Opportunities and Constraints in Modernist Architecture

UCLThe Bartlett School of Built EnvironmentDevelopment Planning Unit (DPU)

MSc Building and Urban Design in Development

Housing Policy, Programme and Project Alternative (BENVGBU4)

Term Paper (Term II)Paper based on the London Walk

OPPORTUNITIES AND CONSTRAINTS IN MODERNISTE ARCHITECTURE:THE CASES OF THE BARBICAN ESTATE AND BRASILIA

(3300 words)

Benjamin Leclair-Paquet SN 834395

March 2009

The Bartlett BENVGBU4 University College London Development Planning Unit

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OPPORTUNITIES AND CONSTRAINTS IN MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE:

THE CASES OF THE BARBICAN ESTATE AND BRASILIA

Content

I. Introduction

II. Historical Overlook of England’s Housing

Typologies

III. Le Corbusier Unité d’habitation and the

Modernist Movement

IV. The Barbican (London, UK)

V. Brasilia (Brazil)

a. Descriptive of the superquadras b. Brasilia’s superquadra: Success or

failure?

VI. Conclusion

I. Introduction

The modernist movement has influenced the lifestyle of urbanites in most parts of the world. Le Corbusier, the epitome of Modern Architecture (Woudstra, 2000, p. 135), popularized high-rise housing, which gave a new face to many industrialized cities. Although some of Le Corbusier’s buildings are criticised for secluding the inhabitants from the urban realm, the brilliance of some of the concepts he put forward is irrefutable. The French architect created housing units that aimed to be sustainable by introducing mix usage, lowering dependence on motorized transportation and strengthening social interactions years before the term sustainable development was even coined in 1987 (Brundtland Commission). Although Le Corbusier’s utopian view of the city doesn’t always seem to be adapted to the ‘human scale’ (remember his plan for the ‘Contemporary City for 3 million inhabitants’?), his architectural contribution is eminent; it strongly contributed to solving the plight of the Industrial city and its destitute living conditions. This essay aims to analyse how Le Corbusier and the modernist movement catalysed a shift in the urban morphology of two countries where contextual elements made the move towards vertical housing preposterous. For this purpose, we will examine how London, a city which unlike its industrialized counterparts, has been reluctant to adapt the ‘flat’ as a housing unit until very recently. After underlining the historical elements that have made this transition difficult, we


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will discuss the case of the Barbican, a modernist ensemble that was highly influenced by Corbusian ideas. Thereafter, we will look at how modernist ideologies were concretized in Lucio Costa’s plan for Brasilia. For our first intention is to examine the extent to which modernism has demystified issues of population density in England with the Barbican, the core objective of this paper is to analyse the degree to which Corbusian ideals have succeeded in low-income economies. For this purpose, our analysis will focus on the effect that modernist housing and planning has had on Brasilia.

II. Historical Overlook of England’s Housing Typologies

This lack of a vernacular flat tradition makes England the clear odd-man-out in the context of European Housing pattern. (Sutcliffe, 1974, p. ix)

Close to one hundred years after the United Kingdom had entered the second phase of its Industrial Revolution, flats accounted for a mere 2.85% of the dwellings in England (Sutcliffe, 1974, p. ix). In a context where demographic pressure and technology had led the great majority of middle-class Parisians to move from individual houses to flats, London had remained almost untouched by the trend (Bulos & Walker, 1987, p. 1). Although the technology used by the Parisian and other industrialized cities was also available west of the English Canal, contextual physical and historical

