Wiener and Sert, master plan for Medellin: sketch done by Sert. Josep Lluís Sert, the Ciam "Heart of the City" and the Bogotá Plan | Eric Mumford 247
mer colleague from GATCPAC in Barcelona, Antoni Bonet, presented the Argentine group’s plan for Buenos Aires at CIAM 7 and received a cool reception from both Le Corbusier and Sert, although the plan had first been developed with Le Corbusier in 1938. Afterward Bonet wrote to his associates in the Austral group, Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy and Juan Kurchan, «After having seen how they have dealt with the Plan of Bogotá I can clearly see how wrong our office was about the way we set out». Bonet continued, «I have been to Venice. 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 center of our barrio. I think we should carry on with the research on this center, it is shaping up well. We should also propose the construction of one of those centers in every barrio designated by the plan». By CIAM 8, even Gropius had begun to support this new CIAM direction, even though it had little evident 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 Venice, the latter a perennial urban design model for enclosed public space that had frequently been invoked by Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook as well. In his lecture «The Human Scale», also delivered at CIAM 8, Gropius showed his recently completed Graduate Center dormitory at Harvard, emphasizing how he had continued the pedestrian sequence 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 center elements. 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 General Motors plant. Students at the GSD, however, were also enthusiastically responding to Sert’s new postwar focus, as in a 1951 Gropius studio project for a new Civic Center for suburban Sudbury, 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 Providence by synthesizing architecture with landscape architecture. Under Martin Wagner’s guidance the students 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 presented at CIAM 8, and a small portion of it then appeared in the subsequent publication. Nevertheless, at this time not all modern architects and planners were firmly settled on Sert’s new CIAM approach, despite the growing European influence of projects like the Rotterdam Lijnbaan (1948) by Dutch CIAM members Van den Broek and Bakema, which was inexplicably not shown at CIAM 8. Eero Saarinen, whom Sert had invited to CIAM 6 and who had recommended Minoru Yamasaki for CIAM membership in 1948, organized his General Motors Technical Center in suburban Detroit (1945–56) around a campus like central space, derived from the client’s original request for a Cranbrook-like environment. The final sprawling and auto-oriented project, however, was more influenced 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 recentralization. At the same time, however, the Saarinens themselves were also unsuccessfully seeking to build a new civic center in downtown Detroit, using a general approach quite similar to what Sert was then 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, then, two related but differing modifications of CIAM urbanism had emerged in addition to the mainstream modernism of Le Corbusier and Mies. One, developed by Louis Kahn and others in Philadelphia, attempted to retain elements of the existing city by reorganizing them as neighborhood units within a system of pedestrian greenways, recreation spaces, and new transportation routes. The other, developed by Sert and Wiener in their plans for Latin America and most evident in their Medellín and Bogota 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 centered on pedestrian cores at the various scale levels called for at CIAM 8. Both approaches used occasional high-density housing types, sited as punctuating visual elements 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-oriented than the decentralized, low-rise settlement design that was still being taught by Gropius, Martin Wagner, and George Holmes Perkins at the GSD. In these developments, Sert’s planning for Bogota is an extremely important illustration of his version of CIAM urbanism. Although developed in conjunction with Le Corbusier’s Plan Piloto, it departs significantly from his ideas at the same time, as the differences between Le Corbusier’s Plan Piloto and Town Planning Associates Plan 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 Planning Associates Bogotá planning work was being completed. In a larger historical sense, the differences between Le Corbusier and Sert and Wiener in Bogotá, as well as the initial reception of both plans, which were more or less rejected by the Rojas Pinilla government, 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 intense demand for housing by large numbers of impoverished in-migrants from the countryside. In their political instability and the divergent goals among different sectors of their elites, as well as their susceptibility to outside intervention by what were then the main superpower adversaries, these cities provide a kind of base line from which to measure subsequent 248 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 and 48: Le Corbusier, cabanon at Cap Martin
- Page 49: Le Corbusier and Sert were aware th
- 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
Change language