Evaluator, Choreographer, Ideologue, Catalyst: The Disparate Reception Histories of Alexander Klein’s Graphical Method PDF

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VOLUME 76 | NUMBER 1 | MARCH 2017 4 In This Issue Field Note 5 Historical License: Architectural History in the Architectural Profession DAN A CUFF In Memoriam 10 Stanford Anderson (1934–2016) NANCY STIEBER Articles 13 The Professione di Architetto in Renaissance Italy ELIZABETH MERRILL 36 The Medie...

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VOLUME 76 | NUMBER 1 | MARCH 2017

4

In This Issue

Field Note 5

Historical License: Architectural History in the Architectural Profession DAN A CUFF

In Memoriam 10

Stanford Anderson (1934–2016) NANCY STIEBER

Articles 13

The Professione di Architetto in Renaissance Italy ELIZABETH MERRILL

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The Medieval Inchinata Procession at Tivoli: Ritual Construction of Civic Identity in the Age of the Commune R E B E K A H P E R RY

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Louis Sullivan and the Physiognomic Translation of American Character C H A R L E S L . D AV I S I I

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Evaluator, Choreographer, Ideologue, Catalyst: The Disparate Reception Histories of Alexander Klein’s Graphical Method CHRISTOPH LUEDER

Books 107

Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, edited by Gülru Necipog˘ lu and Alina Payne R E V I E W E D B Y K AT H L E E N J A M E S - C H A K R A B O RT Y

The Parthenon Enigma: A New Understanding of the West’s Most Iconic Building and the People Who Made It, by Joan Breton Connelly R E V I E W E D B Y R O B I N F. R H O D E S

Paradigm and Progeny: Roman Imperial Architecture and Its Legacy, edited by Diane Favro, Fikret K. Yegul, John Pinto, and Guy Métraux ::

REVIEWED BY KARL GALINSKY

Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumwissenschaft, by Katherine Harloe R E V I E W E D B Y H E AT H E R H Y D E M I N O R

Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere, by Prita Meier R E V I E W E D B Y I K E M S TA N L E Y O K OY E

The Social Project: Housing Postwar France, by Kenny Cupers REVIEWED BY NICOLA PEZOLET

Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955–1991, by Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin R E V I E W E D B Y V L A D I M I R K U L I C´ Ć

Exhibitions 120

Design for Eternity: Architectural Models from the Ancient Americas R E V I E W E D B Y Y U M I PA R K H U N T I N G T O N

Architectural Master Drawings from the Albertina R E V I E W E D B Y G E O R G S C H E L B E RT

Yona Friedman: Architecture mobile = Architecture vivante REVIEWED BY JESSE LOCKARD

Playboy Architecture, 1953–1979 R E V I E W E D B Y R O B E RT B R U E G M A N N

House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate in Thirty-One Episodes REVIEWED B Y TODD GISH

Multimedia 129

Precise Poetry: Lina Bo Bardi’s Architecture, directed by Belinda Rukschcio R E V I E W E D B Y C AT H R I N E V E I K O S

In This Issue

The Professione di Architetto in Renaissance Italy. shows how Renaissance Italian architects used the concept of the professione di architetto as a way to affirm and delineate the character of their occupation. Drawing inspiration from antiquarian models and taking advantage of the humanist ethos, these architects equated "profession" with manual and theoretical expertise, social authority, and the fulfillment of artistic, civic, and moral ideals. Elizabeth Merrill places the origins of architectural professionalism in early modem Italy-rather than in the nineteenth-century movements frequently cited by social historians-and describes the theoretical context for the architect's professional rise. Positioning themselves alongside university-educated professors, architects of Renaissance Italy crafted didactic treatises about their work and created academies for its instruction, foreshadowing a long history of architectural discourse that continues to this day. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the nascent independent communes of central Italy expressed a new sense of civic identity through ~e staging of elaborate public liturgical processions that shaped and were shaped by local mythology and idiomatic urban landscapes. The Medieval Inchinata Procession at Tivoli: Ritual Construction of Civic Identity in the Age of the Commune examines Tivoli's Inchinata procession, which continues to circle the city every year on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption. Reconstructing the route and performance of the medieval Inchinata through textual, topographical, and archaeological data, Rebekah Perry argues that the procession evolved as an adaptation of "official" liturgical rites introduced by Tivoli's rival Rome to a native apotropaic ritual and local narratives ~mbedded in the city's topography. Through the cosmographical choreography of the procession, the young municipality may have used this amalgamation to invoke the New Jerusalem as an appeal to divine authority for the right to self-rule.

