Hello from Maryland. Today is the final part of three slide talks about ideas of dwelling that I recorded for my grad architecture students.
Part 1, Intimate Moments at Home, studies paintings of interiors depicting domestic life, is here. Part 2, House and World, considers the mythic aspects of house: from history, imagination, and personal and cultural memory, is here. In today’s talk, we wrap up the series with examples of ways to house the individual within the collective life of the city. There’s a transcript at the end, if you prefer to read. (Fair warning: the pictures make it.) Enjoy!
Thanks for joining me for this 3-part series. I’d love to hear about your ideas of home in the comments.
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Transcript
This is Dwelling in the City. Part three, House and City.
I'm Julie Gabrielli. In the first two parts, we considered the intimacy of urban domestic life and connections to the world outside. Then, the mythic associations of dwelling from history, cultural memory and imagination. This idea of making order out of chaos. And that the order of the individual house echoes that of the city, potentially.
We ended last time with this house from Pompei. This house as a smaller nested whole within the larger order of the city, or sometimes referred to as a microcosm of the city. The sense of creating order applies no matter how humble or grand the house is.
When we go to design housing that's aggregated even in a multi-story apartment building, it's possible to think of each individual unit in one of two ways: as a microcosm of the whole, which is like this Roman town and house. Or as a fragment which is only complete within the larger city. Both of these address issues of the individual within the collective whole.
I'm going to look at to a couple of examples of each. This first one is an illustration of a microcosm. It's the Certoza da Galuzzo Cloister in Italy. It's a typical monastery. There's a church and other kinds of communal buildings, like refectory and library, and so forth. But this part around what's labeled “D” is the great cloister.
So here's the cloister and the monks’ cells. Each one of these is a cell for a monk. Their rooms, their study, their bedroom. And then this part, all of these ones labelled “I,” these are gardens, individual gardens for each of the monks. And the cell itself has a study, which is, as I said, important for a monk. And then it has a stair to an upper chamber on so.
This is a drawing that the French architect, modern architect Le Corbusier, did in his travels in the early 20th century, because he was really taken with this idea of how the individual can live within a larger collective community and the privacy that the individual monks were able to have within their small cells. So here's a study and this is maybe a bedroom and there's a little stair that goes up, but there's also this loggia, which is this outdoor porch, and then the garden. And as a unit, as an individual dwelling unit, for each month, that is the kind of arrangement. But then, as I showed before in this plan, each of those is connected by this larger kind of communal loggia that goes around this larger communal garden. So the individual has those elements and then the entire community has a community version of that.
And this is what it looks like from within the cloister. So it's clearly expression of the collective life of this monastery. And with this cloister walk, all those arches and columns that goes around the garden. You can see each individual monk's cell door kind of beyond in this wall that and that's all that's in the wall. It’s very simple. But you can also see each of the monks’ cells as an individual expression above this very kind of linear, collective type of space. Even to the point where you can see each individual fireplace chimney here, which kind of brings us back to at the beginning of part two, we were looking at that kind of universal image of a house, the pitched roof, the fireplace chimney. And that's really playing out here, that sort of individual expression within this larger collective order.
And Le Corbusier was really enamored of this as a potential model for housing, modern at the time, housing that he was thinking about.
And just one last image of this monastery from outside. Looking at the backs of those cells themselves. So you can see each one of them has a garden. It's a very rugged mountain setting. But it's a very different aspect, this back view of it compared to this inner view, which is very idealized and geometric.
And so Le Corbusier took that as a kind of precedent for the housing project that he designed in the early 1920s. He believed that urban housing was too dense, it was inhumane and there was little or no access to light and air and especially green space, other than large public parks.
And so he wanted to see if he could design something that had the best of both worlds. Asking the question, Why can't each individual dwelling unit have private access or connection to nature? And so he built this prototype of this idea for an Expo at the time. He called it the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion. That's what we're looking at in this photograph. It’s the idea of the microcosm bringing the garden into the dwelling in this city.
