Image of destruction in Bogotá: 9 Abril 1948. © IDPC–MdB. Le Corbusier, civic center for Bogotá. © FLC. Le Corbusier, Palace of the Soviets competition entry for Moscow in 1932. © FLC. Josep Lluís Sert, the Ciam "Heart of the City" and the Bogotá Plan | Eric Mumford 245
Le Corbusier and Sert were aware that this new focus on the heart of the city might appear regressive to some CIAM members, particularly given the complicated Colombian political situation, which soon developed into «La Violencia», a civil war between Liberal and Conservative factions which lasted until 1953. In his comments that accompanied the Bogotá plan, Le Corbusier insisted that «revolutionary work often appears to be highly traditionalist in character», and he asserted that the «philosophical basis of the project» was that «revolutionary work consists primarily in giving order to what carelessness, incompetence, selfishness, and demagogy have disturbed, denatured, made grotesque and ineffective, and hostile to the public interest». At the same time, the Bogotá plan was the clearest example of the direction in CIAM urbanism that Sert had first articulated at CIAM 5 and then modified after 1943. Based on the four CIAM functions, it called for specific master plans at the regional, metropolitan, urban, and civic center scale, which were conceptualized as key elements in a new legislative structure of land-use regulation. Its stated planning goals were to reintroduce the conditions of nature into people’s everyday lives; to design for the activities of the twenty-four-hour cycle; to separate pedestrian from auto traffic; to provide for diverse housing types «susceptible to modification over time»; and to orient workplaces and dwellings in relation to solar orientation. Local real estate developers, however, resisted the plan’s effort to limit the city’s geographical spread. The civil war and the American-backed leftist military dictatorship of General Rojas Pinilla that came to power in June 1953, just as the final aspects of the plan were being completed by Sert and Wiener, prevented the plan from being immediately implemented. After a period of uncontrolled growth, which included the construction of El Dorado airport and a suburban government center for Bogota (initially planned by SOM), a new master plan, based on some elements of the 1948-53 Sert and Wiener plan, was adopted in 1959, during the era of the «National Front», where each party governed for four years in alternation. Except for some sections of the Bogotá urban road system, however, little of their plan was implemented as originally designed. Only small portions of the system of downtown commercial pedestrian plazas were built, though at the same time middle-class residential areas to the north were constructed with greenways and pedestrian-oriented modern buildings in a way surprisingly similar to some of Sert’s later urban design work. It was also while working on the Bogotá master plan that Sert began to advocate the heart of the city concept for the next CIAM. In June 1949 he had suggested to Gropius that the next congress should be held in Bogotá, Lima, or Cuba. Latin America was not what CIAM was primarily interested in at this time, however. Instead, Le Corbusier and the many British MARS group members all wanted the next congress to be held in Britain, as British planning concepts were still shaping the decolonizing postwar world. MARS members such as William Holford, Gordon Stephenson, Arthur Ling, Ernö Goldfinger, and others had taken a substantial role in the County of London Plan (1943) and Greater London Plan (1944), which replaced the more radical MARS plan of Arthur Korn and Felix Samuely (1942) as the official MARS plans after the war. These proposals, which called for a regional city organized into neighborhood units along radial transportation routes focused on a central downtown core, quickly became the planning models for Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo (1956), among many other places, with widely varying outcomes. The London-based landscape architect and planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and other members of the MARS group were the organizers of CIAM 8, which was held at a conference center in Hoddesdon, near London, in July 1951, under the rubric «The Heart of the City». It took place at the same time as the Festival of Britain, a Labour government effort to create a kind of pedestrian theme park of postwar modernist British culture, inspired by the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930. Sert’s