Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital Project

An Investigation into its Structural Formulation

Mahnaz Shah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317107101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

While Le Corbusier's urban projects are generally considered confrontational in their relationship to the traditional urban fabric, his proposal for the Venice hospital project remained an exercise in preserving the medieval fabric of the city of Venice through a systemic replication of its urban tissue. This book offers a detailed study of Le Corbusier's Venice hospital project as a plausible built entity. In addition, it analyses it in the light of its supposed affinity with the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. No formal attempt to date has been made to critically analyse the hospital project's design considerations in comparison to the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. Using a range of methodologies including those from architectural theory and history, using archival resources, on-site analysis, and interviews with important resource persons, this book is an interpretation of the conceptual basis for Le Corbusier understanding of the structural formulation of the city of Venice as mentioned in The Radiant City (1935). In doing so, it deciphers the diagrammatic analysis of the city structure found in this work into a set of coherent design modules that were applied in the hospital project and that could become a point of further investigation. Architects and other architecturally interested laypeople with an interest in Venice will find the book a valuable addition to their knowledge. For architectural historians the book makes an important link between modernism and the historically grown Venice.

Foreword 1

Robert Maxwell

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are few who doubt that Le Corbusier was the greatest modern architect of the twentieth century, and many who would claim that he set the standard for a functional architecture that went straight to the point: providing efficient buildings for the modern city. To do this surely calls for complete rationality, for re-thinking every problem from the beginning, from starting afresh every time: the appeal of the tabula rasa.

Yet Le Corbusier was not altogether a rationalist. As Charles Jencks has argued, he was himself suspended between the idea of the tabula rasa and the idea that things change and evolve, and gradually assume their final form through a process of continual adaptation. His examples were the briar pipe and the bicycle. Today, the pipe has virtually disappeared from men’s mouths, and the bicycle is still evolving. The final form is perhaps the form that goes into the museum.

Certainly, the modern city is continuing to evolve, and will probably never reach its final form. Except perhaps in the case of Venice. There is no practical sense in which we could re-build Venice from scratch. Venice is unique. An architect who is invited to insert a new building into Venice surely has to think afresh and has to be very careful.

Which is exactly what happened to Le Corbusier. In February 1964, after some exchanges, he accepted the city’s request to design a new hospital. The city council were keen not only because they thought him a great architect, but because he had already declared Venice to be an object lesson in city design, and had objected to the introduction of high rise buildings there. They thought of him as defending the city against commercial interests.

Venice is as old as other European cities; it began as a fortification around the island of the Rialto during the reign of the Duke Agnello Particiaco around 820, which became the seat of the Patriarch in 828. By 1204 Venice had become the most prosperous city of Europe, and even financed the fourth Crusade. Yet it is somewhat precariously built on an archipelago of 117 islands. The watery basis of Venice has given rise to a condition where powered transport is by boats, buses are called vaporetti, and everyone goes on foot. Its city fabric is mediaeval, and because it doesn’t have fields and hedges to adjust to, it is mainly rectangular in detail, containing many courtyards as well as private streets.

What is, perhaps, surprising, is the degree to which Le Corbusier was sensitive to these constraints. He began by assuming that a hospital in Venice should conform to the system of pedestrian circulation it followed: Venice was already a pedestrian precinct. He analysed the spaces of Venice and recognized the importance of the squares, churches, streets and bridges, and how they worked as a whole: this led to a concept of pinwheel centres surrounded by circulation corridors, which when rationalized with the needs of a modern hospital gave rise to a plan based on the fundamental system of circulation in Venice. But before he could complete this enterprise, he died.

The story is a fascinating one, and in this book it is retold with enthusiasm by Mahnaz Shah. She has done her homework, and has consulted all the experts who have written about it: a long list including Donatella Calabi, Hashim Sarkas, Alexander Tzonis, Mario Botta, Alan Colquhoun, Kenneth Frampton and Diana Agrest. She has consulted Guillame Jullian de la Fuentes, who took over the direction of the project when Le Corbusier died. The result is a definitive account which also throws a new light on Le Corbusier.

