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Marina City Lecture: Part Two

Introduction

Slides showing newspaper headlines regarding the University of Chicago's study on Chicago's population pattern in 1990; while a tape recorder reads statistical type editorials on the same information from newspapers of the same date. "Chicago will have a population... Chicago will be half color... Chicago will have a Negro mayor..."

These headlines on the future Chicago environment which just came from Hauser's study at the University of Chicago, these newspaper editorials which are a community reaction to Hauser's statistical prophecies, these are all facts of today projected on ideas more than a hundred years old. These social forecasts came from the age in which Darwin took the history of mankind away from the Bible, in which Freud took the soul of man away from religion and in which Marx took the government of man away from the individual.

And if this is one face of our present surroundings, another face was shown me when William McFetridge, who is President of the Janitor's Union and sponsor of our Marina City project, said: "Let us make it beautiful."...His remark too had an earlier source. It was Matthew who said, "man does not live by bread alone."

We are all of us somewhere today in this span between facts and faith.

Within these limits there is in recognizable form in the modern world around us, a growing value of intuitive forces; creative attitude toward our urban life, a renaissance in the mystery of faith, even Catholic faith; and finally, a coming of age of our cities economically to a point where they operate as city-states.

We are belatedly finishing just now with our Victorian heritage. The Victorian age of science and system is spent. What remains of this period for us is an empty and impotent right-angled rigidity.

The 19th Century gave us little information about creative man. We inherited neither inner order nor the integrity which means unity. Neither in Europe nor America. The Marxist man of make, production man, in Europe, was reflected by the Dewey technological man in America. Neither provided for the spirit of man nor his integrity.

Many 19th Century value judgments in our art contained words like "functionalism, practicality, utility, mass production." These words were shaped to the Science by which the 19th Century knew the world. In contrast, one of the first of the new words used in our new world art appraisals is "dada"; others are "surrealism, abstract." And still others are "infinite" and "indeterminate."

The change is here: the words "materialism, pragmatism, planned society, regimentation" begin to carry an apology. The words "spirit, soul, beauty, God, humanity" are very in-words. McFetridge, the Chief of the Janitor's Union says before his bankers, we want to pay to make it beautiful. The General Electric Company says it will cost you, but it is prettier. And suddenly we are through the sound barrier of Victorian commercialism and rationalism: we dare to say to each other that we are people with dark and sometimes questionable values and dreams and needs for aesthetic response which we cannot analyze scientifically.

Our interest in the infinite during the last 30 years has been announced by the most active return tot he mystery of faith in more than four centuries. Jew, Catholic and Protestant have all reached into the darkness of man's inner space for exploration of irrational truth. Whether Kierkegaard or Bergson, Buber of Jaspers, Heidegger or James, there is a theme of revelation awaited in their writings.

Faith has been our mark of the inner man for our time. Action and change have been our marks of man in the place we work and the way we live.

Our pace of revolution is unprecedented in history. A single lifetime today brings more radical change than centuries created in Egypt or Greece or Rome. Whitehead described a new world when he said that "adventure is the stuff of civilization." Gottman reported in Megalopolis on his travels in North America, Western Europe, and the Mediterranean countries, everywhere he found cities expanding. The physical proof of our regenerating urban society is that today in the United States there are more than 600 urban renewal projects for our "dead" cities.

Suddenly the City, the Victorian "enemy of the people," facing Wright's prophecy in 1930 of extinction through decentralization of industry and overcrowding, the City now becomes synonymous with civilization. Suddenly, the city becomes the place where Aristotle said "one could lead the good life"' where specialization of labor provides the leisure which men may use for creativity and ideas and the refinement of the act of living.

Suddenly a magazine appears to define the "townie," the modern American city dweller, and with his sport car he gets Hemingway, with his Bunny he gets Joyce. Another said in its prepublication announcement: "The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about... the New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience and thereby will escape an influence which hampers most national publications..."

Herbert Muller was bucking Frank Lloyd Wright when he said, "The City is the first clear sign of civilization. In the city the economic surplus is collected and managed or squandered and energy is further stimulated by close association, division of labor and the pursuit of more wealth... These distinctive achievements of civilization are real gains, real goods. Only in a civilized society can man contemplate his inability to live on bread alone and dream of better ways of living. The material surplus provides the leisure of cultivating spiritual interests; the city is the main center of creative activity, the spiritual as well as the commercial and political capital; the self-conscious individual at his best is the glory of civilization..."

