Charles-Marie Dulac (1865–1898), View of Fontainbleau Forest: preliminary study for ‘La Voie Bénie’ of the ‘Le Cantique des créatures’ cycle, 1894. Pencil, India ink heightened with white chalk, 315 × 480 mm. DMC 1660.
As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means
Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing mix.
Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944), portfolio of plans, sections and elevations, Imperial Delhi, service buildings, 1918. Pen, black ink and pencil. DMC 1582.
But as Lutyens’ drawings for the everyday quarters and services behind the monumental parade of George V’s vice-regal capital show, perhaps the best chance of realising and preserving a vast coherent scheme comes in doing as little as is needed, rather than as much as might be desired, and often — as Rossi also pleaded, and as Fritz Ebhardt’s housing for a military clothing plant make clear — in applying to them a familiar, even archetypal language, like that of a harbour warehouse, that can bear extended repetition and be varied to scale and use.
Fritz Ebhardt (1894–1958), Kitchen and refectory for barracks designed to standards of the National Labour Service for Zorn & Co. military apparel factory, Brandenburg, 1938. Pencil on tracing paper. DMC 1040.7.
One gets a clearer vision backward to another day’s sense of the future from the ‘Googies’ and ‘atomic’ suburbs of Los Angeles, in which today’s useful mundane was cast in the sheen of tomorrow, than in the ever-straining conscious futurism of Disney’s Tomorrowland or the pointless Theme Building at LAX.
Hence to the less, to the least, and to the fancies that might be made of nothing. Here, in contrast to the splendour of Taraval’s theatrical city, in which actors had nothing but the dissolving perspective of a backdrop against which to act, is Duilio Cambellotti’s stage for classical dramas: a set of sculpted levels signifying at once very nearly nothing and something intensely emotional, as the shapes of the voids seem to talk already of the cries of grief and chants of resignation that bodies will mime and mouth upon them.
Duilio Cambellotti (1876–1960), Teatro Romano, Ostia Antica: model stage set for ‘Theban cycle’, 1924. Plaster, 145 × 180 × 420 mm. DMC 1406.
Thirty years later in Brussels Le Corbusier would build a pavilion out of coloured light and sound — a poème électronique whose architectural enclosure was dismissively assigned to his composer-assistant Iannis Xenakis — the real form being in the intangibles projected within.
It was Xenakis who worked with him on the acoustics of the Chandigarh assembly, for which drawings show architects working not with visual shapes which are rendered almost invisibly, but, like the Cistercian monks, with how to construct space for sound waves within them.
The Italian avant-gardist Ugo La Pietra went further, looking toward a future city in which the electronic poem was actually enough. A tiny fixed shelter for one human and a telephone would be a traveller’s vademecum, calling in all the social and built forces of the world that might (or might not) still be around it.
Ugo La Pietra (1938), Ciceronelettronico, 1961. Silver gelatin print, 240 × 300 mm. DMC 1759.
Ernest Born, designing a grand entry for the Golden Gate Fair in San Francisco, chooses simply to erect scrims to baffle the winds from the ocean and to use these airs as a welcome.
Ernest Born (1898–1992), perspective, Main Portal, 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, CA, 1938. Colour pastel on tracing paper, 50 × 480 mm. DMC 1828.
The situationist artist/architect Constant, in returning to a “New Babylon”, does something very similar in imagining an urbanism of the future composed mostly of Brechtian banners, just as Cedric Price’s response to a competition for the West Side railyards in New York was to erect wind machines in a void, bringing the spacious drama of elemental forces into a crowded, unbreathable and ‘delirious’ city.
Constant (1920–2005), Frontispiece for New Babylon, 1963. Lithograph, 155 × 200 mm. DMC 1472.11.Yona Friedman (1923), Ville Spatiale concept model and structural study, 1958. Wood. DMC 1471.
It is in the same spirit that Yona Friedman visualised his future cities not as masonry shapes in a new landscape but simply as a second tier of framework hovering above the old one. But none have yet gone so far in praise of the void as the art nouveau artist Charles-Marie Dulac, who saw for his hymn to creation all he needed of architecture in the vaulted space beneath a forest’s trees.
Future Scenarios, Part III
Work on Paper
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means
Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing mix.
But as Lutyens’ drawings for the everyday quarters and services behind the monumental parade of George V’s vice-regal capital show, perhaps the best chance of realising and preserving a vast coherent scheme comes in doing as little as is needed, rather than as much as might be desired, and often — as Rossi also pleaded, and as Fritz Ebhardt’s housing for a military clothing plant make clear — in applying to them a familiar, even archetypal language, like that of a harbour warehouse, that can bear extended repetition and be varied to scale and use.
One gets a clearer vision backward to another day’s sense of the future from the ‘Googies’ and ‘atomic’ suburbs of Los Angeles, in which today’s useful mundane was cast in the sheen of tomorrow, than in the ever-straining conscious futurism of Disney’s Tomorrowland or the pointless Theme Building at LAX.
Hence to the less, to the least, and to the fancies that might be made of nothing. Here, in contrast to the splendour of Taraval’s theatrical city, in which actors had nothing but the dissolving perspective of a backdrop against which to act, is Duilio Cambellotti’s stage for classical dramas: a set of sculpted levels signifying at once very nearly nothing and something intensely emotional, as the shapes of the voids seem to talk already of the cries of grief and chants of resignation that bodies will mime and mouth upon them.
Thirty years later in Brussels Le Corbusier would build a pavilion out of coloured light and sound — a poème électronique whose architectural enclosure was dismissively assigned to his composer-assistant Iannis Xenakis — the real form being in the intangibles projected within.
It was Xenakis who worked with him on the acoustics of the Chandigarh assembly, for which drawings show architects working not with visual shapes which are rendered almost invisibly, but, like the Cistercian monks, with how to construct space for sound waves within them.
The Italian avant-gardist Ugo La Pietra went further, looking toward a future city in which the electronic poem was actually enough. A tiny fixed shelter for one human and a telephone would be a traveller’s vademecum, calling in all the social and built forces of the world that might (or might not) still be around it.
Ernest Born, designing a grand entry for the Golden Gate Fair in San Francisco, chooses simply to erect scrims to baffle the winds from the ocean and to use these airs as a welcome.
The situationist artist/architect Constant, in returning to a “New Babylon”, does something very similar in imagining an urbanism of the future composed mostly of Brechtian banners, just as Cedric Price’s response to a competition for the West Side railyards in New York was to erect wind machines in a void, bringing the spacious drama of elemental forces into a crowded, unbreathable and ‘delirious’ city.
It is in the same spirit that Yona Friedman visualised his future cities not as masonry shapes in a new landscape but simply as a second tier of framework hovering above the old one. But none have yet gone so far in praise of the void as the art nouveau artist Charles-Marie Dulac, who saw for his hymn to creation all he needed of architecture in the vaulted space beneath a forest’s trees.
Related reading...
The changing metropolis 1815–1900
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Displaced persons
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Category
drawing histories drawing techniques & materials commentaries, rants & reflections Drawing Matter archive: research & collecting
Period
c19th c20th
Architect
Ugo La Pietra Duilio Cambellotti Edwin Lutyens Fritz Ebhardt Ernest Born Constant Charles-Marie Dulac Yona Friedman Iannis Xenakis
Medium
collage drawing model print
Tags
commerce plan culture section exhibition elevation urban form projection (axonometric isometric) public space topographic/cartographic theatre presentation work on paper (series) theoretical & imaginary