Architectural form: David Dunster considers the historical relationship between architecture and engineering, how it was tested during the early years of Modernism and how structure might yet fulfil its potential for expression.

Major buildings increasingly demonstrate the ingenuity of structural engineers to provide distinctive form. Indeed, most buildings dubbed iconic by the press could be criticised as whimsical and arbitrary--the engineer's contribution. Which might lead to the question as to why clients employ architects at all--why not eliminate the middle man and go directly to the structural engineer? To broaden this question beyond the balance sheet, could architecture now proceed, even progress, without new engineering developments? Form and the processes of design by which architects seek form presume a degree of innovation, invention even; otherwise rationalist thinking in modern architecture would produce a series of architectural types. These types, both functional and formal, would be repeated. Through repetition, gradual improvement would result, on the model of industrial production and what, in the sciences, Thomas Kuhn called 'normal science' as opposed to those breakthroughs which create a shift of paradigm. The practice of architecture depends on the tensions between invention and repetition. Does invention solely derive, as we now seem to hold, from forms that engineers innovate?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Engineering modernity

We know that in the interpretation of history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, engineering, particularly the engineering of structure, played a major role. (The idea that a great Gothic structure would emit a musical harmony if struck is as apocryphal as the idea that human nature exists and never changes.) In the Modern Movement, adoration of industrial structures vitiated the publications of Erich Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier, and was the subject of the first publication by the secretary of CIAM Sigfried Giedion. On 15 February 1929, Walter Benjamin wrote to Giedion thanking him for his new book Building in France. (1) In 1927 Benjamin had begun the work, also recently translated, known as The Arcades Project. This was to occupy him until his departure from Paris in 1940, but parts of it appeared in essay form and in presentations to friends and colleagues from the Institute for Social Research, initially in Frankfurt and then in New York. In this, Giedion's book is quoted more than 20 times, and from Benjamin's letter it is very clear that he regarded Giedion and himself as being on the same track.

Their purposes were similar in perhaps only one respect: a desire to uncover the origins of modernity in the nineteenth century.

Their differences were monumental. France was the natural home, for Giedion, to experiment with two new materials: cast iron and reinforced concrete, largely undertaken by engineers but also, in a few cases, by architects. He seems caught between recognising the radicalism of the new modern architecture and wanting to root it in history, and therefore in a greater tradition that firmly connects materials with their structural possibilities and potential for change. Benjamin, by contrast, sought to explore ideas which, within a conventional Marxist frame, would be regarded as superstructures upon an economic base. The ideas in The Arcades Project focus upon Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century. He envisaged that it would reveal, elliptically, the concepts and forms, both intellectual and material, which governed production of the entire environment, language, behaviour, fashion, architecture, city planning, and manners: the list is almost endless. (2)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Giedion, unlike Benjamin, wants an activist history, a history, as Banham called it, of the immediate present, (3) a history that encourages modern architects to experiment. For Giedion, the basis of this experiment is materials plus techniques and technology; only these can combine to produce the new forms that embody the zeitgeist in a truthful fashion (ie, one not subject to mere formalism), and also line up with the advances of science, the emerging religion of progress. This combination can solve (the word is not an accident) the problems of the times. The lineage of these new forms is demonstrated in the work of French engineers. Buildings were distinguished by movement: railway stations, exhibition buildings, bridges and department stores. In the 1920s, such potential could and should be explored in housing, factories and above all in city planning. Giedion made it a practice to visit all buildings and to photograph them (he took most of the pictures in his books). His sense of modern architecture was, therefore, neither theoretical nor confined to published works in magazines or books but direct, and visceral.

Benjamin, by contrast, was a total bibliophile. We can hardly doubt, however, that he was a flaneur of the Parisian arcades. He refers to Le Corbusier's written work, L'Urbanisme, (4) but there is no direct evidence that Benjamin had visited the exhibition (5) in which Le Corbusier had exhibited the diorama that Benjamin later discusses. He interprets Le Corbusier's vision thus: 'Le Corbusier's "contemporary city" is yet another settlement along a highway Only the fact that now its precincts are travelled over by autos, and that airplanes now land in its midst, changes everything. An effort must be made to secure a foothold here from which to cast a productive glance, a form-and-distance-creating glance, on the nineteenth century.' (6)

Precisely what he means by 'a form-and-distance-creating glance' can only be surmised. Benjamin's object is not, as the architect's object, to see the future in the past. Indeed Benjamin wondered if architects' fascination with nineteenth-century engineering was shared at all by the general populace, who Benjamin believed despised and hated it. In the phrase 'yet another settlement along a highway' we might think of strip architecture or Las Vegas. Benjamin could not have known either. Perhaps he was thinking of Russian plans, of imagined linear cities which would, in turn, be re-used by Le Corbusier in his 1936 project for Thomas Bata at Zlin in Czechoslovakia. However Benjamin's thoughts focus upon the whole city. Giedion, by contrast, is laying out the design agenda for future architects.