Central City populations remain fixed while our suburbs have grown. Yet the Central City provides increasingly more of the services which the small suburban community cannot afford: generation and control of utilities, law and government, high and specialized education, social welfare, recreation, cultural development. These services which now provide for the many suburban areas, require the city to increase its taxes while it necessarily administers an increasing government for the larger peripheral population; and so the city becomes a great centralized power. Many cities have annual budgets which today exceed our recent national budgets. Our cities have become city-states.

This is not the first time in history there has been an eruption of the city-state. The most recent previous era came to a head in the 14th Century when Toynbee said the future of society emerging from feudalism for a moment hung in balance between city-state and nationalism: the city-state almost became the dominant force in Western society.

A look backward into the future can frequently give us a perspective of our own position. Looking back at the 14th Century to see what architects and philosophers and cities were doing together may be revealing. We shall see if there was anything in the 14th Century which can be projected as a clue to our future environment.

The city-states burgeoned throughout Europe in the 14th Century. The Lombard League, the Tuscan cities, 62 cities in the Rhine land, 67 Flemish cities, 32 cities of Leon and Galicia, maritime cities of Cantabria, the Hanseatic League, gave form to Western society.

The 14th Century wealth which came from the profit of the land was managed in the town and put to work where there were people who could consume it and multiply it through consumption.

If 19th Century financial prosperity gave our cities enough security to look to the beautification of our life, the same held true of the 14th Century prosperous economy which led to development of market places and halls, ports, bridges, quays, fountains, town halls, belfries and cathedrals and churches. Avignon was built in the 14th Century as an entirely new city for the beauty, delight and glorification of the Babylonian Captivity.

This expanding art and architecture was not provincial but like our own, a vast international movement as Sugar said of his artisans, "by many masters from different nations."

A competitive urban life was reflected in medieval building contracts which demanded that a building be built as good or better than work at some neighboring location.

The chapter of Seville in 1401 recorded a resolution to "build so great a church to the glory of God that those who come after us will think us mad even to have attempted it."

Medieval Catholicism is frequently falsely characterized by orthodoxy and an official theology. We have a picture of a limited 14th Century Christian world united by a doctrinaire Catholic religion. But according to a medieval writer "Sacerdotium, Imperium, Studium" (the Church, Secular Government and the University were the three powers which guided the health of Christendom. It was this third ingredient, the University, created by the Church, which promoted the inquiry, doubt and the heresy that ultimately produced a revival of inner faith.

Curiously and increasingly, we can identify common patterns which overlay both our own time and the 14th Century: a creative drive toward urban life, a renaissance of faith against a previous system of rigid and formal doctrine; the growth of the city-state with its power to tax and its need to provide; and the growing value of intuitive forces in our lives.

Our environment mirrored in the 14th Century projects another dimension to our own self-portrait. This dimension will yet give further depth to some of the vaguer forms of our thinking which are not now easily definable.

What were other 14th Century ideas which we can find in our own society?

The fear of Death which followed the Black Plague is painfully comparable to our own persisting fear of death from the atom bomb. Certainly the inflation of wages which tripled in the short years after the Plague is reminiscent of our present world experience since Hiroshima.

If we have had a millionaire boom, the 14th Century had its bourgeois boom. The artisans became the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur became the intellectual. As Panofsky has described this: "The entire social system was rapidly changing toward an urban professionalism... it provided a meeting ground where the priest and the layman, the poet and the lawyer, the scholar and the artisan could get together on terms of near equality." Money and fear of death in both their century and ours have furnished the force to form a great democracy both in fact and in thought.

The 14th Century rediscovery of the value of intuitive experience boldly examined the field of physical science which had previously resisted any challenge of their fixed system. It was not coincidence that Roger Bacon in this new 14th Century freedom of inquiry said: "Machines for navigating are possible without rowers... Likewise cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be moved... And flying machines are possible..." The Nominalists anticipated the heliocentric system of Copernicus, the geometrical analysis of Descartes, the mechanics Galileo and Newton. Is this intuitive approach to our physical world to be matched in modern times for the same reasons by the poetry of Einstein, the quantum mechanics of Bohr, the indeterminacy theory of Heisenberg?

