Wi<strong>en</strong>er and Sert, master plan for Medellin: sketch done by Sert. Josep Lluís Sert, the Ciam "Heart of the City" and the <strong>Bogotá</strong> <strong>Plan</strong> | Eric Mumford 247
mer colleague from GATCPAC in Barcelona, Antoni Bonet, pres<strong>en</strong>ted the Arg<strong>en</strong>tine group’s plan for Bu<strong>en</strong>os Aires at CIAM 7 and received a cool reception from both <strong>Le</strong> <strong>Corbusier</strong> and Sert, although the plan had first be<strong>en</strong> developed with <strong>Le</strong> <strong>Corbusier</strong> in 1938. Afterward Bonet wrote to his associates in the Austral group, Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy and Juan Kurchan, «After having se<strong>en</strong> how they have dealt with the <strong>Plan</strong> of <strong>Bogotá</strong> I can clearly see how wrong our office was about the way we set out». Bonet continued, «I have be<strong>en</strong> to V<strong>en</strong>ice. It is the greatest lesson of urbanism. I think I have learned a lot from it. St. Mark’s square is fantastic. We have come to good results with the c<strong>en</strong>ter of our barrio. I think we should carry on with the research on this c<strong>en</strong>ter, it is shaping up well. We should also propose the construction of one of those c<strong>en</strong>ters in every barrio designated by the plan». By CIAM 8, ev<strong>en</strong> Gropius had begun to support this new CIAM direction, ev<strong>en</strong> though it had little evid<strong>en</strong>t impact on his planning efforts in Chicago with Isaacs and TAC. At CIAM 8 Gropius also advocated cores that would «give back the right of way to the pedestrian», based on the squares in Mexican villages and on the Piazza San Marco in V<strong>en</strong>ice, the latter a per<strong>en</strong>nial urban design model for <strong>en</strong>closed public space that had frequ<strong>en</strong>tly be<strong>en</strong> invoked by Eliel Saarin<strong>en</strong> at Cranbrook as well. In his lecture «The Human Scale», also delivered at CIAM 8, Gropius showed his rec<strong>en</strong>tly completed Graduate C<strong>en</strong>ter dormitory at Harvard, emphasizing how he had continued the pedestrian sequ<strong>en</strong>ce of courtyards found in the older parts of the campus. Most of his projects with TAC, including a campus plan for Hua Tung Christian University in Shanghai, China, partly designed by Pei, were still quite sprawling and suburban, though they also included campus c<strong>en</strong>ter elem<strong>en</strong>ts. At GSD in the immediate postwar years there was a continuing focus on suburban new town planning rather than the heart of the city, as in Martin Wagner’s 1947–48 studio and research study on Framingham, an outlying town along the Massachusetts Turnpike west of Boston, the site of a G<strong>en</strong>eral Motors plant. Stud<strong>en</strong>ts at the GSD, however, were also <strong>en</strong>thusiastically responding to Sert’s new postwar focus, as in a 1951 Gropius studio project for a new Civic C<strong>en</strong>ter for suburban Sudbury, 248 <strong>Le</strong> <strong>Corbusier</strong> <strong>en</strong> <strong>Bogotá</strong>, 1947-1951: Precisiones <strong>en</strong> torno al <strong>Plan</strong> Director Massachusetts. This was also clearly illustrated by the team thesis of Robert Geddes, Martin Sevely, William Conklin, and landscape architect Ian McHarg, which proposed rebuilding downtown Provid<strong>en</strong>ce by synthesizing architecture with landscape architecture. Under Martin Wagner’s guidance the stud<strong>en</strong>ts made detailed planning studies of the area. At the final jury, Robert Geddes recalled that Wagner praised the team’s work but added sardonically, «You forgot everyone is going to move to Texas». This collaborative thesis project, which exemplified the Hudnut and Gropius ideal of a Graduate School of Design, was pres<strong>en</strong>ted at CIAM 8, and a small portion of it th<strong>en</strong> appeared in the subsequ<strong>en</strong>t publication. Nevertheless, at this time not all modern architects and planners were firmly settled on Sert’s new CIAM approach, despite the growing European influ<strong>en</strong>ce of projects like the Rotterdam Lijnbaan (1948) by Dutch CIAM members Van d<strong>en</strong> Broek and Bakema, which was inexplicably not shown at CIAM 8. Eero Saarin<strong>en</strong>, whom Sert had invited to CIAM 6 and who had recomm<strong>en</strong>ded Minoru Yamasaki for CIAM membership in 1948, organized his G<strong>en</strong>eral Motors Technical C<strong>en</strong>ter in suburban Detroit (1945–56) around a campus like c<strong>en</strong>tral space, derived from the cli<strong>en</strong>t’s original request for a Cranbrook-like <strong>en</strong>vironm<strong>en</strong>t. The final sprawling and auto-ori<strong>en</strong>ted project, however, was more influ<strong>en</strong>ced by Mies’s IIT campus. It set a pattern for the postwar suburban corporate campus, a direction that soon