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Louis Sullivan and the Physiognomic Translation of American Character examines the racial politics of Louis Sullivan's democratic vision for American architecture, as manifest in his interpretations of physiognomic character in people and the built environment and in his reflections on U.S. nationalism. Charles L. Davis Il argues that while Sullivan believed that ordinary Americans would produce an indigenous culture reflective of democratic ideals, his assimilationist conception of American citizenship excluded recent white immigrants and resident nonwhite peoples and limited his democratic architecture, as in the case of Kehilath Anshe Ma'ariv Synagogue in Chicago. While Sullivan's ornament for the synagogue expressed Jewish identity in Chicago, its Richardsonian exterior referred to his secular-assimilationist model of national culture. The synagogue's subsequent use as Pilgrim Baptist Church by an African American congregation complicates our understanding of Sullivan's assimilationist political theory and its expression in his architecture. The graphical method propounded by Russian German Israeli architect Alexander Klein during the late 1920s evaluates the qualities of architectural plans through a process of diagrammatic analysis following purportedly objective criteria. In Evaluator, Choreographer, Ideologue, Catalyst: The Disparate Reception Histories of Alexander Klein's Graphical Method, Christoph Lueder examines the reception and adaptation of Klein's method. Ernst Lowitsch reinterpreted Klein's analytical notation as choreography of domestic life. Following Klein's forced emigration from Nazi Germany, Frank Gloor rediscovered Klein's graphical method and transformed and adapted it into a scientific method classifying degrees of flexibility. Catherine Bauer disseminated the method to the English-speaking world under a new title, "Functional Housing for Frictionless Living," which led to Robin Evans's enduring indictment of Klein's diagrams as emblematic of reductive functionalism. Throughout its reception, the graphical method has been viewed at various times as a methodology of scientific evaluation, a choreography of everyday life, an indictment of functionalist ideology, and a catalyst for new working methodologies.

Evaluator, Choreographer, Ideologue, Catalyst: The Disparate Reception Histories of Alexander Klein’s Graphical Method christoph lueder Kingston University London

Klein . . . lectured sometimes in Russian and sometimes in German, while we students for the most part understood only Hebrew. Jochanan Elon . . . , who was Klein’s assistant, translated his lectures into Hebrew for us. We sensed that Klein was a highly qualified architect and urban planner, and held him in high esteem, though he never told us anything about his professional achievements in Germany. But we students took a more skeptical look when Klein began to teach us how to arrange the furniture in various rooms so that the sunlight would not create shadows on the floor.1

T

he graphical method for the evaluation of apartment plans, which the architect Alexander Klein first formulated toward the end of the 1920s, has been received in multiple, contradictory ways, ranging from critique and adaptation to extension and inversion.2 Klein’s graphical method was widely published and discussed among architects and critics in 1920s Germany and, after 1928, disseminated abroad to Denmark, Italy, the United States, and France.3 Yet debates on diagrams, planning, and typology often fail to recognize Klein’s contributions, perhaps because of the rupture created by Klein’s forced emigration from Germany to Israel in 1933. As his student Myra Warhaftig recounts in the quotation above, his method was received with skepticism outside the context of interwar German modernism. The reception histories of Klein’s work in the English- and German-speaking worlds diverge sharply. While the architectural theorist Robin Evans’s seminal essay “Figures, Doors and Passages” of 1978 has consigned Klein’s Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 1 (March 2017), 82–106, ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2017 by the Society of Architectural Historians. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals.php?p=reprints, or via email: [email protected]. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1525/jsah.2017.76.1.82.

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graphical method to an enduring role as the embodiment of functionalist ideology, certain postwar German authors have critiqued, augmented, and adjusted it to new agendas.4 A comprehensive exegesis of these fragmented reception histories promises to yield a better understanding not only of the work of an underappreciated architect and theorist but also of the fluid roles of Klein’s diagrams as they have been received in different contexts: as scientific instruments, as choreographic notation, as emblems of ideology, and as catalysts for thought.