The theory and mechanics of 3-dimensional perspective drawing were developed in the 14th Century. Can we compare this to our own explorations of spatiality in art? Into the mind of the 14th Century artisan flowed a stream of free inquiry and investigation. Structural experiments in spanning roofs were matched by experiments in substituting glass for masonry.

Can we find these 14th Century concepts parallel in our modern attitudes toward architecture?

Does Mies van der Rohe find his path in Aquinas when Aquinas says that to turn away from wisdom and contemplation in a Christian civilization is the first cause of all disorder. Mies says that "reason is the first principle of all human work."

William of Occam said in the 14th Century, "It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer."

Is Mies quoting or restating Occam's Razor of the 14th Century when Mies says: "Less is more?"

What Panofsky called in 14th Century cathedral architecture, the "postulate of clarification for clarification's sake" is nowhere more clearly expressed in a Skidmore, Owings and Merrill building of a curtainwall.

And into this forced clarity, into this perversion of the meaning of order comes the creeping mystery of indeterminism: comes a TWA terminal by Saarinen, comes a cathedral and a monastery of deep mysterious forms by that former champion of right angles - Corbusier.

Is there today indeterminism in our art and architectural methods which parallels our contemporary philosophy? Does Jackson Pollack reflect the concepts of Heidegger? Was Saarinen influenced by Sartre?

The interpenetration of shell forms by Candela, the mysterious structural spatial explorations of space in the endless house by Kiesler... All of these indeterminate forms are to the architectural school of "forced clarity" what 14th Century Roger Bacon was to the 6th Century Aquinas, what Einstein was to Newton, and what the modern psychologist Kohler is to the Victorian philosopher Dewey.

We no longer will be able to know what a building looks like by inspecting the floor plan. The developed 3-dimensional mystery of spatial architecture once again is with us.

The exploration of space has brought with it, just as in the 14th Century, the exploration of method. Never in the past 500 years has there been so much invention in art and architecture. Never in the last 3000 years has the post and beam been so limited in its ability to construct the spatial dreams of our architects.

We have confessed as a community to the boredom of our architectural order, the boredom of the post and beam spun out endlessly as a system. A reaction to this monotony in our most recent architecture shows one more contrast with the 19th Century Victorian design method: our new forms produce totality of building, a monolithic quality, a statement of design with a beginning and an end, which finds kinship with the 14th Century High Gothic Summa aiming at the totality of one perfect and final solution.

City planning along with architecture reached a peak of development in the 14th Century. The planners broke many fences, in spirit and in mind, and in the administration of affairs. These times which made possible the development of men in cities according to their abilities, led easily toward the development of the specialist and his special city. Mumford describes the medieval city as congeries of little cities, which formed so naturally out of common needs and purposes that it only enriched and supplemented the whole.

Venice was the clearest example of the "city within a city": Torcello, the island of the church and cemetery; the Arsenal, the island of shipyard and munitions; Murano, the island for glass. Mumford believes the Venetians crated zoning on the "grand scale, practiced in a rational manner, which recognized the integrity of neighborhoods and which minimized the wasteful journey to work."

This 14th Century urban specialist is being redeveloped today. The day of the common laborer is being replaced by the specialists. As the University gave an education to the bourgeoisie in the 14th Century and developed lawyers, doctors and philosophers, our universities are educating artists and bankers and the operators of the machines which replace the common laborer.

We are creating groups of people who have a special participation in urban life, who have a special way of thinking and expressing themselves within their community. The AMA, the AIA, the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists have more in common with the 14th Century Parisian artisans, physicians and metaphysicians than they have with 19th Century Karl Marx. We are by today's specialization creating the zoning by occupation that existed in Medieval Venice.

Our modern cities have had a four-stage development: first, agriculture and commerce; then a swing to manufacture and trade; third, white collar; and we find ourselves now in a fourth phase with educated specialists in services, brokerage, management, art and communication.

The growth of suburbs have intensified the need for center city. Employment centers found in center cities could not find in a smaller community the quantity of specialized labor which present day work demands. Cybernation, automation, make the factory less important as a community employment center, whereas management, planning, trading, and communicating become the focal points for work.

We have learned, in our new drive, to create urban centers, to create these urban centers for our specialists, much as the "city within a city" concept of the 14th Century.