elements rationalized the English’s partiality towards horizontal housing arrangements, despite changing dynamics. Unlike most other European countries, England’s metropolises removed their fortifications long before the Industrial Revolution (Sutcliffe, 1974, p. 11). “The walls of most towns, except in the northern areas still subject to Scottish incursions, began to be removed or ignored as early as the end of the fifteenth century” (Sutcliffe, 1974, p. 11). This was made possible because of geographical characteristics which made England, an island, difficult to attack. In turn, this lack of external physical barriers allowed the country’s major cities to extend territorially instead of vertically. As it is a “striking feature of housing history that the essential characteristics of basic dwelling-types change very little over time” (Sutcliffe, 1974, p. 1), England’s deeply rooted housing culture did not respond to rising demographic pressures like other powerhouses had at that time. Nonetheless, working-class neighbourhoods still developed into extremely dense residential settlements. The back-to-back houses – the preferred form of individual housing units for the working class in England during the Revolution, consisting of dwellings built in continuity and using party walls – allowed for densities averaging 630 habitants per acre (Sutcliffe, 1974, p. 14). In response to the high mortality rates, insufferable hygiene conditions, and the rising need for low-rent housing in central districts, London’s government encouraged the construction of high rise


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housing through public subsidies by the late 1950s (Bulos % Walker, 1987, p. 8). Between 1959 and 1967, the construction of flats of six storeys or more rose from 6% to 26% (Bulos & Walker, 1987, p. 8). Back-to-back houses

Google Images This picture of back-to-back houses shows how the built environment covers nearly all of the ground. The important footprint of this type of establishment leaves very little room for the natural environment and exterior leisure spaces. In fact, there is not one tree on the block south of the road on this picture.

III. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation and the Modernist Movement

London’s adaptation of high-rise housing is concurrent with the popularization of modernist architecture. In view of Le Corbusier’s strong influence on Modern Architecture, it is worth discussing his most symbolic project and the key concepts it epitomizes. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseilles was the first of four Cité Radieuse (Radiant City) built by the French architect. The experimental social housing project was commissioned by the municipal authority after the Second World War, when “in Marseilles alone, 32,000 families needed re-housing” (Sbriglio, 2004, p. 120). In Oeuvre complete volume 1, 1910-1929, Le Corbusier explains the need for design that makes better use of space (1992, p. 45); an argument that remained at the core of his discourse throughout his life. His utopian view of the urban realm commands for a green city, where “no inhabitant occupies a room without sunlight; everyone looks out on trees and sky” (Le Corbusier, 1964, p. 94). For this, Le Corbusier proposed the Unité d’habitation, where the superstructure would sit on pilotis, therefore freeing up the ground for pedestrians, trees and grass. The building would be positioned in relation to the sun and the trees, not the street. The design also capitalised on the concept of mix function, by shifting the streetscape from its conventional location, to inside the edifice:


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IV. The Barbican (London, UK) The English’s deeply rooted inclination towards low-rise housing did not withstand Le Corbusier’s influence. Chamberline, Powell & Bon, the architects of the Barbican Estate, “were profoundly influenced by the work of Le Corbusier and the Barbican enabled them to further develop these ideas” (Barbican Estate Guide). In fact, Corbusian concepts of vertical housing, mix use, green spaces, direct sunlight, use of pilotis and social integration, as represented in the Unité d’habitation, can all be found in the Barbican Estate. The extent to which these ideas were exploited is however far greater, which explains the success of the later. As it happens, the extensive catchments area of the services offered within the Barbican Estate are reflective of its larger scale; the Barbican contains a school of music and drama, an all-girl high school, a theatre, along with local businesses (namely a grocery store). Instead of transferring city elements to a singular building, the London-based architectural firm developed a complimentary arrangement having much in common with a meticulously planned walled city. Without being gated, the design of the Estate makes its penetration difficult, which ensures the serenity of its courtyard. This aspiration for green and peaceful living spaces comes as a response to the dystopian city of the Post Industrial and Post World War era. Cripplegate, the parish in which the Barbican is set, was critically affected by the war in 1940 (Barbican Estate Guide).