Giedion realised that architects read images faster than text--he covers the profession's word blindness by describing how the hurried reader can take in Building in France simply by reading the illustrations and their captions. The characteristics of the new architecture were not totally clear to him in 1927. While he photographs buildings under construction to show their relation to earlier nineteenth-century engineering works, he does not list those characteristics that would establish the visual cliches of the International Style. Of those photographs, one of the most interesting is a construction shot of Mies van der Rohe's Weissenhof apartment building clearly showing a steel frame infilled with concrete block awaiting the finishing coat of white render. (7)

Technique and materials

What were those characteristics that truly relied upon technique and materials? We cannot fail to begin with Le Corbusier's Five Points, the definitive lexicon of form that makes concrete the formulas on which Modern Architecture is based. If Richard Meier has done nothing else, he has demonstrated just how far these formulas can be pushed. The structural frame, the facade separated from structure, the strip window, the flat roof--these are the equivalent of the periodic table. But what unites them? For Le Corbusier it was the promenade architecturale, which could engender a sense of modernity. Space was the prize and a greater sense of man's domination of it. While that promenade can be likened to the walks prescribed by English landscape architects, notably at Rousham and Stourhead, this promenade became specific to certain architects. Tom Ellis found it not only in Le Corbusier but also in Aalto. The sense of dynamic space was what motivated architects like Mies, often resulting in a deliberate use of asymmetry in a structurally symmetrical enclosure such as the Farnsworth House.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The role of structure

So where does that leave structure? One of Giedion's examples, reused by Benjamin, is the Pont Transbordeur at Marseilles of 1905, Giedion's first illustration (his own photograph was the cover of the book). His caption reads: 'A mobile ferry suspended by cables from the footbridge high above the water connects traffic on the two sides of the harbour. This structure is not to be taken as a "machine". It cannot be excluded from the urban image, whose fantastic crowning it denotes. But its interplay with the city is neither "spatial" nor "plastic". It engenders floating relations and interpenetrations. The boundaries of architecture are blurred.' (8) Benjamin quotes him as saying 'In the 19th century, construction plays the role of the subconscious'. Giedion continues: 'Outwardly, construction still boasts the old pathos; underneath, concealed behind facades, the basis of our present existence is taking shape.' Benjamin comments: 'Wouldn't it be better to say "the role of bodily processes"--around which "artistic" architectures [sic] gather like dreams around the framework of physiological processes?' (9)

Construction--structure actually--is therefore to be exposed; only by coming to the surface can it cease to be subconscious, in that Jungian formulation, and be brought out into the open to be conscious. And we are thus more aware of ourselves because we see the skeleton upon which our lives depend. The engineer is therefore a kind of psychoanalyst who can bring to the awareness of the public that which had previously been hidden, thereby ensuring that what architects design is truthful to us and to our age. But does it matter that Le Corbusier conceals the actual structure of the Villa Stein behind a cantilevered flat facade of strip windows; or that Mies hides the Weissenhof apartment buildings' structure behind white render; or that in the Villa Savoie none of the column grids actually line through from front to back or side to side? There can be a narrative for architecture which is not a lie, and that narrative will not be dominated by structure but by a higher quality For Giedion, that quality is the almost metaphorical and certainly not subconscious sense of space. Structure and structural engineering might not be brought to the surface but, as with much nineteenth-century architecture implied and not stated.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Some 15 years ago during the first conference organised to prop up declining interest in architectural theory, the great South American jurist Roberto Mangabeira Unger began his speech with this thought: 'The trouble with style in contemporary architecture has three sources. One cause is artistic: the absence of a canonical set of forms sustained by authoritative standards of expression and representation. The second basis is social: the inability of any one group in society to get its anxieties recognised as the ones that count. The third root, and the most important, lies in engineering: the increasing failure of physical constraints to determine the shape of buildings. The attempt to disclose in the outward appearance the internal structural necessity--an ideal most fully satisfied in the emergence of late Gothic and early Modernism--now seems to have lost its premise if not its point. As a result, the commitment to a particular style may appear to be both coercive and gratuitous. The architect's stylistic positionings may seem tainted by narcissism or pandering.' (10) Despite Unger's reliance upon that nineteenth-century myth, the accusation of the final paragraph stands, but now with the added irony that physical constraints appear to have been found which can be argued to provide new shapes of building even if they are not physical constraints.