This collection of city islands, forming the center city, will act more like the city-state than ever. Our cities have every domestic state power except that of coining money. And this growth of economic power is simply a reflection of the change in the character of the city function. With this power comes taxation.

Increase of taxation will force new solutions to our planning problems. We cannot burden either business buildings used 35 hours a week or apartment buildings used at night and weekends with our total tax loads. And we cannot any longer subsidize the kind of planning which enjoys only the single shift use of our expensive city utilities. In our "cities within cities," we shall turn our streets up into the air, and stack the daytime and nighttime use of our land. We shall plan for two shift cities within cities, where the fixed costs of operating a city can be shared by commerce, recreation and education at the lower levels and housing above. As we spread taxes and other fixed expenses over a wide use, we shall diminish the traffic problems which are caused by the journey to work. Our specialists living and working in the same building complex need only vertical transportation.I should like at this point to examine a few pictures to see if there is way to show some of these abstract ideas as architectural realities.

The first slide shows the structural framing into some columns from Gothic Cathedrals of the 13th and 14th Centuries. Each of the lines entering a column shows the different ways in which the loads were carefully articulated in their entry into the column section. They also show clearly (the postulate of clarity for clarity's sake) how the column section, the "fluting" was a direct outgrowth of the intersection of these loads.

The next slide is a series of column sections from the corners of various of Mies van der Rohe buildings: 860 Lake Shore Drive, the aluminum detail at Diversey, the concrete detail at IIT, the detail at Newark, all carefully designed expressions of load and material. This compulsion of clarity reaches back 600 years to the Gothic masters who felt about structure as does Mies.

The next slide is of our balcony cantilever at Marina City. We also emphasize the clarity of our lines of loading, but in using a fluid material like concrete, we can mold the material to more accurately reflect the true load patterns. We can abandon the right angle concept, which is not directly applicable to structures.

The next slide is of two rose windows, on 13th Century at Reims, the other almost 14th Century at Reims, St. Nicaise. The difference in the geometry of these rose windows impresses me because of the similarity to the geometry of my own at the Marina City towers, and more recently to designs still on our boards for a new project. The 13th Century window has a hard core, with the petals attached to the center as a focal point. One might call this window design centripetal. The 14th Century window is coreless to the extent that the core is formed by the intersection of flowing curves from the petals. This window I might call centrifugal, with the petals developing outward into space.

This next slide was developed from a helicopter photograph of the foundations at a Marina City tower. You can immediately see the hard 13th Century core with the radial lines.

The next picture shows how the 13th Century foundation develops into the 13th Century rose window pattern with the petals attached tot he core - very centripetal in feeling.

The next picture of our work in progress showing the core formed by the flowing lines of the developed curves of the petals. The dynamics of these petals is rather outward, centrifugal, away from the center into space, and so for me is similar to the 14th Century rose window.

The next picture shows how I have arranged three of these towers on a site and interpenetrated the space with a building with a gigantic horizontal tube. These towers which will be 60 stories high contrast with the tube which will be elevated 20 feet above the ground, and which at the center will spin around four times, turbine like, to create 200,000 square feet of commercial area. These are shell forms, vertical and horizontal and while they each have a totality, a Summa, they interpenetrate space separately and together in a manner which would be understood more quickly by a 14th Century builder than by a 20th Century critic.

The next picture is a partial elevation of our new design for our new 14th Century towers. Neither curtainwalls nor post and beam are part of this design. Yet somehow, even the layman feels that this inquiry into the new form of materials is a part of our present expression, and maybe even a view into the near future.

This last picture is a section of our horizontal shell building, our tube. This is an automobile building which instead of fighting the automobile, swallows them. This building will be divided into two continuous strips. The one is for auto traffic into two directions with parking on one side. The other strip roughly fifty feet deep is an air-conditioned continuous space uncluttered by columns or framing, for use as commercial space, offices or shops. This tubular structure is supported 20 feet in the air, in order that traffic will not disturb the development of our 15-acre site.

These buildings mark for me an emergence from a rigid and rather horrible Victorian Age of Science.

For our future we should at best no longer build the separate building in our center city.

We should think rather of building environment, total environment for the total men our modern faith has just reclaimed. Our future environment could repeat for us a great humanistic renaissance and should give us the building of cities within cities for these men of faith.