After it was blitzed in August of that year, its population dropped from 14,000 to 48 in 1951 (Barbican Estate Guide). The Barbican Estate

This bird-eye-view of the Barbican Estate clearly shows how much green and blue space this hig- density estate procures its residents. The extensive use of verticality of the three towers, and more moderate use of verticality of the rest of the Estate has made it possible to achieve high density while conserving many elements from the natural environment. Twenty-nine year after this bombing (1969), the Barbican’s 2014 flats were ready to house 4,000 people. The Estate’s population density of 101 habitants per square acre (Barbican Estate Guide) amounts to close to five times the density for the Greater London area


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(Wikipedia). Yet, its punctilious use of space and verticality has made it possible for this Estate to offer extensive green and blue sections, and spaces for leisure. The increase of Barbican flats’ market value is testament to its success; one bedroom flats that were initially sold for about 40,000£ in 1981 are today being sold for around 400,000£ (Barbican Site Tour, 2009). Natural environment and the use of pilotis

The use of pilotis has allowed for an even greater amount of soft surface, while also giving the pedestrian open views as the buildings are lifted above the field of vision. Although the Barbican was entirely council owned before 1981, it was never designed as a social housing estate but instead targeted middle management and technocrats (Barbican Estate Guide). If the Barbican now primarily caters to an elitist clientele, it remains that this experimental project was built, financed and administered by the public sector for over 10 years.

V. Brasilia (Brazil)

Brasilia’s superquadras, like the Barbican’s and Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation, is a project instigated by a public initiative (Batella de Siqueira, 2005, p. 73). In fact, most of the development of the Federal District of Brasilia was orchestrated and financed by Brazil’s federal government (Evanson, 1973, p. 156). The plan, drawn by Lucio Costa, was chosen in a national competition for the design of the new capital of Brazil (El-Dahdah, 2005, p. 11). Although our analysis will focus on the constraints and opportunities of the modernist movement in Brasilia’s superquadras, we will also refer back to Costa’s comprehensive urban development plan as it is also inspired by modernist ethos.

a. Descriptive of the superquadras The new city of Brasilia and its residential arrangement – the superquadras - gave the opportunity to Costa and Brasilia’s head architect, Oscar Niemeyer, to experiment with new urban forms. The idea behind the superquadra was to explore Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation concept at a scale even larger than that of the Barbican’s. The Costa plan groups slabs (buildings similar to ones for the Unité d’habitation, on pilots, but with 6 floors instead of 12) by clusters of around eleven, creating the quadra. Although quadras were designed to be more self-sufficient than l’Unité d’habitation, they would only operate as a comprehensive neighbourhood at the scale of the superquadra, the name given to arrangements of groupings of four quadras. The superquadra would then


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become “a sort of neighbourhood area that included shopping and other community services such as a movie theatre and a church” (Zapatel, 2005, p. 22). These neighbourhood units would form the basic element for Brasilia’s urban residential fabric. Similarly to other planned cities (e.g. New Delhi), the configuration of the residential arrangement was designed to create a level of autonomy within each ensemble that would encourage pedestrian movement and socialisation on commercial axis. “Local shops and schools were to double as meeting places” (Gorovitz, 2005, p. 41). The quadra The superquadra

These drawings from Costa’s plan of Brasilia show examples of a ‘quadra’, and an ensemble of four ‘quadras’, forming the ‘superquadra’. To Costa and Niemeyer, this opportunity to draw a new city, perforce, had to include every segment of the population into its design. “The residential superblocks, closed to those most needy, were destined to all the inhabitants of Brasilia” (Costa, 1957).

Residential Building on Pilotis in Brasilia

b. Brasilia’s superquadra: Success or failure? In the 1960s, “Kevin Lynch misread the neighbourhood unit as an island” (El-Dahdah, 2005, p. 12). This critic is reflective of many others whom have accused the Costa plan to produce an environment promoting spatial segregation. In a book bearing the stamp of approval of the Harvard Design School, El-Dahdah (2005, p. 12) outlines that despite being “viewed as the exemplar of all that is wrong with modern architecture’s urbanism […] [Brasilia] continues to thrive”. This contradiction is reflective of the

A quadra in Brasilia

The arrangement of residential buildings allowed for communal green spaces between them which are suited for children or to be used simply as ‘squares’, as many of them later were.


