SHAPING PLACES E. PARIS: LES HALLES DESIGN COMPETITION

The Aims and Means of Urban Design

F. NEW YORK: KNITTING NETWORKS OF URBAN FABRIC The Urban Design Plan for Lower Manhattan

PART FOUR TOWERS AND TEXTURE G. NEW YORK: VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL SPACE

The Re-Urbanization Of Ground Zero—A Proposal for the World Trade Center Site

162 165 197

214 217

H. THE TAXONOMY OF URBAN FORM

URBAN FABRIC: THE COMMON DENOMINATOR OF CITIES

THE URBAN MOLECULE

When Buildings Touched

How a City is Built

Afterword

BARBARA LITTENBERG

253 273 292

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The Dematerialization of Architecture and Ineffable Space Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s seldom-discussed philosophical preoccupation, viewed as the basis for his architecture, seems to reveal a disparity with many who limit the definition of his principles.

Perhaps Mies intended this philosophical interpretation when he said, “The role of the critic is to test a work of art from the point of view of significance and value.…Truth is the significance of facts,” implying that architecture embodied philosophical ideas.

It may have been in this sense that he described architecture as “the battleground of the spirit,” and it suggests that the meaning of Mies’s formal propositions are to be found in relation to his philosophical values.

If we can interpret Mies’s statements to indicate that he understood philosophical significance to be transcendental, to go beyond apparent reality, then a corresponding formal proposition is that architecture should be dematerialized. Its specificity as object and its tangible reality should be reduced as far as possible to reveal the more essential understanding that is beyond form.

The usual evaluations of Mies, however, seem to present him differently. We receive either frustrated dismissals from his critics or descriptive categorizations from his admirers.

Those disapproving of Mies cannot tolerate the limitations of purism and find too many of their own values missing. As Charles Jencks pointed out in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), Mies’s “critics cannot talk about place, identity, climate, symbol, culture, etc., except to deplore its absence.” With most Mies criticism, we do not learn what Mies is, but what he is not. His own values and terms often are not really identified.

On the other hand, apologists justify his work, but also narrow the focus of understanding with simplistic and often contradictory categories.

Mies’s systematized pavilions are seen as neoclassicism while his attention to construction is seen as structural-expressionism. In general, it is assumed that technology is the message.

However, no simple category is entirely satisfactory. Neoclassicism is insufficient, since the plans aren’t organized hierarchically. There are solid central cores with free perimeters and no vertical, multistory centralizing volumes.

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A1

A1 Plans of the Mill Owners’ Building (top) and Crown Hall (middle and bottom) shown at the same scale. The two ideas of freedom in Modern Space: one, a compact canvas for the free play of independent interacting forms, the other, a formless expanse of universal emptiness, open to change and flexibility.

The real entrance to Crown Hall is not the gracious platform of floating front stairs, but the four straight runs hugging the building wall behind; one pair goes up to a narrow stoop in the middle and the outer two go down into the ground to separate basement entrances. There is no classical grace of movement, no subsidiary vestibules, no common foyers.

The symbolic space of drafting rooms upstairs is a precise and elegant dematerialization of architectural form, but the effect comes at a price; the dehumanization of the school as a whole institution, relegating half of it to the basement, lit only by clerestory windows with no outlook.

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Labeling him strictly a technologist is inconsistent with his avoidance of advanced techniques in construction and his refusal to express mechanical systems or to expose ducts and pipes. Also, while structural-expressionism seems to explain Crown Hall, it doesn’t clarify his decision to suppress the structural frame on every high-rise building after 900 Lake Shore Drive.

In a way, both sides represent Mies’s terms in the same way: they assume that his Platonic images stand only for a pure and objective representation of those familiar predicates of modern architecture—determinism, functionalism, structuralism, and technology. Mies’s work is assumed to be a poetic version of these ideas, an intense puree of modernism. But, this label just obscures real appreciation and understanding.

Part of the problem in coming to grips with Mies may lie in this continual identification of a single concept of “modern architecture.” We imagine the modern movement to be one thing, easily recognizable, with a limited number of formal propositions and an apparently clear set of shared values. However, a single concept can’t account for such dissimilar buildings as Mies’s Crown Hall and Le Corbusier’s Mill Owners’ Association Building (A1).