This is a view from that terrace that you can see it that you saw in the previous image. Imagine that this is your this is part of your apartment, if you lived in a city and this is this is where you lived—in a big apartment building in the city, and you had this amount of terrace space for your individual apartment.
And these are just some plans. On the left, you can see this is that is literally the Esprit Nouveau pavilion. So that curved appendage at the far left was for the exhibit itself. But the prototype that he was building of an apartment unit was this. And it's a big unit. It's two stories and has this really generous terrace. This is like the corridor outside of the apartment. That's how you get to it. You come in here and this are some living and dining spaces here, and then upstairs is bedrooms and bathrooms and then overlook, everything overlooks this garden. And then this is the outside edge of the building. And then these are party walls, solid walls between units.
And he got really excited about this idea, and he showed these drawings of what it would look like as a single apartment building. With each individual unit, again, with its garden expressed on the facade. So this is one of those, you know, units that the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion was the prototype of. And it's not unlike the Galuzzo Cloister that inspired things. And the whole thing is a big donut. So in the in the middle is a courtyard that's the scale of that building. It would be big enough to have some soccer fields and football fields on it. But when you get to your individual unit, you have your own private outer space.
As I mentioned, beginning, there are the two approaches, the microcosm and the fragment. So the second approach is more of the fragmentary aspect. The individual unit of dwelling, rather than being this sort of complete whole in and of itself, is more of a fragment within this larger city. This developed as a housing type in Paris in the 17th and 18th century. So each each private house is sort of fitted into the larger pattern of what was essentially a medieval city that was redeveloping, being renovated in places. So the house doesn't repeat or represent a larger order. It's really claiming its own idealized order within a really oddly shaped site, usually.
This drawing is from a map of Paris that was made in the 18th century. And the housing type that I'm going to talk about was called the French Hôtel. Hôtel being one of several French words for house. These houses were for the emerging middle class and upper middle class. They were not royalty at all. They were contained within the fabric, hidden behind street walls. They were not freestanding palaces, like, what the king was living in or even the nobility.
This particular drawing shows the Place Royale, which was one of the early public squares that was cut into this very tight, squirrely fabric of the medieval city in order to create more gracious grand spaces for everybody, not just for the royalty. And it was done speculatively. You can see, there's a certain depth. The facade is very uniform, and there's this building that's built all the way around. And each of these leads to individual houses or apartments.
So on this same map, you can see what I was talking about. The property lines are all kind of angled and they're not really rectilinear. I'm going to look at this, this house. This is the property. It's called the Hôtel Matignon. And Matignon was the family that does it. But just before we look at it in detail, you can see the street wall is very closed. It's either a very tall wall or it's service buildings that look out on the street and then there's a gate in that wall.
In plan, there's that angled street wall and this indentation to get us into the gate here. The houses behind these were jammed into these odd shaped blocks, as I said. But the courtyard itself was a very idealized, regular geometric space. And all of the stuff in between that and the property lines was crammed in, where they stored carriages and stables for the horses, and different kinds of service spaces.
It's all centered on the entry, which you can see in this diagram. There's a direct axis from the gate, through the entry court, to the entry hall. And then the body of the house itself mediates between the front court and the back garden. So the front court space is much more public and the back garden is private for the family and their guests. With the house mediating between the city and the green space of the garden, the private goings-on of the household. You can see that the body of the house is really making that transition from the city to the garden. As a kind of threshold from public to private.
This diagram is just showing how this works spatially. You have this axis coming in through this entry hall into this initial room, and then all of these rooms are connected axially. In French, it’s called en filade, all in a row. No corridors, just space to space to space. And it so happens that this room here that's octagonal in shape is centered on the garden, because the garden takes up the whole width. And so there's a lot of tricks that play between coming into one center and moving across and over to another center that addresses the garden.
