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2 reviews for:
Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953-1969
Eric Paul Mumford, Hashim Sarkis, Neyran Turan
4.0 AVERAGE
2 reviews for:
Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953-1969
Eric Paul Mumford, Hashim Sarkis, Neyran Turan
4.0 AVERAGE
tominlondon's review
4.0
The career of the Spanish-born architect Josep Lluis Sert (1902-1983) began in 1927 when as a student in republican Spain, he became an acolyte of Le Corbusier, invited him to Barcelona, and went to Paris to work for him. They shared an interest in painting and remained lifelong friends, and as a result of this early encounter with his hero, Sert became a leading figure in CIAM, the Corb-led International Congresses of Modern Architecture. Throughout his life he remained a somewhat slavish regurgitator of Le Corbusier’s architectural and urban ideas; his 1958-65 Holyoake Centre at Harvard, for instance, is a remarkably close imitation of Le Corbusier’s 1929 Salvation Army hostel in Paris.
In the 1930s, his modernist stance on architecture and cities was allied to political militancy; at a desperate time for republican Spain, Sert designed the Spanish pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Exhibition, for which he also commissioned various artists including his friend Pablo Picasso. The building was erected defiantly beside that of the Nazis, who had just bombed Guernica, and Picasso’s depiction of that event became his most famous work.
Blacklisted after Franco won the Spanish war, in 1939 Sert went to America, where he devoted himself to promoting modernist urbanism on fairly strict CIAM principles. He wrote “Can our cities survive?” a modernist urban theory treatise (not published until 1947) and with the support of Walter Gropius at Harvard was appointed Dean in 1953, where he set up the world’s first urban design course, which gave him a perfect platform from which to propagate modernist CIAM principles about “shaping cities” using ”new science” “new principles” and “new forms”.
One of Sert's convictions, very much in the Le Corbusier mould, was that existing cities are chaotic and in a state of “crisis” that requires nothing less than wholesale reconstruction. So even though in an address on urban design at CIAM in 1951 he waxed lyrical about “the traditional Mediterranean town square” and “good pedestrian promenades” his ideological blindness made it impossible for him to reproduce similar qualities in his own plans. As a propagandist for a type of urban thinking whose disastrous consequences we well understand today, Sert’s programmatic mindset could see the beauty of historic cities, but his totalitarian attitude insisted on extrapolating abstract systems out of their features: in 1953, for instance, he proposed that the traditional patio house, repeated endlessly, could be used to make entire cities.
His mindset is investigated by Tomothy Hyde, in one of the essays in this book. In the face of numerous distinguished opponents (from Team 10 to Jane Jacobs) who were alarmed by his inhuman approach, Sert went on insisting that since the unplanned energy of cities was in his view “chaotic” and “disorderly” the planner must normalise and “overcome” it. He expressed these convictions in abstract terminologies about neighbourhoods, scalar zones, urban functions, categories and similar gobbledygook, and complacent assertions like “every city is composed of cells, and the role of planning is to put these cells into some kind of system or relationship”. Decades later in an interesting interview (included here) he was still musing fondly about tradition, unable to recognise the harm his own quasi-scientific approach had perpetrated.
Between 1941-1959 Sert’s Harvard-based practice, Town Planning Associates, produced “nearly a dozen master plans for Latin America, mostly unrealised”. His 1952 plan for Havana is a particularly shocking example. Commissioned by a group of mafia speculators intent on carving up the city, Sert’s Pilot Plan “addressed the entire metropolitan area of Havana, applying Le Corbusier’s rules on classification of roads”, a totally abstract theory.
His plan proposed to completely destroy the city’s historic streets and would have obliterated all memory of Old Havana. Encircled by a disastrous new highway network were to be “clusters” of what he supposed would be “charming streets recalling the city’s origins” but completely rebuilt and dimensioned using the completely abstract principles of Le Corbusier’s Modulor. This awful scenario was to be dominated by “tall towers for a new financial district” that would have finally wrecked Havana once and for all.
Thankfully, Fidel Castro's 1959 Cuban revolution thwarted this insane plan. But in the interview reproduced here, Sert blithely continued theorising about the urban qualities found in history and tradition, ruminating fondly about Mediterranean folk architecture but only half- admitting that modern architecture “destroyed the concept of enclosed urban space [causing] a disintegration of the total environment” without ever realising that he himself had played a major role part in that process, as a practitioner and as the influential Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design (1953-69) where he was responsible for the intellectual formation of many architects.
