Letter to Malcolm: Chiefly on Krier

Dear Malcolm,

All traditional architecture is not necessarily classical. The classic is the very best of a tradition. Jefferson's Capitol would be an example of a classical building because it not only hearkens back to former classical buildings, but has itself become a classic. It is so because in it Jefferson took a previous example, namely the ancient Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and made it thoroughly modern for the new seat of provincial government in Virginia. In this example lies part of the answer to your question about the practical uses for classical architecture in the modern world. 

Classicism is not un-modern. One of my professors in fact describes classicism as the "other modern." Modernism, the ideology that has held architecture around the world in a death grip since the 1920's, was based in the denial of all previous models and sought to replace them with the paradigm of the machine. The "international style" is a good example of such a mentality based in the desire for a new, unsullied architecture, fitting form to function. All but a few anachronistic modernists have long since left the machine slogan behind, however its influence can still be seen in even the tamest new construction. 

Traditional architecture, on the other hand, seeks to work with and continue local traditions, to render the urban order of the city more intelligible, and to tell the user and passer-by about itself through its form. Part of this process involves the adaptation of the way things have been done in the past to suit current needs. In other words, it does what buildings have always done until roughly eighty years ago. In opposition to many modernist buildings which are often either completely inexplicable to anyone but their designer, or hideous blights on the land, (and more often both) the traditional building seeks to be a good neighbor. Being a good neighbor entails a willingness to have a dialogue with one's surroundings, not to be offensive, to understand one's place in the order of the city, and most importantly to contribute to the public good. This means that in a Western city such as Richmond, the provincial capitol will be the most important building, traditionally ornamented with a fully expressed order, etc., all at an appropriate scale. Lesser buildings take their cue from this and are ornamented in a way that tells the story of the city. Classical buildings like the State Capitol are the best of these good neighbors.   

So, perhaps another question might be "what are the practical uses of an architecture that refuses to look to the past and continues to build indefensible, un-neighborly buildings?" Of course I have made this seem very cut-and-dry. There are many current architects who seek to use the modernist language in a communal, legible way, with varying degrees of success. I would argue, however, that such efforts are inherently futile. 

I am not sure what exactly you mean by the resources and processes originally used, but your question does raise an interesting question: how do we recover the skills and traditions of a building craft ignored for the last half century? One of the main difficulties with such an undertaking is the difficulty of mastering many of the required skills of the traditional architect and builder. Many of these traditions have been protected or rediscovered in the preservation field. There are several institutions around the world, my school among them, which seek to continue and spread the skills and traditions of the last 2700 years.

If you would like to know more about traditional and classical architecture and urbanism I would recommend the book, Architecture: Choice or Fate, by Leon Krier. It is a great place to start understanding classicism in a modernist world.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Best, 

Richard

Reorganizing the Modern City: The Case of Detroit

The following text and accompanying images were composed in Genoa during the summer of 2009 as a submission by Gallarati Architetti to the ResilientCity Competition for the renewal of Detroit, Michigan. Urbanismo had the good fortune to work with Gallarati Architetti on the project in the fascinating Ligurian port city. In the process we were able to learn and apply the teachings of Italian urban morphologist, Saverio Muratori and his concept of urban scale architecture to the continental grid. Special thanks to Mario and Giacomo Gallarati for permission to use these documents. Please click on the images for more detail.

The town in the past was characterized by a high degree of organic unity, deeply rooted in its slow process of formation and transformation, by successive stratifications, strictly connected with the orthographic structure of the place, the network of roads over its territory and the systems of landed property distribution.


To each settlement corresponded a pertinent territory, so structured as to thin away in proceeding from the centre to the periphery where it met the border-line of other settlements. As a consequence, the territorial body consisted of different scale sub-organisms, each having its own centre and its own periphery.


The modern city, the fruit of successive expansions of the original settlements occupying a "nodal" position in the territory, grows at first by saturating its own original territory and then by acquiring areas belonging to other elementary organisms, originally endowed with an autonomous structure, to end by conglobating them totally within its undifferentiated peripheries.