Biographical and Historical Context The life and work of the architect and theorist Alexander Klein make for a compelling narrative. Born in Odessa in 1879, Klein studied architecture at the Institute of Civil Engineering in St. Petersburg, Russia.5 In 1906, shortly after his graduation, he won a competition for a hospital complex consisting of administrative, service, and residential buildings as well as a hospital building for two thousand beds on a 22-hectare site; his scheme was subsequently built.6 Klein undertook several trips to Western Europe and Italy from 1910 to 1913, taking a special interest in visiting Palladio’s villas. Palladian influences are conspicuous in the façades of Klein’s tenement building at Kronwerkskij 5 in St. Petersburg, built 1913–14 (Figures 1 and 2).7 Contrasting with these classical tropes, the “space group plan,” which Klein fully developed in his later German minimal dwelling plans, made its first appearance here. The space group plan consolidated spaces and activities into three groups—living, sleeping, and servicing—thereby allowing each activity to occur without disrupting others.8 The integration of services into the space group plan differs from Palladio’s floor plans, which usually relegated services to

Figure 1 Alexander Klein, apartment building at Kronwerkskij 5, St. Petersburg, 1913–14, plan of first floor and matrix diagram of interconnected spaces (drawing by author).

ancillary wings and separate volumes, thereby allowing a sequence of formal and generously proportioned spaces to unfold within the villas that corresponded to the proportions expressed externally. By contrast, at Kronwerkskij 5 the axis of symmetry does not correspond to the division between the two apartments on each level, and the enfilade of spaces seems retroactively inserted into a formally constrained volumetric envelope. The openings in the formally composed façades conflict with the inhabitation of the rooms inside, as evidenced by windows that are blocked to prevent views into the apartments of the neighboring wing. Later in his career, Klein characterized as “paper architecture” such contradictions in the work of contemporaneous architects that sought to uphold classicist

structure, proportions, and vocabulary despite radical changes in social structures and patterns of inhabitation. In 1917 Klein relocated to Kislovodsk (Caucasus) to master plan an extension to a spa town. In 1920, three years after the October Revolution, he immigrated to Germany, and in 1922 set up his architectural office in Berlin. The following year he designed his first, modestly scaled, German project, a series of terraced houses in Berlin-Wilmersdorf; completed in 1925, this work continued to draw on the language of historicist architecture that Klein had studied during his visits to Italy.9 In the period from 1922 through 1927, Klein entered projects in a total of seven competitions in Berlin and Moscow, none of which were built.10 From 1925 onward, his interest shifted from the design of domestic buildings for

EVALUATOR, CHOREOGRAPHER, IDEOLOGUE, CATALYST

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Figure 2 Alexander Klein, apartment building at Kronwerkskij 5, St. Petersburg, 1913–14, photograph of street elevation (Leo Adler, “Arbeiten von Alexander Klein, St. PetersburgBerlin,” Wasmuths Monatshefte fur Baukunst 10, ::

no. 8 [1926], 342).

bourgeois clients to the need for affordable housing arising from the drastic housing shortages of the Weimar Republic. Before World War I, speculative developer housing in Germany failed to address the needs of the working class. The shortage of housing for workers was exacerbated first by the war and then by a lack of means to build affordable apartments in the postwar period of hyperinflation. German architects responded to the housing crisis in various ways. Architects such as Heinrich Tessenow equated industrialization with the inhumanity of industrial warfare.11 Along with others, such as the young Walter Gropius in his 1919 founding manifesto for the Bauhaus, Tessenow argued for a return to traditions of craftsmanship.12 In contrast, proponents of ֵ the “Neues Bauen,” such as Bruno Taut, Hugo Haring, Martin Wagner, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the critic Adolf Behne, and, later, Gropius, turned their attention to massproduction affordable housing. From 1924 onward, Siedlungen (housing estates) were promoted on a large scale by the Social Democratic government. Although Klein did not realize his first housing project until 1928, the German journals Wasmuths Monatshefte fu::r Baukunst and Bauwelt published his competition projects as well as his earlier Russian buildings. In these journals, Klein reported to his German readership on Russian architecture and the Russian competition system, which in Germany was considered exemplary; its promotion