The familiar concepts of modern architecture can be recognized in Le Corbusier’s vigorous formal exercise in India, composed as a “free plan” articulated in a reference frame of round columns, and celebrating the object through assertive shapes and curved surfaces. But, Crown Hall has the exact opposite characteristics; it is an unarticulated void—free of columns, largely transparent, and without composed surface or shape. This suggests a very different set of values, a fundamentally opposed theory about form.

These two opposed propositions emanate from different philosophical concepts. For Le Corbusier, the essential knowledge and principles of architecture are found in aesthetics, which can be defined as the study of things perceivable and experienced by the senses (as form). Specifically in the case of Cubism/Purism, it is the search for understanding through the appearance of objects or phenomena.

In contrast, Mies found the essential knowledge and principles of architecture in metaphysics, which can be defined as the study of being in essence beyond the physical. (The Platonic ideal is beyond perceived form.) This knowledge is deduced from axioms claiming to be universal and certain, in contrast to empirical knowledge, which claims only to be probable and relative. Mies’s conception of architecture as metaphysics is exemplified by his belief that while “architecture depends on facts...its real field of activity is in the realm of significance...It has nothing to do with the invention of forms.”

Modern Space

B10a View of the Sapienza courtyard.

The Church of Sant’Ivo was inserted into Giacomo Della Porta’s existing building.

Borromini placed the chapel behind a new curved end wall attached to the arcaded courtyard to establish a hollow “thick wall” condition of negative space that simultaneously defines both the horizontal court and the vertical chapel.

B10b Plan of the Sapienza block.

The Church of Sant’Ivo is the focus of the entire composition. Even though it was built last, it totally integrates the surrounding arcades and courtyard engaging them through its four hexagonal corners in a web of negative space.

B10a

B10c

B10b

B10d

B10c Plan of the Dome.

The surrounding buffers of negative space in the base allow the complex energetic spatial interior of the chapel below to rise up as an inversion, from void to solid, emerging through the roof as a disengaged free-standing object into the forming space of the courtyard attic.

B10d Detail plan of Sant’Ivo with subsidiary wardrobe rooms, and altars.

The plan is a proliferation of interlocking negative and positive spaces. Every piece of “wall” is carved away within the central Star of David chapel itself. Imagine moving into the private hexagonal chapels, through the walls and window wells, and up the tower stairs with their own windows in the most solid tip of building mass.

From its integral presence in the thick walls of Bramante and Palladio, negative space has evolved into a useful contemporary form that provides independent overlapping places for a variety of uses.

At the neoclassical Caffè Pedrocchi in Padua, built in 1831 (B8), the pockets of negative space within the walls have expanded into a spreading realm of niches, anti-rooms, left-over closets, hidden chambers, and buried stairs. Positive spaces fill the plan, the whole enabled by the back-up of negative space, within the walls. The large meandering empty area of negative space in the middle of the plan, behind the main hall, is a residual precursor to modern flowing space. Here it both separates the main Sala Rossini from the diagonal enfilade of different rooms, but also joins them through a common backstage serving-pantry.

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Alternative Ideas of Space

B15 a Claypotts Castle, Dundee, Scotland, 1569–1588, view.

B15 b Claypotts Castle, plan.

B16 a Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Le Corbusier, 1964, view.

B16 b Carpenter Center, plan.

B15 ab

B16 ab

In a similar, more humorous, illustration, the rectangular room inside Lucy the Elephant (B9) is created by hiding the inner skin behind a fattened thickness in the shoulders and stomach. Here, the empty thickness is filled with closets, storage, and ingeniously gives place for the main entrance stairs. This can be thought of as negative space.

This condition of negative space is not limited to the gaps between interior volumes. It can exist between the outside and inside of buildings as well, if the walls are shaped to form external urban spaces. In the Sapienza block, in central Rome, finished in 1660, Borromini inserted his spatially dynamic church of Sant’Ivo into the calm of Della Porta’s existing arcaded courtyard with a curved wall that terminated the court and gave a front to the church. These separate forms are welded together through the web of negative spaces that are cut into the surrounding fabric of walls. Here, imbedded within the thickness, are the subsidiary places for small chapels and wardrobe rooms in a complex ritual program integrated through the intrinsic concordance of positive and negative space (B10a–d).