As a reverential academic publication celebrating Sert’s career at Harvard, this book cannot undertake any severe critique of modernism’s vast errors in urban design, so perfectly exemplified in Sert’s work. Despite probing essays by Eric Mumford and Timothy Hyde, overall the book is too deferential to be able to say anything relevant to today’s debates about how to correct them.
In the 1930s, his modernist stance on architecture and cities was allied to political militancy; at a desperate time for republican Spain, Sert designed the Spanish pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Exhibition, for which he also commissioned various artists including his friend Pablo Picasso. The building was erected defiantly beside that of the Nazis, who had just bombed Guernica, and Picasso’s depiction of that event became his most famous work.
Blacklisted after Franco won the Spanish war, in 1939 Sert went to America, where he devoted himself to promoting modernist urbanism on fairly strict CIAM principles. He wrote “Can our cities survive?” a modernist urban theory treatise (not published until 1947) and with the support of Walter Gropius at Harvard was appointed Dean in 1953, where he set up the world’s first urban design course, which gave him a perfect platform from which to propagate modernist CIAM principles about “shaping cities” using ”new science” “new principles” and “new forms”.
One of Sert's convictions, very much in the Le Corbusier mould, was that existing cities are chaotic and in a state of “crisis” that requires nothing less than wholesale reconstruction. So even though in an address on urban design at CIAM in 1951 he waxed lyrical about “the traditional Mediterranean town square” and “good pedestrian promenades” his ideological blindness made it impossible for him to reproduce similar qualities in his own plans. As a propagandist for a type of urban thinking whose disastrous consequences we well understand today, Sert’s programmatic mindset could see the beauty of historic cities, but his totalitarian attitude insisted on extrapolating abstract systems out of their features: in 1953, for instance, he proposed that the traditional patio house, repeated endlessly, could be used to make entire cities.
His mindset is investigated by Tomothy Hyde, in one of the essays in this book. In the face of numerous distinguished opponents (from Team 10 to Jane Jacobs) who were alarmed by his inhuman approach, Sert went on insisting that since the unplanned energy of cities was in his view “chaotic” and “disorderly” the planner must normalise and “overcome” it. He expressed these convictions in abstract terminologies about neighbourhoods, scalar zones, urban functions, categories and similar gobbledygook, and complacent assertions like “every city is composed of cells, and the role of planning is to put these cells into some kind of system or relationship”. Decades later in an interesting interview (included here) he was still musing fondly about tradition, unable to recognise the harm his own quasi-scientific approach had perpetrated.
Between 1941-1959 Sert’s Harvard-based practice, Town Planning Associates, produced “nearly a dozen master plans for Latin America, mostly unrealised”. His 1952 plan for Havana is a particularly shocking example. Commissioned by a group of mafia speculators intent on carving up the city, Sert’s Pilot Plan “addressed the entire metropolitan area of Havana, applying Le Corbusier’s rules on classification of roads”, a totally abstract theory.
His plan proposed to completely destroy the city’s historic streets and would have obliterated all memory of Old Havana. Encircled by a disastrous new highway network were to be “clusters” of what he supposed would be “charming streets recalling the city’s origins” but completely rebuilt and dimensioned using the completely abstract principles of Le Corbusier’s Modulor. This awful scenario was to be dominated by “tall towers for a new financial district” that would have finally wrecked Havana once and for all.
Thankfully, Fidel Castro's 1959 Cuban revolution thwarted this insane plan. But in the interview reproduced here, Sert blithely continued theorising about the urban qualities found in history and tradition, ruminating fondly about Mediterranean folk architecture but only half- admitting that modern architecture “destroyed the concept of enclosed urban space [causing] a disintegration of the total environment” without ever realising that he himself had played a major role part in that process, as a practitioner and as the influential Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design (1953-69) where he was responsible for the intellectual formation of many architects.
