160
INTEGRAL URBANISM
100.
101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.
108. 109.
110. 111. 112.
Prestel Publishing, 2002). Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital was designed “to extend the city’s roads and canal networks, while simultaneously turning in on itself to create flexible, quasi-urban interior environments in the form of endlessly repeating courtyards.” The Team 10 diagrams can be understood more as representations of process rather than urban. Their approaches shared a search for patterns of “association,” the network of human relations. As Jonathan Barnett points out, these efforts, such as the Mechanic Theatre district in Baltimore, offered examples of cross programming, but turned their backs to existing city by suppressing streets and creating superblocks with a public plaza in the interior, accessed primarily via underground parking structures. Josep Lluis Sert is often considered to be the person who coined the term “urban design” and he created the first degree program in urban design in 1959 at Harvard University. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1938). Angelil and Klingmann, “Hybrid Morphologies,” 21–22. Gerrit Confurius, “Editorial,” Daidalos 72 (1999): 4. Wall, “Programming in Urban Surface,” 235. Alexander Tzonis, “Pikionis and the Transvisibility,” Thresholds 19 (1999): 15–21. Doxiadis was a student of Pikionis. Tzonis and Lefaivre trace this to the Bible. They also remind us that “Artists, architects and urbanists have for a long time sought to capture movement within the spatial framework of design. One approach to achieving this has been to emphasize the expressive visual-spatial qualities of the design object, arranging its masses in controlled disequilibrium so as to anticipate a future state. (Elsewhere, in relation to the work of Santiago Calatrava, we have called this the ‘aesthetics of the pregnant moment.’ Prior to the Second World War the word used to describe this strategy was ‘plasticity,’ relating the iconic likeness of the artefact to an organism which moves or grows” (“Beyond Monuments,” 1999). Tzonis, “Pikionis and the Transvisibility,” 1999. Liane Lefaivre, “Critical Domesticity in the 1960s: An Interview with Mary Otis Stevens,” Thresholds 19 (1999): 22–26. Stevens explains, “We were interested in how it allowed growth and change and variation. We designed the building from the inside out … It was the result of a process, not the application of preset notions.” All from Tzonis and Lefaivre, “Beyond Monuments,” 1999. Tzonis and Lefaivre, “Beyond Monuments,” 1999. Ibid. Woods advocated “the creation of environment at every scale of human association” appropriate for a “society … entirely new … a completely open, non-hierarchical co-operative in which we all share on a basis of total participation and complete confidence” (Tzonis and Lefaivre, “Beyond Monuments,” 1999). He tried to accomplish this in the new town prototype he designed with Candilis and Josic.
POROSITY 1. Roland Barthes defines “readerly” texts as quick easy reads versus “writerly” texts that conceal and reveal and are, therefore, more satisfying. See The Pleasure of the Text (1975, translated by Richard Miller, NY: Hill and Want and S/Z (1970, Paris: Editions du Seuil). 2. For Herbert Muschamp, the veil has become a prevalent graphic device in contemporary design, symbolizing the contemporary condition between the industrial and information ages. As a subset of translucency, as I’m conceiving it, the veil, according to Muschamp, “conveys the conflicting desire to conceal and reveal.” “Shadow, translucency, reflection, refraction, dappling, stippling, blurring, shimmering, vibration, moiré, netting, layering, superimposition: these are some of the