Because, although his design was sensitive to the context, not in a superficial, but in a fundamental way, it still comes about that we end up with a typically Corb building: as clear in its form as his celebrated Villa Savoye at Poissy. It would have been white, up on stilts, cantilevered, poised above the waters. It would also have demonstrated the principles of a functional architecture, here at grips with one of the most complicated briefs of our times. The key to this success was the section, with three levels, each one specialized, all working together. Exploiting its site near the road and rail access to Venice, it would have combined vehicular and pedestrian access in an interesting way. It would have been marvelous. And it there is little doubt that it would have regenerated the backdoor of Venice.

Mahnaz Shah brings all this before us in a sober and balanced way. Her language is restrained, her judgement is objective. This book adds to the history of modern architecture.

 

London, March 2012

Foreword 2

Tim Benton

Two distinctive features of Le Corbusier’s work, both as artist and architect, were his reworking of ideas from his early work and his ability to transform himself. Two of his last projects, the Venice hospital and the Zurich pavilion, exemplify this ability to present completely new avenues of exploration while searching for inspiration in his own oeuvre. The project for the hospital in Venice is particularly interesting because it proposes not only a new approach to urban organization and circulation but also a new concept for how to live.

From the early 1920s, Le Corbusier presented the two essential problems of the twentieth century as the city and the housing cell. In his lectures, he normally treated these subjects separately: a lecture on architecture followed by one on urbanism.¹ But the themes were connected, macrocosm and microcosm responding to the same conditions and subject to a similar methodology.

In the 1920s, Le Corbusier perceived the fundamental problems of the city in terms of congestion and breakdown of circulation. Modern forms of transportation had overloaded the city centres, and the spread of the suburbs had created a commuting hell for millions of workers. While most of his contemporaries looked for a solution in decentralization – creating a new business centre outside the city and developing satellite towns with their own centres of employment – Le Corbusier believed in preserving the city centre as a concentrated focus for business and culture.² Paradoxical as it might seem, the Plan Voisin for Paris, which would have demolished part of the right bank of the city to introduce high rise office blocks and high density housing ranges, was an attempt to save the city centre. The 60 storey skyscrapers would have maintained the key organs of the city in the centre and surrounded them with dwellings for the elite office workers and administrators who would run the country. Further out would be the manual labourers, close to their employers in the industrial zone. The city centre would become green, as Le Corbusier claimed, the problems of circulation would be resolved, and most of the city of Paris, including a majority of its historic buildings, would be left untouched. The plan was a rhetorical gesture, and it depended on a stratification of society into elite managers and contented workers that could never have worked. The plan was understandably attacked from all sides, but it remained a defining image of modernity, a challenge to the tradition of slow evolution.

Le Corbusier’s urban theories underwent considerable development in the 1930s, leading to his project for the city of Moscow, which evolved into his book La Ville Radieuse, 1935.³ Here the stress was on the quality of life in the housing belt which would have surrounded the city centre. Le Corbusier would have demolished the suburbs completely, replacing them with long zigzagging housing blocks, located in an automobile-free, park-like setting that provided sports fields at the foot of the apartments. For Le Corbusier, the ‘essential joys’ of light, space and greenery, combined with a healthy use of the leisure time liberated by short commuting times, were the essential aims of urbanism. What is surprising about La Ville Radieuse, however, is the anti-mechanistic rhetoric which pervades the book from the first pages. Visible in his paintings since 1928 and in his architectural projects from the de Mandrot house (1929–1931), Le Corbusier’s fascination with natural materials, hand craftsmanship and a ‘natural’ life-style close to nature permeates every page of La Ville radieuse. His lecture tour in South America in 1929 had also loosened up his approach to urban planning. The plans for Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo and, two years later, Algiers, reflect a wish to respond to the irregularities of the landscape and to liberate housing from the grid. By the end of the thirties, Le Corbusier’s general theory of urbanism had shifted up a scale, from the city to the international network of communications. Enshrined in his book Les TroisÉtablissements, his theory now proposed a three-way division of urban organization, into the historic ‘radiocentric’ cities (centres of culture and thought), linked by linear industrial cities (organized to allow workers direct access to the countryside) and industrialized farms.⁴ At the same time, faced with the rejection of his reconstruction projects for the cities devastated by the Second World War, Le Corbusier developed a different strategy. Instead of trying to plan whole cities, or districts, units of housing large enough to include the essential elements of social cohesion would be designed. The first of these ‘Unités de grandeur conforme’ was built in Marseilles (1947–1952) and four other similar ones were built in the next ten years. The Unité included a floor with shops, a hotel and restaurant, and a roof terrace featuring a running track, nursery school, paddling pool, gymnasium and a stage for showing films or performing plays.