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Alternative Ideas of Space

The Roman Forum: a perpendicular axis connects the Tiber embankment into the Roman Forum and orients the location of the Capitoline Hill (D31, D32).

The Roman theme of straight lines from Pope Sixtus V: new lines are introduced within the site sector to complete the larger Roman network of linear connections in the southwest corner (D33).

THE TACTICS OF CONNECTIONS Within the site, various methods are used to form connections and transitions between the separate pieces.

1. Interpenetration of fields: the overlapping of edges and patterns between fields establishes a multiplicity of relationships (D34).

2. Continuity of texture: all continuity with the existing Roman center must be stretched through the narrow bottleneck of the Forum Boarium.

The existing urban fabric texture is extended and re-channeled.

D31 Plan of the Tiber embankment road crossing in front of the porch of the medieval church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin.

D32 View of the Tiber embankment cross axis connecting the Roman Forum and the Curia.

D33 Theme of straight lines of Rome.

D34 Interpenetration of fields—with streets and edges on different orientations.

D35 Existing plan just north of the Circus Maximus shows bottleneck of disconnected fragments.

D36 Plan of the continuous arc of urban fabric behind Santa Maria in Cosmedin opposite the Tiber Island.

D31

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D32

The Elements of Urban Form

3. Geometry of axes: extending the centerline of the Circus Maximus reveals new possible orders; a cross-axis to the Roman Forum, a triangular lagoon in the river bend that focuses on the Tiber Island and makes a split connection between Trastevere and central Rome (D35: before, and D36: after).

4. Public landscape: the structure between the separate hill fragments is an interstitial network of gardens and trees (D37).

5. The French garden as model: superimposed on the city as continuity, not authority, it becomes a starting point for extensions—space breaks out of the site but retains its local origins. The garden becomes an alternative urban strategy (D38).

6. The Italian garden generates texture: the existing garden of the Villa Mattei provides a pattern for urbanism (D39: before, D39: after, and D40: aerial view).

D33

D34

D35

D36

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D37 Public landscape connections.

D38 French garden planning integrates the Aventine Hill and the Circus Maximus spaces into a unified formal conception.

D39 Before and after plans; The Italian garden as a model for urban form. The two round garden points in front of the Villa Mattei become urban squares in the core for new urban development.

D40 The urbanized Villa Mattei is in the upper right. At the center, the Circus Maximus is transformed by a cross axis connecting the ancient exedra on the Palatine to align with new gardens of the Aventine. Open on the near side, it is the last bottom parterre of the Aventine Villa. Closed on the far side, it is the foreground to two long “Nash” housing terraces, in an ironic reverse history of classical architecture.

The diagonal downhill path along the Villa walls becomes a road leading to a new public square centered on the existing little church of San Lorenzo in Panep.

D40

Aerial perspective drawn by Steven Kent Peterson 1977.

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The Elements of Urban Form

Our solution was to provide both; a series of peripheral local squares and a central main space (E23). In this case, the city walls contain the structured space of a protected garden, while the city appears to expand limitlessly outside. This connotation of a historical or archaeological city, carved out of the interior of existing blocks, is amplified by restricting access to the garden to four gates located at the cardinal points. The garden is structured by this primary cross-axis like the original Roman town or Imperial Forum (E21, E22). It is both garden and urban space developed as a combination of flat parterres floating within a moat, and a series of terraces stepping up to the south eventually reaching the roof level of the external city and providing a view back to the ĂŽle de la CitĂŠ and the tower of Notre Dame (E24).

E20

E21

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E22

Paris: Les Halles Design Competition

E20 North/south cross-section.

E21 Plan of main garden precinct and surrounding areas.

E22 Plan of the Imperial Forum, Rome.

E23 The center precinct of the inner public garden with its four gateway entrances.

E24 The stepped parterres ascending to the roof of the museum providing a view to the city beyond.

E23

E24

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F25

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G23

G26

G22

Photo: Jock Pottle

In the plan, the destroyed World Trade Center tower footprints are inscribed in the garden, the south footprint as a memorial reflecting pool (G27), the north footprint as an amphitheater containing 2,800 seats, each dedicated to a victim (G28). The space of the theater, defined by a semi-ruinous enclosing wall, allows the visitor to understand the vastness of the collapsed buildings’ one-acre floor plates. A new Memorial Museum is located immediately beneath the amphitheater and is entered via a new building opposite the Winter Garden, an existing important public space. The exhibition progresses down to bedrock and the slurry

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New York: Vertical and Horizontal Space

G22 Peterson Littenberg model looking down on the Public Garden precinct, surrounding elevated roof gardens, and the new Twin Towers.