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JSAH | 76.1 | MARCH 2017

of objective evaluation criteria had a profound influence on Klein’s views.13 He forged a crucial professional relationship with Werner Hegemann, the editor of Wasmuths Monatshefte :: fur Baukunst, who endorsed the work of traditionalist architects, such as Tessenow and Paul Schmitthenner, but also sought to turn his journal into a platform for discourse and controversy.14 Klein purposefully provoked a number of debates during his time in Berlin; these do not align with a traditionalist/ modernist divide, as evidenced by his discussions with Taut, ֵ Haring, and Franz Löwitsch, which I examine later in this article. Klein’s interests evolved around the evaluation and optimization of spatial organization, predominantly in the floor plan, which enabled him to forge a unique position in the architectural debates taking place in Weimar Germany. His peculiar position within those debates may help to account for the diminished attention that Klein’s theoretical work received following his forced emigration from Germany in 1933, despite the professional success and honors bestowed on him. His later work included master plans for numerous large settlements and housing projects in Israel, and master plans as well as faculty buildings for the Technion in Haifa. Klein had a distinguished professorial career at the Technion as head of the Division for Town Planning and Housing in its Faculty of Architecture. He became the first

representative of Israel at the International Union of Architects in Lausanne in 1948, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1954, and exhibited his work at Columbia University in New York in 1949 and in 1953.15 In 1947, Klein presented his views on urban planning in an article titled “Man and Town.”16 After he moved to Israel, however, his work and publications did not provoke the intense debate that they had sparked in Germany.

Inception and Iterative Development of Klein’s Graphical Method In May 1927 Werner Hegemann curated an exhibition of buildings by J. J. P. Oud in Berlin, which he published in Wasmuths Monatshefte later the same year.17 He commended Oud for the clarity and simplicity of the unadorned building volumes of his housing estates at Hoek van Holland and the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, but he was concerned about the unusual arrangement of the floor plan at the Weißenhofsiedlung. Earlier, Hegemann had published a number of studies and articles on small apartments by Klein and had been impressed by Klein’s expertise. Therefore he commissioned Klein to evaluate Oud’s houses at the Weißenhofsiedlung in comparison with one of Klein’s own projects, terraced houses for a site between Wurnemünder- and Selchowstraße in BerlinDahlem. Klein’s report appeared in 1927 under the title “Versuch eines graphischen Verfahrens” (Attempt at a graphical method). He argued that in the customary judging of housing floor plans, of competitions, proposals or realized buildings, a number of concepts and expert terms are used, such as clarity, economics, spatial form, spatial sequence, circulation routes, utilization of surface area, overall impression, etc. . . . Experts tend to assign many of these concepts merely subjective value.18

To overcome the limitations of such subjective evaluation, he proposed his graphical method as “a means of objective substantiation of the hitherto subjective appraisal.”19 In its first iteration of 1927, Klein chose to disregard the height of spaces, color, treatment of walls, and furniture, as he argued that these factors can be easily changed and therefore are of only secondary importance to the floor plan. The report was accompanied by three diagrams, showing the layout of (1) “pathways,” (2) “concentration of areas for free movement,” and (3) “the geometrical similarity and coherence of the elements of the plan” (Figure 3).20 In the diagrams, Oud’s plan for his Weißenhofsiedlung project appeared on the left, and Klein’s plan for Berlin-Dahlem was on the right. The

pathways diagrams mapped the trajectories of daily routines in plan; Klein evaluated the pathways according to the convenience of apartment use and according to “the purely physical expenditure of energy.”21 The diagrams of the concentration of areas for free movement mapped the floor areas left over after the essential pieces of furniture, such as beds in the bedroom, had been set up. Klein argued that feelings of comfort and spaciousness depend on the concentration and consolidation of these free areas. Finally, the diagrams labeled “geometrical similarity and coherence of the elements of the plan” traced the outlines of spaces as they are perceived when an occupant enters them. Klein argued that “nervous stress” increases with the number of spatial impressions encountered—such as the proportions of spatial enclosures— and the sequence in which these are experienced, changes of level, the meandering of circulation, and changes in lighting. In all three categories, Klein’s diagrams demonstrated the superiority of his own plans over Oud’s. The sum of pathway length in Klein’s plans was shorter; the consolidated areas of free movement in his plans contrasted favorably against the broken-up, residual spaces in Oud’s plan; and spaces in Klein’s plan were more similar to each other in terms of proportion and dimension than were t...