As a reverential academic publication celebrating Sert’s career at Harvard, this book cannot undertake any severe critique of modernism’s vast errors in urban design, so perfectly exemplified in Sert’s work. Despite probing essays by Eric Mumford and Timothy Hyde, overall the book is too deferential to be able to say anything relevant to today’s debates about how to correct them.
tom_in_london's review
4.0
The career of the Spanish-born architect Josep Lluis Sert (1902-1983) began in 1927 when as a student in republican Spain, he became an acolyte of Le Corbusier, invited him to Barcelona, and went to Paris to work for him. They shared an interest in painting and remained lifelong friends, and as a result of this early encounter with his hero, Sert became a leading figure in CIAM, the Corb-led International Congresses of Modern Architecture. Throughout his life he remained a somewhat slavish regurgitator of Le Corbusier’s architectural and urban ideas; his 1958-65 Holyoake Centre at Harvard, for instance, is a remarkably close imitation of Le Corbusier’s 1929 Salvation Army hostel in Paris.
In the 1930s, his modernist stance on architecture and cities was allied to political militancy; at a desperate time for republican Spain, Sert designed the Spanish pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Exhibition, for which he also commissioned various artists including his friend Pablo Picasso. The building was erected defiantly beside that of the Nazis, who had just bombed Guernica, and Picasso’s depiction of that event became his most famous work.
Blacklisted after Franco won the Spanish war, in 1939 Sert went to America, where he devoted himself to promoting modernist urbanism on fairly strict CIAM principles. He wrote “Can our cities survive?” a modernist urban theory treatise (not published until 1947) and with the support of Walter Gropius at Harvard was appointed Dean in 1953, where he set up the world’s first urban design course, which gave him a perfect platform from which to propagate modernist CIAM principles about “shaping cities” using ”new science” “new principles” and “new forms”.
One of Sert's convictions, very much in the Le Corbusier mould, was that existing cities are chaotic and in a state of “crisis” that requires nothing less than wholesale reconstruction. So even though in an address on urban design at CIAM in 1951 he waxed lyrical about “the traditional Mediterranean town square” and “good pedestrian promenades” his ideological blindness made it impossible for him to reproduce similar qualities in his own plans. As a propagandist for a type of urban thinking whose disastrous consequences we well understand today, Sert’s programmatic mindset could see the beauty of historic cities, but his totalitarian attitude insisted on extrapolating abstract systems out of their features: in 1953, for instance, he proposed that the traditional patio house, repeated endlessly, could be used to make entire cities.
His mindset is investigated by Tomothy Hyde, in one of the essays in this book. In the face of numerous distinguished opponents (from Team 10 to Jane Jacobs) who were alarmed by his inhuman approach, Sert went on insisting that since the unplanned energy of cities was in his view “chaotic” and “disorderly” the planner must normalise and “overcome” it. He expressed these convictions in abstract terminologies about neighbourhoods, scalar zones, urban functions, categories and similar gobbledygook, and complacent assertions like “every city is composed of cells, and the role of planning is to put these cells into some kind of system or relationship”. Decades later in an interesting interview (included here) he was still musing fondly about tradition, unable to recognise the harm his own quasi-scientific approach had perpetrated.
Between 1941-1959 Sert’s Harvard-based practice, Town Planning Associates, produced “nearly a dozen master plans for Latin America, mostly unrealised”. His 1952 plan for Havana is a particularly shocking example. Commissioned by a group of mafia speculators intent on carving up the city, Sert’s Pilot Plan “addressed the entire metropolitan area of Havana, applying Le Corbusier’s rules on classification of roads”, a totally abstract theory.
His plan proposed to completely destroy the city’s historic streets and would have obliterated all memory of Old Havana. Encircled by a disastrous new highway network were to be “clusters” of what he supposed would be “charming streets recalling the city’s origins” but completely rebuilt and dimensioned using the completely abstract principles of Le Corbusier’s Modulor. This awful scenario was to be dominated by “tall towers for a new financial district” that would have finally wrecked Havana once and for all.
Thankfully, Fidel Castro's 1959 Cuban revolution thwarted this insane plan. But in the interview reproduced here, Sert blithely continued theorising about the urban qualities found in history and tradition, ruminating fondly about Mediterranean folk architecture but only half- admitting that modern architecture “destroyed the concept of enclosed urban space [causing] a disintegration of the total environment” without ever realising that he himself had played a major role part in that process, as a practitioner and as the influential Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design (1953-69) where he was responsible for the intellectual formation of many architects.
