Architectural Association

Sharp Words: Selected Essays of Dennis Sharp

To commemorate the life and work of Dennis Sharp (1933–2010), Sharp Words collates together a variety of essays that touch upon each of his architectural fascinations – among them, glass architecture, picture palaces, masters of concrete and English modernism.

Punctuating these texts are a number of editorials from his days as editor of AAQ, which graphically as much as intellectually offer emblems of his time at the AA.

EvEry Spirit builDS itSElf A houSE;AnD bEyonD itS houSE A WorlD AnDbEyonD itS WorlD A hEAvEn…builD, thErEforE, your oWn WorlD. ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay on nature

Contents

5 introduction: pluralism in a Singular life

7 Connell, Ward and lucas: Men from Mars?

13 Space, light and form

27 theatre Spaces and performances

41 Kisho Kurokawa: 1934–2007

45 paul Scheerbart’s Glass World

69 Another one bites the Dust: the Greenside Case

75 Mackintosh and Muthesius

85 Dennis Sharp interviews bruce Goff

95 the Aesthetics of Expressionist Architecture

99 bruno Zevi: 1918–2000

103 Design Considerations in british Cinemas During the thirties

121 Culture, form and the Architect: two Experiments in Community living

129 AAQ: Comments and Cover Gallery

145 utopian ideals and the Complexity of the Modern City

156 Sources

159 Acknowledgements

160 Colophon

8 9

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Space, light and form

Twentieth-Century Architecture: A Visual History2002

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‘it is the forms, the shapes and the patterns of architecture which everyone first apprehends and which also have survival value.’ – henry-russell hitchcock

t h E D Er i vAt i o n o f i D E A S i n t W En t i E t h - C En t u ry A r C h i t EC t u r E

In reviewing a period of rapidly changing ideas, fashions and tastes the difficulty is that of finding the point in time at which to start the analysis. This difficulty faces anyone tracing the development of architecture in the twentieth century.What, in essence, is twentieth-century architecture? Is it different from previous architecture and, if so, in what way? What is meant by ‘modern’ architecture? Is its almost continuous use in the second half of the nineteenth century any different from the more portentous usage it gets today? In attempting to provide a record of this century’s architecture, I have purposely chosen examples which have had some generic importance or have played some innovatory part in architecture over the past century. I use ‘modern’ as a keyword, synonymous with ‘avant-garde.’ It is an elastic term. As ‘architectural modernism’ it can be stretched to include the tangled progress of many revivals – neo-Baroque, neo-Liberty or the more recent ‘new vernacular’ – as well as the idiosyncrasies of inconsistent designers. What it does not cover is as pertinent as what it does: I have omitted the blubber of Edwardian Britain’s magnificent but largely irrelevant edifices and their continental counterparts, the illiterate revival of interest in Classicism by Fascist states and the middle-of-the-road meanderings of government architects and public works departments around the world. The buildings featured here are therefore not the only important build-ings of their day, nor necessarily the ones that excited the most comment at the time. But I would argue that they do represent a forward-looking attempt to alter attitudes and conventions towards architecture. Why then should one isolate these buildings of the twentieth century if they tell only a partial story of what has been known since the 1830s as ‘modern architecture’ – an architecture, that is, which belongs to the modern age and is thus different from the architec-ture of all previous epochs? The answer to my own question is in a quotation from Professor E Laube: ‘Every definition or theory of architecture represents a certain kind of architecture. Every definition or theory of architecture gives an answer to what is architecture. Every manifestation of architecture favours the growth of a new definition or theory of architecture.’ The Victorian ‘moderns’ sought for a change in kind. A change in terms of definition and theory was to take much longer. The nineteenth century was an age of rapid growth and unprecedented expansion in virtually every field of human endeavour, in which new ideas shot

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from the heads of inventors, industrialists, philosophers and artists like the sparks from an early electric generator. The simile can be taken further: in the arts and architecture the nineteenth century was an ‘electro-dynamic’ age in which the forces excited by one fashionable current had an effect on others. Architecture was in a rut. With the ever-increasing knowledge of past styles, buildings no longer had to conform to established patterns or to the dictates of a patriarch or a region. With the demand for completely new types of building