By 1964, when Le Corbusier began thinking about the Venice hospital project, he had begun to lose faith in the grand scheme approach to urbanism. Instead of designing for a city, or a region, or even a block of flats, he began to turn the process on its head and focus on the individual. His fascination for the urban structure of Venice, a dense and automobile-free maze of streets, alleys and little squares, led him to try to work from the bottom up. Mahnaz Shah demonstrates, in this book, how the ‘lesson of Venice’ inspired the seventy seven year old architect to completely modify his approach. Many modern architects and urbanists responded to this approach, trying to define patterns of circulation and dense, low-rise occupation of the land. Le Corbusier was also undoubtedly influenced by the traditional organization of the Medinas which are to be found in North African cities. Le Corbusier’s close examination of the Casbah in Algiers, and his attempts to save it from the encroachment of the French colonial city, reflected a similar interest. Rooted in the rationalism of the modern movement which he had helped create, he always thought in terms of systems, but now the system must above all attempt to serve the individual

Parallel to the evolution of Le Corbusier’s ideas on urbanism was his changing approach to the design of the living cell. One of his first projects for blocks of flats, the Immeubles-Villas, of 1922, attempted to combine the advantages of high density living with the pleasures of the cottage, by providing each apartment with a garden. As he developed his urban plans in the 1930s, the housing cells became simpler. He even explored a modular system of minimal spaces of 14m2 per inhabitant, which could be combined together according to the size of a family. His approach to living was governed by a belief that more important than comfort was an active life-style. His personal preference was for very simple domestic arrangements, taking many of his vacations on the lagoon of the Bassind’Arcachon, near Bordeaux. Here he preferred to stay in a very simple, wooden guest house and spend his time out of doors. He admired the shacks built by the local fishermen in the pine forests lining the sand bank which divides the Bassind’Arcachon from the Atlantic, once describing these as ‘palaces’.⁵ He increasingly represented the minimum housing cell in his lectures as a single space with a big window overlooking a beautiful view. A typical sketch shows a cross-section of a block of flats with a diagram showing how the provision of electricity, heating, ventilation and elevators all supported a drawing of an eye overlooking the landscape. It is as if the gratification of the eye was sufficient for well-being.

The apartments in the Unitéd’habitation at Marseilles included many other important features, such as the double height living room, with a well-equipped kitchen opening onto it, and a succession of bedrooms on another floor stretching across the building and providing cross-ventilation. Le Corbusier was particularly anxious, in this and other projects, to provide the best possible sound insulation between apartments. In his funerary oration for Le Corbusier, André Malraux cited one of the architect’s favourite sayings, that his aim was to give people a little peace in a world of noise and disturbance. In this sense, the Venice hospital project was a natural conclusion to Le Corbusier’s research into how to live. Of course, a hospital bedroom does not correspond to a fully functional dwelling, but it is as if Le Corbusier boiled down his whole approach to living into a single unit. Here there was to be no outside view, but daylight reflected from hidden skylights onto coloured walls which would provide the suffering patient with comfort.

Le Corbusier had undergone a number of painful hospital operations in the course of his life, and he knew what it was like to be helpless and in pain. Furthermore, the seventy seven year old architect knew he was ill and perhaps did not have long to live. It is significant that one of the references that he gave to Jullian de La Fuente to work on was a sketch of the painting by Carpaccio showing Saint Ursula’s bier being carried above the heads of the crowd in Venice. As Mahnaz Shah explains, the placing of the hospital bedrooms at the top of the building not only allows for uninterrupted zenithal lighting but also has the effect of raising the patients towards the sky. Once again, Le Corbusier’s fusion of urbanism and architecture aimed to create a private, restf...