As a reverential academic publication celebrating Sert’s career at Harvard, this book cannot undertake any severe critique of modernism’s vast errors in urban design, so perfectly exemplified in Sert’s work. Despite probing essays by Eric Mumford and Timothy Hyde, overall the book is too deferential to be able to say anything relevant to today’s debates about how to correct them.
In the 1930s, his modernist stance on architecture and cities was allied to political militancy; at a desperate time for republican Spain, Sert designed the Spanish pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Exhibition, for which he also commissioned various artists including his friend Pablo Picasso. The building was erected defiantly beside that of the Nazis, who had just bombed Guernica, and Picasso’s depiction of that event became his most famous work.
Blacklisted after Franco won the Spanish war, in 1939 Sert went to America, where he devoted himself to promoting modernist urbanism on fairly strict CIAM principles. He wrote “Can our cities survive?” a modernist urban theory treatise (not published until 1947) and with the support of Walter Gropius at Harvard was appointed Dean in 1953, where he set up the world’s first urban design course, which gave him a perfect platform from which to propagate modernist CIAM principles about “shaping cities” using ”new science” “new principles” and “new forms”.
One of Sert's convictions, very much in the Le Corbusier mould, was that existing cities are chaotic and in a state of “crisis” that requires nothing less than wholesale reconstruction. So even though in an address on urban design at CIAM in 1951 he waxed lyrical about “the traditional Mediterranean town square” and “good pedestrian promenades” his ideological blindness made it impossible for him to reproduce similar qualities in his own plans. As a propagandist for a type of urban thinking whose disastrous consequences we well understand today, Sert’s programmatic mindset could see the beauty of historic cities, but his totalitarian attitude insisted on extrapolating abstract systems out of their features: in 1953, for instance, he proposed that the traditional patio house, repeated endlessly, could be used to make entire cities.
His mindset is investigated by Tomothy Hyde, in one of the essays in this book. In the face of numerous distinguished opponents (from Team 10 to Jane Jacobs) who were alarmed by his inhuman approach, Sert went on insisting that since the unplanned energy of cities was in his view “chaotic” and “disorderly” the planner must normalise and “overcome” it. He expressed these convictions in abstract terminologies about neighbourhoods, scalar zones, urban functions, categories and similar gobbledygook, and complacent assertions like “every city is composed of cells, and the role of planning is to put these cells into some kind of system or relationship”. Decades later in an interesting interview (included here) he was still musing fondly about tradition, unable to recognise the harm his own quasi-scientific approach had perpetrated.
Between 1941-1959 Sert’s Harvard-based practice, Town Planning Associates, produced “nearly a dozen master plans for Latin America, mostly unrealised”. His 1952 plan for Havana is a particularly shocking example. Commissioned by a group of mafia speculators intent on carving up the city, Sert’s Pilot Plan “addressed the entire metropolitan area of Havana, applying Le Corbusier’s rules on classification of roads”, a totally abstract theory.
His plan proposed to completely destroy the city’s historic streets and would have obliterated all memory of Old Havana. Encircled by a disastrous new highway network were to be “clusters” of what he supposed would be “charming streets recalling the city’s origins” but completely rebuilt and dimensioned using the completely abstract principles of Le Corbusier’s Modulor. This awful scenario was to be dominated by “tall towers for a new financial district” that would have finally wrecked Havana once and for all.
Thankfully, Fidel Castro's 1959 Cuban revolution thwarted this insane plan. But in the interview reproduced here, Sert blithely continued theorising about the urban qualities found in history and tradition, ruminating fondly about Mediterranean folk architecture but only half- admitting that modern architecture “destroyed the concept of enclosed urban space [causing] a disintegration of the total environment” without ever realising that he himself had played a major role part in that process, as a practitioner and as the influential Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design (1953-69) where he was responsible for the intellectual formation of many architects.
As a reverential academic publication celebrating Sert’s career at Harvard, this book cannot undertake any severe critique of modernism’s vast errors in urban design, so perfectly exemplified in Sert’s work. Despite probing essays by Eric Mumford and Timothy Hyde, overall the book is too deferential to be able to say anything relevant to today’s debates about how to correct them.