– railway stations, hospitals, universities and other educational buildings, as well as mass housing for industry, new settlements – architects themselves became confused over matters of style, status and method. A liberation of ideas and a common revolutionary feeling characterised the second stage of modernism at the end of the nineteenth century, when the ‘enemy’ had been identified as revivalism and eclecticism. There was a conviction that whatever came after the battle had been won would represent a new order, a new aesthetic, a new sensibility, the hope of a new world. Ruskin, Morris, Darwin and Freud all contributed to the new sensibility. So, too, did British nuts-and-bolts specialists like Joseph Paxton, the engineer who built the sensational glass palace for the exhibition of 1851 in London, and W H Barlow, the engineer of the St Pancras train shed – the longest span arch in the world in 1864 – and countless other engineering innovators who transformed the world of solid, four-walled architecture into one depending on lightness, spectacular open spaces and structural adventure.

r At i o n A l M At Er i A l S

The generally accepted view by architectural historians that the introduction of new materials almost miraculously caused a breakthrough on every sector of the design front is a myth. Virtually all the materials used, and most of the technical developments introduced by architects even well into the twentieth century, were known and had certainly been tried years before in the previous century while the more conventional techniques and materials, such as timber, stone, brick and concrete, go back to antiquity. The material that the engineers so confidently and prophetically handled was, of course, iron, both cast and wrought. It was not by any means a new material, but through improved methods of manufacture it had taken on the characteristics of a tough all-purpose substitute for masonry and brick. Without the precedent set by the nineteenth-century engineers, the modern movement in architecture might have been very different, but few indeed were the architects who saw in iron engineering any real possibilities for a new architecture. Viollet-le-Duc, the French restorer, architect, theorist and encyclopedist, saw ways of producing

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the effects of stonework more economically and, above all, more rationally with iron, but as John Summerson points out in an essay in his book Heavenly Mansions, ‘Viollet-le-Duc’s rationalism did not succeed, any more than the English fumbling with styles.’ Over a period of time, however, the influence of Viollet-le-Duc, of the Viennese architect and teacher Otto Wagner, the Dutchman H P Berlage and of the German neo-classicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel, manifestly created a climate of opinion in which a ‘modern’ architecture could emerge. A complex process of cumulative influences engendered the ‘new art and architecture’ which eventually manifested itself under the blanket term Art Nouveau, the French-inspired counterpart to the fin-de-siècle movement which spread through Europe like a bushfire after 1885. The effects of newness and originality were not tied to any one technological advance or new aesthetic idea, but were produced by a general sense of liberation from the repressive routines of forever having to pour new wine into old bottles. There is, however, one important technical discovery which does impinge on any discussion of the new architecture. That is the development in reinforced concrete from the 1890s onward. This artificial monolithic mate-rial derived from the combination of steel and concrete became possible because of the tensile and compressive qualities of the respective materials. It offered undreamt-of possibilities for architecture. It was a material as solid-looking as stone, but it overcame the problems of dead loads; it was relatively elastic, flex-ible and economic to produce; it was self-finishing, speedily erected, fireproof and easily calculable. The repercussions of reinforced concrete construction on twentieth-century architectural design were of paramount importance in establishing a new appearance to buildings. This plain-surfaced material, which did not easily respond to ornamentation either carved into or added to its faces, allowed for an architecture of plain wall surfaces with roofs like billiard tables, exactly along the lines predicted by the fin-de-siècle prophets.

A r C h i t EC t u r E A n D o r n A M En t

Another myth is that of the plea for an architecture freed from ornamentation, an argument which is to be found in the writings of all the important modern-age theorists and architects during and after the Art Nouveau period. It is well known that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect and journalist, equated ornament with crime, and that later architects such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, J J P Oud and Mies van der Rohe, carefully eliminated it from their work, only to replace ornament with the use of surface textures, the application of colour, the articulation of surfaces and the employment of precise