Both in the presence of spontaneous growths and in the case of planned growths, the new urban structure tends to extend itself like a uniform net over a great variety of different local realities, each having its own shape and its own functional balance.
 Planning the modern city anew means, first of all, becoming conscious of the growing complexity of the territory that the town embraces in one urban "continuum", through the acknowledgement of the relations and the successive degrees of hierarchy between the elements which form - on different scales - the structure of the city.



Sheet One: The Urban Organism

Reading of the Urban Organism

The first level of reading considers the organization of the different sectors of the city with reference to the system of its road-axes and particularly to the different roles they have in the formation and development of its urban fabric. In Detroit we can recognize a double-scale system. One scale is linked to the larger city, and originates from the City’s earliest plan (represented in blue), and another is based on the organization of the land division. This second system is made up of several single districts each characterized by its own structure. We have considered only that part of Detroit which maintains its original orientation towards the river in contrast with the surrounding areas which correspond to the American continental grid. Within this larger city organism we have individuated up to fifteen smaller organisms each with its own center and borders, thus forming its own district. One of these districts maintains the role of city center corresponding to the original planned center of Detroit. The others are located along main axes often at their crossings (represented in red). 
 


Proposal of a Multi-Nucleus City


Our proposal tries to outline a criterion by which to transform the city into several smaller self-sufficient nuclei. Each of these nuclei should be composed of a unified tissue organized by a hierarchy of axes. As a basis for each nucleus we determined which axes served as the primary connection between neighborhoods and the tissues that seem to be organized by the same axes. Between these central nuclei we converted peripheral tissue into green areas for sustainable use. In short, the city will be composed of several smaller autonomous districts, each with a central built tissue (with a concentrated population of approximately 25,000), and surrounded by areas destined for mixed agricultural use and sustainable forestry.



Sheet Two: The District Organism

A Proposal for The Durfee District

Within the example district of Durfee the urban nucleus will maintain the original order of the axial system that determined the layout of the urban tissue. The surrounding tissue, transformed into green land, will be divided into public parks, agricultural land and facilities for municipal services.

As in other districts, starting from a main road-axis, or matrix route, the setting evolves along planned building routes, orthogonal to the matrix route along which the building fabric evolves.

In our proposal the presence of a second main street parallel to the matrix route suggested the introduction of similar residential tissues as areas of higher density into other sectors. In relating to the existing industrial structures to the north and the sports facility to the south, our proposal accentuates the possible public function of the area along the southern matrix route and destines the remaining western areas to agricultural use, while the eastern areas will be taken up by forest and wetlands. 



Sheet Three: The Building Tissue

Reading the Building Fabric

Analogous to the general setting of the network of streets we have already seen, the study of the organization of the building fabric starts from the observation of the preexistent realities, from which we have tried to draw some general rules. 


a) Commercial lots are wider than residential lots and form autonomous strips along the main routes.
b) Most of the commercial activities concentrate along the main or peripheral axes.
c) Most residential tissues are organized by planned building routes, between which run alleys. Average lots facing these routes range from 120-130 feet by 30-35 feet.
d) Some of these planned building routes gain importance from their continuation outside the district. e) In some cases there are high-density residential lots which shift their orientation towards significant vertical axes.
f) Within the tissue there are areas of varying degrees of vacancy.

Our Proposal

Following the above guidelines we have completed the commercial tissues along main and peripheral axes, and differentiated two types of residential tissue. Along significant planned building routes and some existing or new vertical routes we have organized contiguous, high-density building tissue, while the remaining tissue will maintain its current character. High-density buildings will reach four floors. At the intersection of these main routes new squares will be created, also taking into account some currently vacant areas. Similarly, at a larger scale, a new great public square could be created on the site of present parking lots at the intersection of the matrix routes. Taller buildings could be realized around this main square and destined for administrative or institutional use.

An American Search for Urban Unity: Alexandria Louisiana- Part One

Several years ago we were fortunate to have had an opportunity to study the fascinating inland city of Alexandria. What follows is the first of two original posts on the community's remarkable history of architecture and urbanism. The city's documentation in the form of tinted postcards relates directly to the article's theme by its consistency in tone and color. The postcards are published online by the Alexandria Retrospective at http://www.alexandria-louisiana.com/.


