Leonardo Benevolo-History of Modern Architecture Volume 1 The Tradition of Modern Architecture: Introduction Architecture and the Industrial Revolution PDF

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H is to ry o f m o d em a rc h ite c tu re Leonardo Benevolo Volume one The tradition of modern architecture The M .l.T. Press Cambridge, Massachusetts G ^O - n 7/ h v. / Co 1 V First published in Italy in i960 Storia dell’architettura m odem a © G iuseppe Laterza & Figli, i960 Translated from t...

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H is to ry o f m o d em a rc h ite c tu re

Leonardo Benevolo

Volume one The tradition of modern architecture

The M .l.T. Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

G ^O -

n v.

Co

7/

h

/

V

1

First published in Italy in i960 Storia dell’architettura m odem a © G iuseppe Laterza & Figli, i960 Translated from the third revised Italian edition, 1966 by H. J. Landry T h is English translation first published in G reat Britain 1971 Published in the U nited States o f Am erica by the M .I .T . Press, Cam bridge, Massachusetts 1971 © this edition Routledge & K egan Paul, 1971 IS B N o 262 02080 7 (hardcover) L ib rary o f Congress Catalog Card num ber: 77-157667 Printed in G reat Britain

C o n ten ts to vo lu m e one

CD

r- CM CM

t

volume one

The tradition of modern architecture o Acknowledgements Preface 0 Introduction Architecture and the industrial revolution

section one one two three four

section two five six section three seven eight section four nine ten eleven

V

vii ix xv

Birth and development of the industrial town Changes in building technique during the industrial revolution The age of reorganization and the origins of modern townplanning Haussmann and the plan of Paris Engineering and architecture in the second half of the nineteenth century

3 38 61 96

The debate on the industrial town The industrial town and its critics Attempts at reforming the industrial town, from Owen to Morris

127 148

The industrial city in America The American tradition The Chicago school and the American avant-garde

191 219

European avant-garde movements from 1890 to 1914 Introduction Art nouveau France’s contribution: Auguste Perret and Tony Gamier Experiments in town-planning from 1890 to 1914

253 262 320 343

Notes

368

C o n ten ts to volum e tw o

volume two twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty

The modern movement Conditions at the start The formation of the modern movement Early relations with the public Approach to town-planning problems Political compromise and the strugglewith the authoritarian regimes Progress in European architecture between 1930 and 1940 Modern architecture in America Europe after the Second World War ' The new international field

375 412 472 507 540 586 629 684 748

Conclusion

783

N otes.

841

Bibliography

850

Index

859

s

| In tro d u c tio n A rc h ite c tu re and th e in d u s tria l revolution \

i

On 14 April 1791 the union of the building workers (charpentiers) - the men working on the sites of Sainte-Genevieve, the Place de la Concorde and the new bridges over the Seine - invited employers to agree to regulate wages on the basis of a minimum wage.1 One month before, a decree by the Con­ stituent Assembly had suddenly abolished the traditional organization of the guilds which had regulated labour relations until that time. The workers, excluded from elections for the Constituent Assembly, were unmoved by the spirit of this ruling; they did not regret the disappearance of the old guilds, where they had been oppressed by their masters, but neither did they show any particular enthusiasm for the freedom of labour proclaimed by the liberal economists, as can be seen from the cahiers of the fourth estate presented in 1789; they were concerned for their immediate livelihood and believed that the new arrangement should produce an' improvement in their standard of living, or at least leave them a margin to defend their own interests themselves. For this reason they turned directly to their employers, inviting them to negotiate. The employers did not reply. So the union appealed to the Municipality of Paris to intervene in its favour. Bailly, the Mayor