opening address called for CIAM to begin to «talk in civic and urban terms». His goal was for CIAM to establish a «network of cores» to recentralize large urban areas around pedestrian centers to bring people together. These cores, he believed, would allow for public gathering and discussion, promoting «talk on all the things that are extremely important for our way of living if we are to keep a civic life which we believe in», A key aspect would be the general application of the idea of reserving central areas only for pedestrians, which he believed should become a major focus for cultural and political life. The MARS group’s official invitation to the congress, probably written by Tyrwhitt, had linked the core concept both to the CIAM four functions (dwelling, work, transportation, and recreation) and to the metropolitan «5 scale-levels» (village or primary housing group, small market center or neighborhood, town or city sector, city or large town, and metropolis of several million people). Sert thought that few other general principles of urbanism could be stated, since «countries are different» in climate, «standards of living, means, customs and many other factors». He closed his talk with a quotation about the human centeredness of the civic plaza from the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, adding «after our studies of bringing open space into the cities, we nonetheless feel the need for a civic space somewhere in them». With a few exceptions, prewar modernists had not been interested in designing such dense zones of pedestrian activity and civic life. In his Palace of the Soviets competition entry for Moscow in 1932, Le Corbusier had projected a kind of pedestrian sorting mechanism using ramps between the parking level and the auditorium, but this hardly qualified as the kind of civic public space that Sert had begun to propose in his Latin American projects after 1944. In a 1983 interview with Robert Campbell, a former student and firm associate, Sert, speaking of Mies van der Rohe, recalled that it was around this time that «I began to see more and more bad modern, it was always repeating the same pattern, and one was perfectly convinced that it would be really dull and sad to see whole cities develop on that very limited formula». While he remained a lifelong admirer of Le Corbusier, Sert began to modify Corbusian urbanism to focus on the city as realm of politically and culturally oriented pedestrian activity. He later recalled that while in Bogotá, where Le Corbusier was interested in incorporating «all this tropical growth» into his plans, Sert instead drew his attention to «nicely lit up storefronts and these girls walking in front» places where there was some life in the city. This new CIAM direction in favor of the pedestrian core came as a surprise to many of the other members. Sert’s for- 246 Le Corbusier en Bogotá, 1947-1951: Precisiones en torno al Plan Director
- Page 1 and 2: Palabras y trazos: las unidades de
- Page 3 and 4: Una misión integrada por el Sr. Bo
- Page 5 and 6: Le Corbusier, proyecto Plan Directo
- Page 7 and 8: sobre la calle, la calle en zigzag,
- Page 9 and 10: Repetimos, le agradeceríamos si no
- Page 11 and 12: «La unidad de Habitación» se opo
- Page 13 and 14: Le Corbusier, planta de localizaci
- Page 15 and 16: en épocas anteriores? No es posibl
- Page 17 and 18: étabissements humains, Denoël, Co
- Page 19 and 20: La Sabana es dominable desde un avi
- Page 21 and 22: de los años 30, que dominaban el d
- Page 23 and 24: 12. Le Corbusier: propuesta de loca
- Page 25 and 26: (indicadas en el plano urbano como
- Page 27 and 28: Bogotá es una ciudad corbu Fernand
- Page 29 and 30: Finalmente se encontraban el marco
- Page 31 and 32: En septiembre de 1953, Le Corbusier
- Page 33 and 34: Le Corbusier, registro de las fotos
- Page 35 and 36: Le Corbusier, «Bogotá, Plan Regul
- 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
- Page 45 and 46: The heart of the city: towards the
- Page 47: Le Corbusier, cabanon at Cap Martin
- Page 51 and 52: mer colleague from GATCPAC in Barce
- Page 53 and 54: La influencia del Plan Director en
- Page 55 and 56: Acuerdo 7 de 1979. Departamento de
- Page 57 and 58: El trabajo del equipo de Jorge Gait
- Page 59 and 60: de la implantación del «ordenamie
- Page 61 and 62: De la negación al redescubrimiento
- Page 63 and 64: veer simultáneamente las infraestr
- Page 65 and 66: Programa de Vivienda de Interés So
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