ancient cities

694 Sert, Josep Lluís
to make it into a professional discipline that sought
to link architecture with planning and (to some
extent) landscape architecture. At Harvard he
began a series of urban design conferences in 1956,
and these had a large and continuing impact on the
field, though his efforts to alter the direction of
postwar American urbanization patterns proved to
have only a limited impact, much of it evident in
his campus architecture and planning. His campus
projects include major works for Harvard
University, Boston University, and the University
of Guelph, Ontario. His and Wiener’s ambitious
plan for Havana (1955–1957) was not carried out
because of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
Sert’s unpublished writings of this time reveal
that he had rejected what he called the “functionalist
dream cities of the 1920s” and instead admired
the active street life of cities like Bogotá and New
York. Related ideas would soon be developed by
Jane Jacobs into a full-fledged rejection of Le
Corbusier and modernism, though this was a step
Sert was never willing to take. Jacobs, then an
architectural journalist, first voiced her ideas about
the importance of pedestrian urban street life at
the first Harvard Urban Design conference in
1956. In 1960 Sert launched the world’s first professional
Master of Urban Design program at
Harvard. This was a joint degree program in
which all the students were also professional master’s
students in architecture, landscape architecture,
or planning. Sert hired Willo von Moltke to
head this program in 1961; von Moltke was a
planning associate of Edmund N. Bacon in
Philadelphia who had overseen the urban design
plan for the Society Hill area and the work of I. M.
Pei within it. Various faculty taught in the program,
including the landscape architect Hideo
Sasaki, the historian Eduard Sekler, and the planner
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. It also included Fumihiko
Maki from 1962 to 1965 and various visitors such
as Shadrach Woods. Sert also introduced the use of
computers into urban design at the Harvard
Graduate School of Design in 1966 and chose the
architect of its new building, John Andrews, before
his retirement there as dean in 1969. By this point,
however, the modernist planning direction he represented
was under challenge from a variety of
directions, and his efforts at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design are still often criticized as elitist
and insensitive to the demolition of historic
buildings. In the early 1970s his firm was commissioned
by the New York State Urban Development
Corporation to design housing at the “new town
in town” of Roosevelt Island and in Yonkers, New
York. These projects attempted to soften the usual
image of high-rise housing and to include more
communal facilities within them.
In the 1970s Sert was active in efforts to promote
the UN focus on human settlements, which
resulted in the Habitat II conference in Vancouver,
British Columbia, in 1974. These efforts also included
architects Nader Ardalan and Moshe Safdie. He also
worked on an unfinished book, Balanced Habitat,
and continued to practice architecture in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and Ibiza, Spain, until his death in
1983. In subsequent years much of his work has
been neglected and is usually now seen as part of
mid-century brutalist modernism. Until recently
there has been little awareness of how Sert’s
urbanistic ideas differed from those of Le Corbusier
and how important his role was in advancing the
set of ideas that are now identified with the term
urban design.
Eric Mumford
See also Architecture; City Planning; Le Corbusier; Urban
Design
Further Readings
Bastlund, Knud. 1967. José Luis Sert: Architecture, City
Planning, Urban Design. London: Thames & Hudson.
Mumford, Eric. 2009. Defining Urban Design: CIAM
Architects and the Formation of a Discipline,
1937–69. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Mumford, Eric and Hashim Sarkis, eds. 2008. Josep Lluís
Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953–1969.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Pizza, Antonio. 2006. “Politics and Architecture.”
Pp. 96–125 in GATCPAC: Una nueva arquitectura
para una nueva ciudad (A New Architecture for a New
City), edited by A. Pizza and J. Rovira. Barcelona,
Spain: Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña y Baleares.
Rovira, Josep. 2000. José Luis Sert, 1901–1983. Milan,
Italy: Electa.
Sert, Josep Lluís. 1937. “Cas d’application: Villes.”
CIAM V Report No. 2, Logis et Loisirs. Boulognesur-Seine,
France: Éditions de l’architecture
d’aujourd’hui.