of Paris, realized that there was an important matter of principle lurking beneath this dis­ pute and preferred to reply publicly with a manifesto that was put in the Paris streets on 26 April and which solemnly reaffirmed the theoretical principles of the liberalism which had led up to the abolition of the guilds, and condemned the very existence o f workers’ associations let alone their demands: ‘The law has abolished the guilds which held the monopolies of production. It cannot, therefore, authorize unions which, by replacing them, would set up a new sort of monopoly. For this reason, those who entered these workers’ unions, or who encourage them, are plainly going against the law, are enemies of freedom and punishable as disturbers of the peace and of public order. [Therefore, the request to settle wages by law could not be entertained.] It is true that all citizens have equal rights, but they have not equal abilities, talents and means; it is, therefore, impossible that they should all hope to be able to earn the same amount. A union of workers, aiming to bring daily wages to a uniform amount, would plainly be going contrary to their interests’ .2 On 30 April the employers in their turn

1 J.L. David, Oath of the Tennis Court (1791)

addressed a petition to the Municipality; they stated that workers’ associations were contrary to the existing laws and that they aimed to impose their conditions by force; this conduct ‘constitutes an outrage against the rights of man and the liberty of indi­ viduals’ and is counter to the principles of the economy, ‘since competition alone is enough to contain mutual interests within their natural limits’ .3 This unrest among building workers spread to those in other trades, in Paris and elsewhere, while employers too began to aim at some sort of organization among them­ selves; many workers went on strike and on 22 May the problem was brought before the National Assembly. The employers claimed that the workers’ associations were simply a new version of the old guilds; the workers firmly refused to accept this analogy, claiming that it was a completely new form of organi­ zation, indispensable in view of the changed

state of affairs and that their employers too were an organized body, and more easily so, in view of their smaller numbers. ‘The National Assembly’ - ran a workers’ memorandum - ‘by destroying all privileges and guilds, must have foreseen that this declaration would be of some use to the poorest class, which for so long has been the plaything of the despotism of its employers’.4 On 14 June the deputy Le Chapelier - a representative of the third estate - presented his outline of a law that accepted, basically, the requests of the employers, and re­ affirmed the theoretical neutrality of the State with regard to labour relations. The problem raised was connected with the free­ dom of association, sanctioned in the declaration of the rights of man; but ‘it must be forbidden to citizens belonging to a particular profession to gather together in the cause of their own so-called common interests’ since the new state does not

recognize the existence of these so-called interests; ‘within the state, there exists only the particular interest of each individual, and the general interest’ .5 Personally, Le Chapelier was convinced that the workers’ demands were reasonable; but the Assembly could not and must not intervene and support them with a law, because from here would come a basis for the rebirth of the old guild system and the momentary gains would be cancelled out by permanent damage. The Le Chapelier law, passed on 17 June 1791, impartially prohibited ‘both workers’ aims to increase wages, and employers’ coalitions to lower them’ ;6 it also forbade both parties the right to hold meetings, for­ bade administrative bodies to hear requests of this type and set up various punishments though not harsh ones — for transgressors. France’s example was followed, a few years later, by England. In 1800 - here too after a disturbance among building workers the Combination Act was issued, prohibiting all meetings of members of a common trade. In this way, during the crucial period of the industrial revolution, the attitude of the political power to labour relations was de­ fined by means of a theoretically unexcep­ tionable statement. But facts soon proved the untenability of this solution. In France the agricultural crisis, the devaluation of paper money and the hardships of war prevented the revolutionary government from maintaining its liberal attitude in economics, and soon forced it towards a system of rigid control; then came the Empire, which not only re-established trade associations compulsorily in 1813 but also went even further than the Monarchy in controls, to the point of setting up state industries. In England the general liberal tendency was maintained partially even during the Napoleonic wars, though the Combination Act immediately proved un­ suitable for regulating the expanding British economy, and after being modified in practice, was abolished in 1824.