To return to the first issue: are buildings and their structures inseparable in Modernist theory? So much of the new architecture in the 1920s depended upon how to work with reinforced concrete, with steel and with glass; it is inconceivable to think of the great houses of Le Corbusier, the experimental skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe or the undervalued buildings of Bijvoet and Duiker without realising that structural engineering almost formed the Modern Movement. Almost but not quite. Each of those architects used structure as a device, and ignored it when they chose. Rowe and Slutsky famously differentiated between actually being able to see into a building, or even to see through it--literal transparency and being able to comprehend the building through the senses, with the intellect. This second kind of transparency, called phenomenological, relates it perhaps unwittingly to the philosophical movement of the same name--phenomenology. It is just this kind of verbal ambiguity, confusing uses in different discourses, structuralism meaning an obsession for structure--pace Frampton--that makes talking and writing plainly about architecture more complex than need be, while never detracting from the hidden complexities of the design process. The most ambiguous word in built environment disciplines is 'design', meaning either the whole process in architecture or the disposition of reinforcing rods in concrete beams. Let me test this against the ideas of structure, and how structures, together with some commitment to transparency, have influenced architectural production.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Battle of the styles

A proposition: in seeking transparency in architectural designs, architects have radically connected to a positive and democratic desire to demystify as far as possible what any building might mean, which is reduced in extremis to how it might be used. In particular, transparency has been interpreted as an objective which will promote greater honesty about what buildings are made from and about how they were made. This greater honesty presupposes that materials are used properly by the architect ('properly' the adverb from which the vaguest of terms--appropriate--derives). This doctrine can be traced back to Frank Lloyd Wright (11) who was certainly more than capable of hiding the steel beams that supported his apparently timber and brick houses. Such a presumed honesty should extend as well to the same coding or expression of internal function on the building's exterior. Furthermore, what holds the building up should be visually differentiated from that which keeps the building up--its structure. A building's structure should thus form an element of the expressive potential--for some the element--and by so doing, structure will assist in the pursuit of the objective to be transparent. Structural expression is entailed by transparency, either as fact or as sense impression. For clarification, those who have heroically achieved this might be set against those architects who do not deem such achievement to be an essential part of architecture. Thus early Modernist canonical heroes plus Kahn, the Smithsons, Stirling and the 'new Brutalists', the High-Tech architects and even those Deconstructivists back in the 1980s. The later minimalists might form one camp set against the revivalists: Venturi, assorted Postmodernists, Rossi and Ungers, most rationalists, and of course the mass of speculative house-building, PFI projects and anything designed by a surveyor.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It may be too tempting to see this as a re-run of the battle of the styles between Gothic--entailing myths of structural authenticity, with the structural columns, vaults, flying buttresses contributing not only to structural soundness but also to the look of Gothic--and Classical, whose simplicity and coherent 'language' of forms, orders, grids, proportions and so on ignores structural honesty and an expressive use of materials and is, at worst, painted. The loss in the intervening period is that fragile idea of phenomenal transparency, which must entail a world view, politics and a vision of how society could be.

1 Georgadis introduction to the first English translation, p53.

2 Benjamin's translator writes: 'In the dusty cluttered corridors of the arcades where street and interior are one, historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and momentary come-ons, myriad displays of ephemera, thresholds for the passage of what Gerard de Nerval (in Aurelia) calls "the ghosts of material things". Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress", is the ur-historical, collective redemption of lost time, of the times embedded in the spaces of things.'

3 Banham's attitude to Giedion was sceptical. In lectures at the Bartlett in 1963 he referred to Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture as 'Spare Time in Architecture' mindful of Giedion's private means as the scion of a textile producing family and thus dismissing him as a moneyed dilettante.

4 L'Urbanisme, published in Paris 1924 and translated in 1929 as The City of Tomorrow.

5 Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the Exhibition of the Decorative Arts, Paris 1925, where Le Corbusier exhibited the diorama of the Plan Voisin--see p230 of the English translation. A copy of the pavilion and of the diorama exists in the Fiera in Bologna.

6 The Arcades Project, p407.

7 Ibid, pl31.

8 Ibid, p90, fig 1.

9 Ibid.

10 Robert Mangabeira Unger in Anyone (ed Cynthia B. Davidson, 1991, p30).

11 'Bring out the nature of the materials, let their nature intimately into your scheme ... Reveal the nature of the wood, plaster, brick or stone in your designs; they are all by nature friendly and beautiful.' Frank Lloyd Wright, from Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Gerald Nordland, ed Frank Lloyd Wright: In the Realm of Ideas, p48.