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futile concept of an ‘utopian’ city, as the urban realm can indeed work perfectly for some, yet never for all. Whilst it is clear that Brasilia is not an idyll city, it remains interesting to evaluate the degree to which the Costa plan fulfilled its purpose. Before investigating this matter, it is worth considering the limits of a new city and the goal of the plan:

In a normal city, urbanism’s objective is to create conditions that allow a city to sprout like a plant, unlike Brasilia, which is a product of reason imposed by an act of will that occurred with the expressed objective of transferring the country’s capital. […] [Which is why] Brasilia will never have the characteristics of a spontaneous city that so many people call for. (Interview with Lucio Costa, in Zapatel, 2005, p. 22)

If this statement proposes that Brasilia was blueprinted in a way that gave architecture the role of providing definite spaces for the city-dwellers (instead of proposing adaptable forms), the validity of the plan should be evaluated accordingly. So how does Brasilia perform as a city mainly for bureaucrats? How has this modernist city managed (or not) to formally provide for an informal sector so momentous in the Brazilian context? And how have modernist ethos contributed to the achievement or failure of these goals? In 1964, Brazil underwent a pivotal governmental transfiguration as military dictatorship superseded the democratic regime (Herbert, 1999). This shift

strikingly affected Brasilia, as the totalitarian system was supportive of a bourgeoisie against the transfer of the capital (Herbert, 1999). In turn, Niemeyer who has never disguised his alignment with the communist movement got exiled from Brazil (Herbert, 1999, p. 304). Whilst an important part of the Costa plan had already been built, the remaining was discarded; the Pilot Plan no longer had pilots. In these conditions, the social aspects of integration of Costa’s master plan were no longer being considered (Lefebvre, 1968, p. 274). Despite the important migration of poverty-stricken rural workers to Brasilia during the years where the construction industry offered stable employment for the working-class, “Brasilia had become virtually the only city in Brazil that appears largely free of internal favelas” (Evanson, 1973, p. 179). Unfortunately, this is not a result of successful integration of informal dwellings into the formal provision system, but a consequence of systematic displacement of informal settlements away from the city centre (Evanson, 1973, p. 179). Opposed to Costa and Niemeyer’s vision, a standardized system of spatial exclusion of the urban poor had been developed during the oligarchic regime. Ironically, it marginalized the people who have actually built the city. “The division of social classes between Brasilia and its satellites reflects the pattern of class distinction characteristic of Brazilian communities” (Evanson, 1973, p. 179) which Costa and Niemeyer had so strongly worked against:


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We were constrained by the conviction that it would be unfeasible to insure the workers the standard of living assigned them by the Pilot Plan, which situated them, as would have been only fair, within the collective housing areas so as to allow their children to grow up with other children of Brasilia in a friendly impartial association. (Niemeyer, in Evanson, 1973, p. 179)

For at one level it can be said that this territorial segregation places the burden of commuting on those least prepared to afford it, most importantly, this turn of event missed on an opportunity that comes by as seldom as new planned cities. The constraint fighting this objective could be said to have lied in an ingredient external to the modernist plan itself. As political forces, in line with urban capitalist modalities, repositioned social housings outside the edges of the Pilot Plan, merely 2% of Brasilia’s superquadras are intended for lower-income families (Herbert, 1999, p. 307). After the return of the democratic system in 1984 (Herbert, 1999, p. 308), Costa drafted a second plan for Brasilia where ‘economical’ superquadras would be located along the axis linking the planned and satellite cities (Costa, 1985). At that time, over 100,000 favelados were residing in Brasilia’s satellite cities (Herbert, 1999, p. 308), on top of the thousands belonging to the middle class who could no longer afford the inflated cost of housing in the planned city (Peluso, 1990, p. 742).