So after a generation the whole problem was open again, and had to be faced in a way that was very different from that arrived at by the French deputies o f 1791: not by a declaration of principle but by the gradual building of a whole new organizational structure quite different from the original one and certainly no less complex. The immediate causes for this develop­ ment were, undoubtedly, class interests. The French bourgeoisie, having gained power with the help of the fourth estate, did not intend to share with them the advantages of this newly gained position. In England manual labourers were similarly excluded from public life. But this was not the whole story. The legislators of 1791 and 1800 were inspired not only by self-interest but also by a theoretical vision which seemed, at the time, to be the only one possible; for the moment all the workers had to set against it were bitter complaints about their own conditions, or a backward-looking attachment to vanished institutions. Le Chapelier was an independent jurist moved by a theoretical stubbornness which did not prevent him from recognizing, in the very report with which he presented his law, that current wages were too low and needed to be raised. It is true that the workers’ cause was defended in Marat’s Ami du Peuple, but three months earlier the same paper had also protested against the abolition of the guilds, without producing reasons other than the most reactionary platitudes against industrial progress.7 There was an obvious imbalance between the solutions put forward and the problems to be solved. A real and difficult question would be treated in theoretical terms and resolved along these lines, leaving aside the most important difficulties; an eminently dynamic situation would be expressed in absolute terms, as though the theses upheld had the value of eternal and natural laws. Practical difficulties, furthermore, were pre-

2, 3

Versailles, The Petit Trianon (A .J. Gabriel, 1762), and Marie Antoinette's village (Ft. Mique, 1783—6)

sent and visible to everyone, so that disre­ gard of them was to some degree deliberate, by a sort of convention accepted by all parties. The terms of theoretical discourse were apparently quite clear, but ambiguous in this particular context. Words as used by poli­ ticians, employers and workers did not have the same meaning: ‘freedom’ for the first meant a programme derived from the philosophers of the Enlightenment, for the second a slackening of state controls on their activities, for the third the right to a reason­ able standard of living. Yet all used the same conventional phrases and allowed discussion to take place in metaphorical terms, through habit or calculation. Thus the formulation arrived at seemed conclusive and unimpeachable, but was in fact provisional and uncertain; instead of solving the problem, it gave rise to an end­ less series of new developments. This phenomenon could be observed in many other fields. Theories proved ill-

suited to solving the practical difficulties of the processes they had helped to put into motion, and could remain consistent only by conventionally restricting their own fields. Since the fortunes of architecture depen­ ded on the balance between theory and practice - and since the conditions of building workers were part and parcel of architecture after all, even though the thought of the time did not like to admit it - this subject must form the starting-point for our discussion. At the risk of appearing to exaggerate, one might say that Le Chapelier’s law was laid on the new problems of union organization like the neo-classical facades laid upon the new industrial buildings — and was equally irrelevant to their real needs. In both cases the problem was regarded as solved by postulating the identity of certain theoretical models with practical reality. But what actually occurred was a process of revision of the whole of contemporary thought, from which current opinion on

4 The poor man's house, engraving by C.N. Ledoux, L'Architecture consideree sous le rapport de I'art des moeurs et de la legislation, 1806. 'This vast universe that amazes you is the poor man's house, the house of the rich man who has been despoiled. For his ceiling he has the vault o f the sky and he is in communication with the assembly o f the gods. The poor man asks for a house w ithout any o f the decorations used in the houses o f the modern Pluto. A rt must interpret his needs and submit them to proportion.'

political economy and architecture emerged profoundly altered. One cannot, therefore, begin to talk of architecture without considering the nature and limits of what was meant by architecture at that time. One must first consider briefly the general pattern of social and political changes, the views that contemporary think­ ers formulated about these changes and the position within this pattern of the system of ideas and experiments transmitted by the architectural tradition of the past. The industrial revolution is characterized by certain basic changes which occurred first in England, from the middle of the eighteenth

century onwards and which were repeated, sooner or later, in the other countries of Europe: increase in population, increase in industrial production and the mechanization of productive systems. In the middle of the eighteenth century England had about six and a half million inhabitants; in 1801, when the first census was taken, there were 8,892,000 and in 1831 about fourteen million inhabitants. This in­ crease was not due to a rise in the birth-rate which was more or less constant throughout the period, between 37-7 and 36-6 per thousand - nor to an excess of immigration over emigration, but to a decisive lowering of the death-rate which fell from 35-8 (in