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geometrical shapes. The battle over ornament was related to the victory over eclectic mannerisms of previous architectural styles, particularly the superficial fripperies associated with the decorative revivals throughout Europe at the end of the century. The ‘no ornamentation’ argument was part of a much wider plea for freedom in life. It was motivated by deep aesthetic desires for structural honesty and clearly defined volumes. This plainness of surface was provided by the very few examples of buildings erected by the leaders of the new school of thought. The impact of these must have been almost as shocking as the first glimpse of full frontal nudity on the stage a few years ago. The public and the critics responded to the new, ‘naked’ architecture of Loos, Hoffmann and Le Corbusier with a measure of revulsion – without realising that here was the invention of a new form of architectural expression which depended on a simple building envelope, a dynamic aesthetic based on the grouping of masses, spatial interpenetration and hard surface edges. In the past, ornamentation had implied an obscurity of contours and a softening of edges, but in spite of some critics the past itself was not anathema to all the new designers. Hans Poelzig wrote in 1906: ‘We cannot do without the past in solving the architectural problems of our own day’, particularly ‘on the mastery of tectonic problems.’ Where ornamentation had played an impor-tant part in the great periods of the past it was justifiable; it was not justifiable when applied surface deep and spoiled the ‘organic clarity’ of an architectural solution. According to Poelzig and his colleagues, the new architecture would be ruled by objective considerations rather than simply artistic ones, and would be characterised by a want of confusion over its tectonic purpose. At the opening of this century there was an attempt to establish a connection between architectural theory and practice. It is therefore appropriate to consider here in some detail the theoretical aspects of the pictorial survey which follows, and to continue the discussion, serial fashion, in the introduc-tions to the successive decades. It is, of course, a dangerous piece of ground on which to tread, and I am only persuaded to put my foot on it in the hope of dispelling some curious notions which have grown up over the years among the public, among architects, and among architectural students about ‘style,’ the ambivalence of architecture as a science or an art, and making qualitative judge-ments about buildings. What may appear to one section of the public as ‘square and oblong, angular structures,’ without the ‘vestige of grace and nobility, elegance and charm’ – as one recent newspaper editorial put it – may appear to another part to be a fitting representation of the present age. To both sections, what is being considered is the final look of a project. In doing so, one need not devalue the social importance of a building, nor the technical developments implied in it, nor any wider environmental issues that may impinge upon it. These are other ingredients in the architectural mix. But I am convinced that

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50 51

58 59

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modern world. Embedded in these too were the beginnings of a re-evaluation of ideals – both architectural and theoretical. The desire to establish a new vocabulary, the need to examine meanings and values as well as the start of man-environment studies (by Rapoport, Gottmann, Hall, as well as Rudofsky with his delicious treatises on a vernacular architecture without architects). Soleri examined planning and the spread of the two-dimensional suburban cloud. He saw the storm warning. Do I have to remind you? – one conurbation down the eastern seaboard of the US of A. Thousands of four-square gridded townships die-stamped out in every available square mile and connected together with those insensitive sinews of transport and commercial life we used to call roads and now give fancy names to like route ways, turnpikes, motorways, etc. He attacked CUM principles as well as Doxiadis. He conceived of three-dimensional structures to be concentrated on small tracts of land. Thus he condemned the two-dimensional flat, spread-out city as dysfunctional and ‘alienating’ because it contributes to energy and pollution problems (as it depends on the inexorable logic of the automobile) and because it creates barriers to human and cultural interaction. Arcosanti is an experiment in conceptual analysis and a product of continual thinking of man’s predicament. It is being built by voluntary labour and energised by the sun’s rays. It will cover 13 acres of a 860-acre site preserved for use and enjoyment. It will eventually house a population of 4–5,000 people and will be virtually self-sufficient. It will continue to serve as a guinea pig for social, economic, ecological and architectural research. To this end, the large festivals now associated with Arcosanti and commenced a few years ago – crowds of up to 10,000 people a day have crowded around its stages and auditoria to enjoy the external architecture that such a place affords. But it is more than an entertainment centre – it exists, in Soleri’s view, to enhance man’s condition. In a construction sense it is a man-made place – like all cities – but it is a proto-type as well of an urban condition in a natural setting. Culture, form and the visionary architect meet again at Arcosanti as they did in Urbino, Florence, Bath and Chandigarh.

1 See the issue of Architectural Design nov 1981 devoted to Anglo-American suburbs. See also Walter Creese, Search

for Environment (yale, 1966).

2 See Architectural Design nov 1981 and Doty D, ‘the town of pullman’, Pullman 211, 1983 (reprinted 1974) which states:

‘pullman has put the working man upon a higher plane and placed about him conditions which are better than he could have hoped for unaided…’

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