Overview

The urban form of city of Alexandria, Louisiana results from a series of interventions, summarizing in their complexity much of the history of American planning. The city began with a grid laid out around basic public elements placed on two central public squares. As time passed and public functions multiplied, the various public functions, including town hall, public market, court house, academy, and jail were dispersed onto additional public land around the city, representing civic interests at both both the local and parish scales and employing a common architectural grammar based in European-derived architectural traditions allied with a bookish classicism. Religious structures were monumental in scale as befits basic institutions serving communal purposes, but employed mostly Gothic forms and details. This clear differentiation of sacred structures appears to have resulted in part from a recognition of their essentially private character during the Antebellum era.

The city faced nearly complete destruction of its fabric at the end of the American Civil War. The two decades of poverty that followed were eventually reversed by boom times. Under the influence of a successful commercial elite, the city was redesigned after the turn of the century using sophisticated planning, consistent architectural motifs, and details borrowed from and inspired by the self-confident American Renaissance. Design at the urban scale adopted monumental patterns emphasizing the importance of civic life. City buildings, serving both civic and religious purposes, adopted a universalizing architectural grammar, as will be seen. Classical details and similar materials were shared at every level of civic significance, including the architectural vocabulary of domestic architecture. This interrelation of the private and public realms indicate the aspiration of Alexandria to the good life. As a result of the legacy of slavery, however, this extension of the public good was restricted by the limited access permitted to some members of the community to the full benefits of civic life.

Loss of commerce in the mid-twentieth century derailed the economic growth. Social conflict and loss of faith in traditional American architectural and urban goals led to an impoverishment of the central part of the city at the same time.

Background

Alexandria lies at the center of Louisiana, on the right bank of the Red River. The central Louisiana region was settled in the early years of the eighteenth century. The Natchitoches Indians lived along the Red River. A trading post was established there in 1714 by Louis Jachereau de St. Denis, a French soldier and explorer. In 1723, The French colonial government established a garrison at a portage around a series of rapids on the Red River to protect trade. The tiny settlement across from the site of Alexandria was known as Post du Rapides.

In the 1760s, when the Spaniards received control of the region, the village contained no more than fifty inhabitants. Two merchants from Pennsylvania, Alexander Fulton and William Miller, arrived in the early 1790s and were given exclusive trading rights with the Indians. They opened a store on the right bank of the river just below Bayou Rapides. Shortly before the Louisiana Purchase they bought approximately forty thousand neighboring acres from the Indians. They had the tract surveyed for sale to settlers, who they expected would flood the area. Miller sold out and moved away, but Fulton, well-connected with the leader of the new Louisiana Territory, stayed and developed his property as the U. S. took possession in 1803.

Central Louisiana 1839. Detail, David H. Burr. The American Atlas (London, J. Arrowsmith, 1839), Library of Congress. http://www.usgwarchives.org/maps/louisiana/statemap/la1839n.jpg

As settlers arrived, Fulton, with the help of his brother-in-law, surveyor Samuel Wells, laid out a town along the river near his store, with the intention of providing a mercantile center for the immediate region and a port on the Red River. When the legislature established Rapides Parish several years later, it was chosen as the courthouse town as well. It was first incorporated as a town in 1818 and received a city charter in 1882. The name “Alexandria” may derive from Fulton’s name or that of his daughter. At any rate, the ultimate reference, understood by most educated Americans at the time, was to the great Hellenistic center of learning and commerce on the Nile, site of the greatest library of classical times.

Alexandria in 1872.Original city is at the center. http://usgwarchives.org/maps/louisiana/citymap/alexandria1872.jpg

Surveyor Wells laid out the town carefully in 1805 using the basic uninflected grid employed for most new towns across the US for many years. The central grid plan was symmetrical and mostly uninflected towards the river at the start. The original platting of the town divided it into approximately eighty one-acre squares with eight streets running back from the river. The central street running perpendicular to the river was called Washington Street. A series of ten numbered streets ran parallel to the river (what would have been First Street lined the river bank and was called Front Street. Two squares at the center were reserved for public use.


