ancient cities

uilt from this plan, although Sert also designed a
tuberculosis clinic in Barcelona and some schools
for the Catalan government at this time as well.
In July 1936, Sert began living mostly in Paris,
where he worked for the Spanish government’s
tourist board and continued his CIAM activities.
He became friends with the Zagreb CIAM émigré
Ernest Weissmann and with Le Corbusier’s interior
design associate Charlotte Perriand. The three
worked on a planned “popular” publication of the
results of the famous fourth CIAM meeting, held
between Athens and Marseille in 1933, a version of
which was later published by Sert as Can Our
Cities Survive? (1942). At this time Sert was commissioned,
along with Madrid architect Luis Lacasa,
to design the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris
Exhibition. This important work housed propaganda
exhibits and artworks like Picasso’s
Guernica, and Alexander Calder’s Fountain of
Mercury. With the fall of the Spanish Republic, Sert
and Moncha left Europe, sailing first to Havana,
and from there arriving in New York in June 1939.
Once in the United States Sert practiced briefly
with Weissmann, who had also emigrated to New
York, and then in 1941 joined another émigré, Paul
Lester Wiener, in founding the firm Town Planning
Associates. Wiener had connections with the U.S.
State Department and he and Sert began to be commissioned
to plan new towns in Latin America; the
commissions in Latin America formed the bulk of
the firm’s work until its dissolution in 1959. With the
help of Harvard Chair of Architecture Walter Gropius,
Sert lectured and taught on urbanism in American
modernist design schools. In 1944 he signaled a
new direction in his CIAM thinking with the essay
“The Human Scale in City Planning,” in which he
followed Lewis Mumford in emphasizing the cultural
importance of pedestrian civic centers and
calling for new cities to be built in the form of
compact, walkable “neighborhood units.” These
ideas were demonstrated in Sert and Wiener’s
Brazilian Motor City project of 1944, which was
exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York in 1947. The firm was then commissioned by
a democratically elected government in Peru for a
plan for the new industrial port of Chimbote and
a master plan for Lima, the latter designed with
Ernesto Rogers, an important Italian CIAM member.
After a military coup in Peru, Sert and Wiener
began working extensively in Colombia, where
Sert, Josep Lluís
693
they were commissioned for master plans for
Tumaco, Medellín, Bogotá, and Cali. They established
a local CIAM group and advocated, as they
had in Peru, new urban planning legislation, much
of which was then enacted. In 1949 Le Corbusier
joined Sert, Wiener, and Colombian CIAM members
in developing a master plan for Bogotá. Sert’s
Medellín (1948) and Bogotá (1949–1952) plans
were significant in attempting to limit the physical
spread of these rapidly growing industrial cities
while accommodating much higher population
densities and planning for efficient vehicular and
pedestrian circulation. Unlike Le Corbusier’s plans,
such as that for the new Indian provincial capital
of Chandigarh (1950–1960), which used some elements
of the Bogotá plan, including the “7V” categorization
of the highway routes, Sert’s plans did not
place the main emphasis on the monumental core
but instead sought to increase pedestrian circulation
throughout the city, retaining what are now usually
called “urban” qualities, while still advocating the
use of Corbusian modern architecture.
At the sixth meeting of CIAM in 1947, Sert was
chosen as president of CIAM, and at the seventh
CIAM in 1949, held in the historic town of
Bergamo, Italy, Sert began to advocate the importance
of the pedestrian core of the city, contrasting
the high urban quality of Bergamo with what he
called the “chaos” of modern industrial cities. For
the eighth meeting of CIAM, held in 1951 in
Hoddesdon near London, Sert selected the theme
“The Heart of the City” and in his opening address
insisted on the political as well as cultural importance
of urban spaces for face-to-face discussion and
demonstration, presciently pointing out the dangers
of new mass media–based politics. Unfortunately,
none of his urban projects in Brazil, Peru, or
Colombia was built as designed (although some
elements of the Colombian plans were implemented
later), and his work in Venezuela (1951–1953)
for industrial towns along the Orinoco and Caroní
rivers (the site of the later Ciudad Guayana) did
not materialize.
In 1953 Sert was appointed dean of the Harvard
Graduate School of Design at the suggestion of
Walter Gropius; while there he began to restructure
the curriculum to focus on what he began to
call urban design. This term had been used occasionally
by Eliel Saarinen at his Cranbrook
Academy of Art in the 1940s, but Sert was the first