So just in terms of the hierarchy of public and private and the geometry of how these houses worked, is that the front rooms dealt with service on arrival and coming and going, and then the five rooms on the garden are really the grand main rooms at the house. And you can say there's sort of a spatial overlap between this front court and these front rooms of the house and then the garden and the back rooms of the house. And that's kind of what this diagram is also alluding to.
And to wrap up this kind of discussion of how do you think about urban multi-family housing, how do you respond to this idea? What's the expression of the individual within that larger collective whole? So in sort of extreme example, you have the sort of big house, which is a Shaker dwelling in this photograph. And so there's no individual expression at all. It's all about the community for them. Which is culturally appropriate for Shakers. There was no individual expression in their day to day lives, either. And so it's just a big house and they all live there.
A kind of in-between version of that is Karl Marx Hof in Vienna. In a way, it's the opposite to the Shaker house, which was an object building. It's a bit like a Monopoly hotel, from the game Monopoly. Whereas this building is is actually, again, a big donut. It's a wall that defines this grand park in the middle. So the space is the collective public garden that's been defined by the building itself.
This was built in 1927 to ‘30 by Karl Ehn, and it has 1382 apartments, so it's very large. The building's expression has a certain kind of exuberance, but it's meant as a background building to the space. Some of the formal expressions of these balconies that extend out from the darker brick to the lighter. And these arches connect from inside park-like space to the city at large outside of that precinct. There is a little bit of individualized expression, like these tower elements coming up. You could tell somebody, I live in the middle tower or under the middle arch. So then you're only talking about this many apartments instead of the whole sweep of all of them.
With these balconies, certain apartments get to have outdoor space that's on that individual scale. Not everybody, because some of these folks don't have that, but some of them do. And that helps to break down the scale of the of that huge wall as well.
With this last slide, I want to talk a little bit about what is sometimes called “good soldiers” in an urban setting, or “good citizens.” On the left is a project called Washington Square Apartments by James Polshek Architects, from the 1980s in New York City. On the right is the San Francisco-based firm Mithun, with architect Dan Solomon, a project in Chinatown called the Broadway-Sansom Apartments, that was opened in 2015.
Stylistically they're pretty different, but they have similar elements. Both of them have a base of of a different material. On the left is the stone that frames these retail shops. On the right it's more glassy with, again, storefront for retail. And then they have figural aspects towards the top. This one goes through some sort of chimneys and these little pieces that start to hint at this individual units, but also gives a sort of intermediate scale. even though the windows are all pretty repetitive, there's a really nice rhythm to the pairing of the wider ones and the narrow ones and this kind of marching across the façade, expressing a middle scale that's scaled for the street, but also gives more immediate expression of these four windows instead of all fifty of them to be right at once.
And on the right, you're seeing, again, careful attention to the scale of the street. So the building wraps the corner—this is all part of the same complex, even this part. On this face of the building, the expression doesn't change. It's a much wider street, and actually this is also part of the building. So it does change right at the corner. So it's a very particular series of solutions and then it wraps around, and then there's this recess, and then then there's this other part of the building. So that's all one complex. You have a variation of materials, red brick and some kind of gray, I think those are metal panels. But it's all meant to feed into or fit into the rhythm and scale of the neighborhood through the massing and the materials.
And again, the first floor very much addressing the life of the street through public uses. And this top on this side, these are set back a little bit and there's more shade and shadow there and more. It's more of an additive expression, so it helps to bring the scale down and articulate more individualized elements here as it marches along. Versus this, which is really more of a tight skin or wrapper all along that whole facade. So you have some in-between, individualized expressions of apartments, but then you also have the larger collective whole.
So that concludes the series, Dwelling in the City. These are some things to think about when designing urban housing.
Panning for gold in the north Scottish wilderness we found the foundations of a cluster of stone cottages, where 250 years ago a community of panners and their families had lived until drought reduced the flow. Two days in the trickle we found traces, but I was more interested in those long gone inhabitants....
Interesting insights here Julie. Helps to make sense of all those "Remaining Foundations" of the many ancient sites I have visited