One public square, located away from the busy commercial area along the river, was designated to be “solely for the advancement of learning and culture,” probably indicating a school or academy. The other, labelled "Market Square" in 1872, was the principal public provision at the urban scale, demonstrating the centrality of the public life. Markets and town government have been associated from Renaissance times for a variety of reasons (see the City Market article). A market square was needed so that the important laws regulating commerce might be applied to a specific piece of ground. While the form of any special building erected on the square is not know to us, the form of market house/ town hall is one used across the country from Colonial times onward. Later, as we will see, that square became the site of the classically-designed city hall, seen in the postcard illustration above.

Detail of Map of the Town of Alexandria, Louisiana, 1872 showing the market square now the site of the City Hall

Each square was divided into four quarter-acre lots. The streets were to all be fifty-three feet across, except for those on the periphery, which were to be one hundred feet wide. While the town did not fill the grid provided for it for some years afterward, it gradually lived up to and exceeded the promise of the first urban design. There were two courthouses in succession. The courthouses were sited on a county square at the center of Front Street along the river, since county and town government typically required separate public accommodation at the urban scale. A literary society was chartered by the leading citizens in 1824 and a theatrical society in the 1830s. The town’s small scale is shown by the provision of a single church (Catholic). There were two banks, two hotels, and a growing roster of lawyers and doctors.

Most American towns in the earliest periods existed to provide lots to house the commercial and mechanical trades who served the surrounding countryside and the parish's (or county's) non-farming professionals (lawyers, doctors, and officials), whose activities were best served by a central urban location. As industry grew in scale and scope, many of these activities were also housed on peripheral tracts associated with the town. Most of the commercial buildings were at first located along the river on Front Street. Many of these undoubtedly took the form of the basic building of Federal-period American urbanism, the house/store, in which the owner lived above his shop.


The original quarter-acre lots were subdivided as required into narrow strips as needed to form commercial building sites. John Casson, a local leader, donated a tract of land to the west of town to house an educational institution. The College of Rapides, an academy, was built on that tract and funded, at considerable cost, to provide education to the region’s youth.

The town’s promise was reinforced when, in 1837, the Red River Railroad, the first rail line west of the Mississippi, was extended from Alexandria’s courthouse square to towns and plantations in the rich Bayou Beouf region. By mid-century, the improving economic climate brought new architecture and urban ideas. Alexandria’s population doubled from 1850 to 1860, when it numbered over 1,500. A new courthouse, with iron columns, was built in 1859. A new city hall and a library building were built in the same decade. By this date, there were three hotels, three banks, and three churches (Catholic, Episcopalian, and Methodist).


The city was part of a new national emphasis on the heritage of democracy among the Greeks. The new buildings were part of the confident building of civic buildings utilizing details and forms associated with the Greek Revival movement. During this era concepts of hygiene were emphasized and public lands and streets tended to be more carefully tended and planted than formerly.

Part Two to follow

Understanding Richmond's Civic Order

Most accounts of Richmond’s urban and architectural history have examined the city’s buildings as individual monuments rather than as part of an urban whole. Tyler Potterfield, in his history of the city’s landscape, and Charles Brownell and his students at VCU have done a great deal to dispel a good deal of the fog surrounding the deeper structure of Richmond’s overall fabric and of the history of its specialized civic architecture at the urban scale. As a further attempt to excavate some aspects of Richmond’s civic order, we have posted to the right an ongoing series of essay on some of the building types that make up the city’s tradition of public buildings.

Virginian cities were directly related to the urban structures of the ancient world, informed by later intellectual developments, in particular Renaissance Humanism and English political theory. The changing form of our city and its layered fabric can be traced by an excavation of its political structure and of the building types that correspond to the elements of civil life. Most important, in urban historian Carroll William Westfall’s view, is the relation between civic life and architectural form. Most significantly, in the light of the civil and architectural disorder evident in modern Richmond, traditional cities employ civil functions and architecture to demonstrate how that the civic life orders and enlivens both private and commercial activities. Westfall asserts, in Learning From Pompeii, that “Roman cities illustrate a general principle: In cities that take the civil life seriously, the physical reinforces the civil and vice versa, with the one used as a means of achieving the ends of the other.”