G23 View down proposed West Street Boulevard, looking south toward Upper New York Bay, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

G24

Archival photo, 1888

G24 The staged development of Park Avenue north of Grand Central Station, 1888, the precedent for reconstruction of the WTC site.

G25 Public Garden precinct containing the tower footprints and memorial museum surrounded by streets with future building sites.

G26 Sketch view of Public Garden from the air.

G25

Photo: Jock Pottle

wall, still miraculously holding the river at bay. Franz Koenig’s sculpture of the world, Sphere, which like the slurry wall, survived the attack and reoccupies its position on the site in the former entry plaza where it had previously united the two towers (G29). Also revealed in the garden is a fragment of the Hudson River’s original shoreline. This commemorates the place where George Washington landed for his inauguration as first President of the United States. He had proceeded to Saint Paul’s Chapel, located on the edge of the site, to pray before the inaugural ceremony took place nearby.

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H8 Hudson Yards: architectural rendering.

H9 Hudson Yards: original architectural site plan.

H9

H8 264

Courtesy: Hudson Yards

The Taxonomy of Urban Form

H25

COMPONENT 1 NETWORK OF SPACES: IN A CONTINUOUS WEB The complex network of urban spaces, represented in the axonometric of the Wall Street area, is the primary component of an established, complete, dense urban fabric. The streets form an interconnected pattern of positive, solid figural spaces where the blocks are not perceived as objects, but only as the edge surfaces that define the voids. The street is not a single element, but is part of an entire interwoven network of spaces joined in a continuous web of connections that constitute the city’s public realm (H25).

The particular places in Lower Manhattan, such as the oval at Bowling Green or the widening of Broad Street in front of the stock exchange, are achieved by subtle distortions to the network. However, the full potential of a spatial network’s complexity is better illustrated by central Madrid’s surprising urban fabric, where the multiple, individual plaza shapes connect into a diverse series of hierarchical street patterns (H26).

Individual urban spaces and the strands of their street connections dominate the irregular, nonsystematic blocks that make up the solid portion of the urban fabric. The presence of over 20 different plaza types represents almost every form of possible urban space configuration. The intense development of public space contrasts with the background of residual blocks with their impromptu internal configurations.

H25 Axonometric of the Network of Spaces in Lower Manhattan.

H26 Central Madrid The rich spatial interconnections that are possible within a dense urban condition is dramatically illustrated by this aerial view of central Madrid.

H26 278

Apple Maps

The Taxonomy of Urban Form

COMPONENT 2 MATRICES OF BLOCKS: ARRAYED IN PATTERNS The group of solid blocks in the Wall Street area form an array across the site to create the rhythmic, repetitive, textural background that forms the sense of a continuous city. The blocks form a tight matrix of solids that work in reciprocity with the street network, to define and enclose each other in a single field of urban fabric.

Although no block shapes are repeated, they still interlock through corresponding parallel street walls. The result is an aggregate matrix of solids held together by their edges, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. The visual impenetrability of the blocks is critical to its capacity to juxtapose multiple places and mix functions in a variety of separate spatial forms (H27).

The Lower Manhattan interior block arrangements, however, were largely improvised. A more sophisticated combination of designed blocks and public spaces, is the remarkable area north of the federal parliament complex in Brussels (H28).

Although the plan is geometric it is not symmetrical or monumental. The diagonals intentionally generate from the impenetrable federal public building complex at the edge of Parc de Bruxelles to the left. They intersect at a modest public square of trees that centers the district at the orthogonal cross-axis leading up to the semicircular Place du Congrès overlook. There are so many more surprises to discover by walking around or simply viewing this aerial photo.

H27

H27 Axonometric of the Matrix of Blocks in Lower Manhattan.

H28 Brussels This 44-acre triangular district demonstrates the great potential of an urban fabric to simultaneously accommodate multiple geometries and different places. The clear crisscross spatial plan depends on an array of very different block shapes to achieve.

H28

Apple Maps

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