became the antithesis of Sert’s effort to promote urban rec<strong>en</strong>tralization. At the same time, however, the Saarin<strong>en</strong>s themselves were also unsuccessfully seeking to build a new civic c<strong>en</strong>ter in downtown Detroit, using a g<strong>en</strong>eral approach quite similar to what Sert was th<strong>en</strong> advocating. After Eliel’s death in 1950, Eero would go on to propose heart of the city–like campus plans for Brandeis University, MIT, Yale, Drake University, and the University of Michigan, though only parts of these plans were actually built as designed. By the early 1950s, th<strong>en</strong>, two related but differing modifications of CIAM urbanism had emerged in addition to the mainstream modernism of <strong>Le</strong> <strong>Corbusier</strong> and Mies. One, developed by Louis Kahn and others in Philadelphia, attempted to retain elem<strong>en</strong>ts of the existing city by reorganizing them as neighborhood units within a system of pedestrian gre<strong>en</strong>ways, recreation spaces, and new transportation routes. The other, developed by Sert and Wi<strong>en</strong>er in their plans for Latin America and most evid<strong>en</strong>t in their Medellín and <strong>Bogota</strong> plans, used new construction to create pedestrian neighborhood units of courtyards and row houses. Their approach was more autobased than the Philadelphia model, but it also c<strong>en</strong>tered on pedestrian cores at the various scale levels called for at CIAM 8. Both approaches used occasional high-d<strong>en</strong>sity housing types, sited as punctuating visual elem<strong>en</strong>ts in the midst of walk able neighborhood units or urban sectors. Both versions of the urban vision differed from the more familiar widely spaced high-rise models of earlier CIAM, and both were also more urban and pedestrian-ori<strong>en</strong>ted than the dec<strong>en</strong>tralized, low-rise settlem<strong>en</strong>t design that was still being taught by Gropius, Martin Wagner, and George Holmes Perkins at the GSD. In these developm<strong>en</strong>ts, Sert’s planning for <strong>Bogota</strong> is an extremely important illustration of his version of CIAM urbanism. Although developed in conjunction with <strong>Le</strong> <strong>Corbusier</strong>’s <strong>Plan</strong> <strong>Piloto</strong>, it departs significantly from his ideas at the same time, as the differ<strong>en</strong>ces betwe<strong>en</strong> <strong>Le</strong> <strong>Corbusier</strong>’s <strong>Plan</strong> <strong>Piloto</strong> and Town <strong>Plan</strong>ning Associates <strong>Plan</strong> Regulador clearly demonstrate. In doing so, Sert began to define in visual terms what he meant by what he began to call «urban design» after he took over the Deanship of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, just as Town <strong>Plan</strong>ning Associates <strong>Bogotá</strong> planning work was being completed. In a larger historical s<strong>en</strong>se, the differ<strong>en</strong>ces betwe<strong>en</strong> <strong>Le</strong> <strong>Corbusier</strong> and Sert and Wi<strong>en</strong>er in <strong>Bogotá</strong>, as well as the initial reception of both plans, which were more or less rejected by the Rojas Pinilla governm<strong>en</strong>t, indicates an important turning point in the history of architects’ efforts to shape urban form. The fast growing Colombian (and other Latin America) cities of the 1940s were among the first harbingers of the postwar global city, with their vast income inequalities and int<strong>en</strong>se demand for housing by large numbers of impoverished in-migrants from the countryside. In their political instability and the diverg<strong>en</strong>t goals among differ<strong>en</strong>t sectors of their elites, as well as their susceptibility to outside interv<strong>en</strong>tion by what were th<strong>en</strong> the main superpower adversaries, these cities provide a kind of base line from which to measure subsequ<strong>en</strong>t
- Page 1 and 2: Palabras y trazos: las unidades de
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- Page 11 and 12: «La unidad de Habitación» se opo
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- Page 33 and 34: Le Corbusier, registro de las fotos
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- Page 37 and 38: El Centro Cívico del Plan Director
- Page 39 and 40: acional los lugares de habitación
- Page 41 and 42: eunión de la colectividad, debidam
- Page 43 and 44: Josep Lluís Sert, the CIAM «Heart
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- Page 47 and 48: Le Corbusier, cabanon at Cap Martin
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- Page 55 and 56: Acuerdo 7 de 1979. Departamento de
- Page 57 and 58: El trabajo del equipo de Jorge Gait
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- Page 61 and 62: De la negación al redescubrimiento
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- Page 65 and 66: Programa de Vivienda de Interés So