Urban life, variously religious, political, social and commercial, requires venues where public activities can be accommodated and ordered. Virginia’s most familiar models of civic order were to be found in the towns and cities of England. Basic elements of any town or city in the English civic tradition include the church, court, tavern, and market.  In England, as Mark Girouard has shown, these activities were traditionally manifested in a hierarchy of scales. Town, County, and State each accommodated these and other civic functions, in some cases conflated in a single architectural form.  Town government and markets stalls were conventionally housed in a single building. Similarly, as ancient seats of justice, the great halls of county castles were adapted to serve as courts and indoor regional market on the regular court days that drew a larger population to the county seat.  Westminster Hall in London served a similar role at the national level.

Eighteenth-century Americans transformed English civic order and its architectural expression in ways that suited the changed circumstances of the colonies and new nation, but the forms of urban design and architectural expression continued to show their roots in Post-medieval Northern Europe. The few public buildings of the mid-eighteenth-century town at the Falls of the James- the Church on Richmond Hill and the Henrico County Courthouse- occupied sites and took forms that shaped the civic life by their careful detailing and rich materials and their placement outside the regularity of the grid of conventional lots. The church, facing due east at an angle to the grid, was placed in an elevated, anti-nodal position away from the bustle of the principal street and the courthouse was located in the middle of a principal cross street at the center of commerce and near the county jail. 

When the town was selected to become the capital city after the Revolution, it acquired a new set of civic functions and a greatly expanded form. As it grew, the city’s local institutions lent civil order to the enlarged scope of commercial activities, while the market brought the prosperity that made the civic architecture possible. The institutions proper to a city included a market for commercial transactions, scales to assure fair measure, a hall for the council and court, a lockup, a constabulary to keep the gathered populace in order, and a place for the storage of records.

Following English and American tradition the city’s institutions were, at first, housed together in a new, classically detailed Market Hall, placed on the public common at the hinge between the old, county town and the new capital district. As the city civic institutions multiplied, the new public buildings, including the jail, a school, and a police station, most were located on the nearby land along Shockoe Creek.  However, by the time that the Hustings Court and City Council outgrew the Market Hall in the early nineteenth century, the valley location no longer seemed the center of the city. A new, domed City Hall with a temple front was built on Shockoe Hill in a nearly axial location directly behind the Capital on the main route though the city.  A new, second market was constructed nearby.

The new state government district was strategically placed on the Richmond’s Shockoe Hill. Existing streets were widened hierarchically, a public square created, and a program for the addition of a full range of buildings projected, adapting a previous unarticulated street grid. The working out of the state’s program took several decades and underwent many transformations, but it resulted in a powerful amalgam of public and private architecture, with a series of public buildings surrounded by a landscape of architecturally distinguished villas designed by some of the nation’s most competent architects.

A group of citizens, advised by Thomas Jefferson and a series of well-informed European immigrants, such as his associate, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, provided designs for the new city’s public and private realms. They enriched the English tradition in which they were immersed with political, urban and architectural theories imbibed from a variety of sources. Jefferson and his colleagues redefined the city’s institutions, elaborated its program, enriched its layout, and ornamented its fabric with a series of public and private buildings of exceptional quality. The planned institutions included the legislative, judicial, and executive arms of the government, an armory, and a jail (later known as the penitentiary). The massive, temple-form Capitol was placed, like an acropolis, on a knob of Shockoe Hill overlooking the river. Together with the other institutions of government, it was located on a calm, expansive public square in an anti-nodal position away from the principal thoroughfare.

Theaters, churches, and educational institutions were not at first included among the civic institutions in the capital district on Shockoe Hill, but instead clustered around the market. Unexecuted designs by Latrobe for an elegant theater/hotel and a new church failed to secure a sufficient level of interest or funding.  Latrobe and his clients proposed to place the church at the apex of the civic order, in the center of the eastern end of Broad Street on the bluff above Shockoe Creek.

Richmond’s urban form continued to be enriched by a classical understanding of the form and meaning of the city well into the twentieth century, resulting in one the most successful amalgams of public and private architecture. We intend to continue to explore the civic architecture around us in greater depth and to bring the study into later periods as we go along. Please see the essays collected in the panel to the right for a deeper analysis of the city’s building types.