Although Brasilia fell short of its objective to create a city for all, it succeeded in creating a functional capital where 30% (300,000) of Brazil’s public servants reside. This amounts to 80% of the formal jobs in Brasilia (Herbert, 1999, p. 302). According to Brasilia’s citizens, the plan has allowed the formation of a comfortable and quieter place, where social ties with neighbours are strong, and the arrangement of the built environment in relation with the natural domain gives a sense of openness, freedom and privacy (Bernardes Ribiero & Litwinczik, 2005, p. 94). Although the fraction of citizens satisfied with their neighbourhood unit is significantly higher amongst those who have lived there the longest, which suggests that the people need to adapt to this very different built environment before truly appreciating it, newcomers are also generally pleased with their superquadras (Bernardes Ribiero & Litwinczik, 2005, p. 93). In fact, 84% of a survey group of 88 people ranging from newcomers to long-established Brasilienses said they were ‘satisfied with the neighbourhood unit’ (Bernardes Ribiero & Litwinczik, 2005, p. 93). The urban morphology and function prescribed by the Costa plan were also effective in guiding the spatial life. It has been observed that “in a superquadra people tend to gather at key points such as schools, playgrounds, bus stops, local stores, and the church” (Bernardes Ribiero & Litwinczik, 2005, p. 92). Also, the same research determined that about 85% of shoppers in a given superquadra commercial strip reside in adjacent superquadras (p. 92), thereby confirming their functioning as city blocks, concomitantly proving the


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likes of Lynch (1969) and Alexander wrong in their perception of the superquadras as an isolated and isolating urban forms. Notwithstanding, at the time of this study many superquadras had been readapted so as to reorient their façades towards the roads instead of the superquadras (William, 2007). Even though this reversal of shop fronts does not fit Modernist Architecture, it is interesting to see how the architectural design has allowed enough flexibility to make this adaptation possible. For its typical inhabitant, living in a superquadra implies “financial stability, home ownership, individual car, schools, cinemas, theatres, clubs, green spaces, viable roads, without traffic, and where physical safety is guaranteed” (Zanotta Machado & de Magalhaes, 1987). It is a place to work, raise children, and the “complexities, it is assumed, will come in their own time” (Evanson, 1973, p. 182). Without pretending to fit Sassen’s (2000) definition of a global city, the modernist disposition of Brasilia has shaped the capital into a functional place where many problematic aspects of urban life are seemingly inexistent, and where community life is strong. As a capital, Brasilia projects the image of a well-structured and updated country, perhaps more reflective of the Brazilian intention than its actuality. A plural approach to Brasilia’s design could have perhaps allowed this capital to better represent the country’s colourful culture, most often associated with winsome entropy as opposed to the impersonality of a modernist

city. On the other hand, Brasilia celebrates an architectural style for which Brazil is recognized worldwide.

VI. Conclusion

The Barbican and Brasilia projects capitalized on opportunities given by the public sector, and put forward grandiose modernist experimental projects inspired by Corbusian planning and architecture. They made use of the modernist influence to overcome problematic conditions: the post-war dystopian city in the London case, and the need for a functional integrationist comprehensive new capital in the second case. If “Brasilia represents a triumph of administration in a county never noted for efficient administration” (Evanson, 1973, p. 103), the transfer of political power that occurred in 1964 generated pivotal constraints on the Pilot Plan. For it is improbable that Brasilia could have achieved full integration of its community without a pluralist approach to housing provision, Costa’s plan was perhaps too prescriptive in its design. Inasmuch as new planned cities are inherently not spontaneous or organic, it remains possible to allow for impromptu growth by providing adaptable spaces (or simply leaving them untouched). Also, the ideals of integration of the Pilot Plan seem to misconceive the urban poor as a homogeneous group. Costa had planned for low-income dwellings, without considering the needs and ability to pay off for the poorest fraction of society. It hoped


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for integration to come as a result of better architecture, without enabling or providing mechanisms that could target societal resistances against vertical social and economic mobility. Architecture can surely play a role in the struggle against poverty and segregation, but it cannot suitably address this problem through this profession alone. In both the Barbican and the superquadra, the built environment has created an environment that facilitates social interaction and the sense of community. For all that, the modernist projects discussed in this paper did not successfully integrate heterogonous socioeconomic groups by design alone. It remains that these publicly funded projects still allowed for the creation of a new housing stock which, still today, caters to a certain group in society, whether French, Brazilian or English.

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Opportunities and Constraints in Modernist Architecture