the decade 1730-40) to 21 1 (in the decade 1811-21).8 It has been established that the causes of this drop were mainly connected with hygiene: improved food, personal hygiene, public services and housing, pro­ gress in medicine and better organized hospitals. The population increase was accompanied by an unheard of increase in production: during the seventy years between 1760 and 1830 the production of iron rose from 20,000 to 700,000 tons, that of coal from 4,300,000 to 115 million tons; the cotton industry, which in the mid-eighteenth century pro­ duced four million pounds, produced about 270 million in 1830. The increase was both quantitative and qualitative: there were more ' types of industry, more types of products and more processes for producing them. The rise in population and the increase in industry influenced one another in a highly complex fashion. Some of the improvements in hygiene were dependent on industry; for instance, better food was due to the progress made in food­ growing and transport, while personal clean­ liness was made possible by more soap and cheaper cotton underwear; housing was im­ proved by the replacement of wood and thatch by more durable materials, and still more by the separation of home and work­ place ; more efficient sewers and water mains were made possible by the progress in hydraulic engineering, and so on. But the decisive causes were probably the advances made in medicine, which had their effects on even the non-industrialized European countries, where a rise in, population was similarly produced. At the same time the need to feed, clothe and house a rising population was certainly one of the incentives for the production of manufactured goods, though it could also produce a simple lowering of the standard of living, as it did at the beginning of the nine­ teenth century in Ireland and as is still the case in Asia (it should be noted that the rapid

mechanization of English industry ,was due, in part, to the disparity between the labour that could be used in manufacturing and the demands of trade, that is, precisely to the fact that the population was not increasing as fast as the volume of industrial production; and that the late mechanization of French industry was connected, on the other hand, with the country’s large population - twentyseven million at the outbreak of the Revolu­ tion, almost three times that of England). Industrialization was one of the possible answers to the population increase, and it was dependent on an ability to intervene actively in productive relations, in order to adapt them to the new needs. Various particular circumstances, favour­ able to economic expansion, have been put forward to explain it: in England, the in­ crease in agricultural incomes following the enclosures, the existence of vast sums of capital because of the unequal distribution of income, the low interest rate, the increasing labour force, the many technical inventions produced by the high standard o f purely scientific research and the high degree of specialization, the large number of employers eager to make use of the simultaneous pre­ sence of inventions, skills and capital (a marked vertical mobility between the classes created the most profitable situation for the exploitation of natural talent), the relative freedom granted to nonconformist groups and religious dissenters who proved very active in industry, and the attitude of the State in imposing less rigid restrictions than usual on economic activities, both because it now had fewer strategic and financial worries and because of the influence of the liberal theories put forward by Adam Smith and noted by important politicians such as Pitt. These facts probably had their roots in a single starting point, the current spirit of enterprise, the open-minded desire for new results and the belief that they could be obtained by calculation and hard thought.

Throughout history writers have been amazed at their contemporaries’ rage for novelty, but during the second half of the eighteenth century this theme became very frequent indeed, almost unanimous; an English writer wrote: ‘the age is running mad after innovation ; all the business of the world is to be done in a new way; men are to be hanged in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation’,9 and a German: ‘the existing state of things seems to have become generally offensive and some­ times contemptible. It is a singular fact that everything old is now judged with disfavour. New impressions make their way into the bosom of our families and trouble their order; even our housewives can no longer endure old furniture’ .10 However, this same spirit of enterprise was constantly involving the protagonists of the industrial revolution in risky decisions and inconsistent and contradictory actions and indeed causing them to make a constant series of mistakes which weighed on society on a scale proportionate with the new quantities at stake. All historical descriptions of this period, since they have to attribute a different degree of importa...