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1 Introduction: site and composition
The need to revisit our understanding of the site and its relationship to its surroundings has become necessary – more than ever before – at this point well into the twenty-first century.
Such a necessity has arisen for a number of reasons. The reality is that site considerations have received progressively less attention in the academic and professional practice of architecture over the past decades. The proliferation of iconic buildings – Venturi’s ducks1 – has resulted in distinctive, formally unique architecture, claiming special symbolic and aesthetic qualities. Formal iconicity has also been proclaimed and acquired through the unbuilt, such as in Libeskind’s proposed extension to the V&A Museum in London and Alsop’s Fourth Grace project in Liverpool. Aspiring to be the object of veneration itself, such iconicity is removed from previous understandings of the term as representation or resemblance of a sacred persona or work of art generated following established conventions. This solipsistic isolation and narcissism has often resulted in little attention being given to the qualities of their sites, and the building and site’s relationship to the surroundings. Venturi’s decorated shed, exemplified by the myriad out-of-town shopping complexes and neighbourhood supermarkets, has also remained uneasily situated within a landscape essentially shaped by the need to optimise car-parking arrangements. Contrary to Venturi’s belief, these structures housing mundane and everyday activities have hardly carried any enduring symbolism, meaning or social messages, to which the insensitive, banal treatment of site and context have contributed. Sadly, architectural education has not been immune to such developments and pressures.
The welcome rise in environmental concern has also ushered in a kind of myopic, conservative instrumentality into the way both architects and students of architecture are now guided to handle sites. The tendency to assess the appropriateness of a site for building and its relationship with the wider context through a set of overly simplistic and determining criteria – site geometry, orientation, transport and accessibility, solar gain, minimal environmental footprint, community benefits, to name a few – is both limiting and abstract in its scope.2 On the other hand, rising demand for expediency in building procurement, cost optimisation and the persistent shadow of the conservationists looming large over architects engaged in suburban volume house-building projects have limited the opportunities for engaging with site and context.
The age of frenzied information production and exchange has arguably turned our world into a global village with a flattened geography with no peaks and troughs. More than ever before, architects and architectural practices are working at locations across the globe – and often remotely. The ‘foreigner’ could potentially bring in a critical dimension – a refreshed dialogue – to energise debate regarding the reshaping of a built environment; however, this is not always the case. Beyond the obvious technical expertise the foreigner adds to the project – the perceived universal applicability of which, in itself, is not bereft of a problematic political dimension – the interventions remain global and are seldom localised due to lack of knowledge of site within specific locales. Perhaps paradoxically, this demand has now been given added impetus by the desperate need for expansion outside the West in the light of the present economic downturn that has changed the architectural profession forever.
Burns and Kahn define the understanding of site under three distinct areas of concern:
the first … is the area of control, easy to trace in the property lines designating legal metes and bounds. The second, encompassing forces that act upon a plot without being confined to it, can be called the area of influence. Third is the area of effect – the domains impacted following design action.3
These concerns have important scalar implications, both in terms of the actual physical extent of the sites but also in their perceptual qualities – from within and without. The book aims to address this by considering a wide range of scales and definitions of sites. The examples chosen for discussion include, of course, the bounded and defined urban site, of which Le Corbusier’s Mill Owners’ Association, a building we discuss in some detail, or Herzog & de Meuron’s CaixaForum, which we consider in terms of its materiality, are excellent examples. Alvaro Siza’s Galician Centre for Contemporary Art, although part of a larger collection of buildings, nevertheless sits on a fairly defined site. Such examples characterise the restricted, or enclosed, urban sites typical of most urban developments in cities. However, recognising the emergent contemporary condition of expansive ‘campuses’ or ‘parks’ produced by global corporate developments, many of the case studies included here examine buildings, or complexes of buildings, whose site boundaries or edge conditions are not so clearly defined or, in the extreme case, even non-existent. Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Centre for the Visual Arts at the Ohio State University campus and the Aronoff Centre for the Arts at the University of Cincinnati, or the siting of the High Court building within the Capitol Complex at Chandigarh – and even Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House – are sites that are expansive, with varying degrees of definition, which acknowledge – and are acknowledged by – larger geographical terrains beyond their immediate surroundings. As we will find out, this results, in various ways, in buildings becoming expansive with respect to surrounding land and horizon.
Returning to Burns and Kahn’s first concern, the area of control, the most spatially and temporally limiting attribute of a site, is unfortunately regarded as its prime characteristic. The second one is rather more difficult to fathom but remains closely connected to the first. In describing Alberti’s attempts at surveying the city of Rome (Forma Urbis Romœ) using an instrument he called a Horizon, Leatherbarrow notes how he ignored the terrain between the Capitoline Hill – the position of the instrument – and the city wall, choosing to plot ‘key points on the perimeter and a number of significant places in the expanse between’.4 The mathematical understanding of the city he thus developed employed an abstract – and thus transparent – matrix, which ignored or temporarily suspended the consideration of the in-between terrain. Although known extremely well through everyday lived experience of the city, for Alberti the substrate could be seen to have withdrawn ‘into a kind of darkness, a blind spot, remaining latent and unnoticed’.5 Leatherbarrow highlights this inversely proportional nature of the relationship between the refined and abstracted nature of the mathematical (instrumental) and the latent existential knowledge of the site. The mathematical method of ‘seeing through things’, more often through orthogonal projections such as plans and sections, does not necessarily need to reject the ‘tacit thickness of things’ – the knowledge that eludes instant enumeration.6 This thinking provides the central thrust of the book.
The above unfolds a number of issues central to this book. Alberti’s treatment of the city was evidently not homogeneous, for the potent latency of the middle ground also gave prominence to selected structures and buildings – urban fragments consisting of buildings situated on sites – which appeared as positive, projected figures within a recessive backdrop.7 Yet these fragments were never extraneous to the city, never able to evade the influencing omnipresence of the urban context. The context thus not only surrounds a site but pervades and permeates all aspects of it; the urban fragments perform within an un-homogeneous – viscous – field of relationships that create a tacitly acknowledged wholeness That the site should indeed be regarded as a fragment of a wider whole, connected by intense and reciprocal relationships between the site and its context – between overlapping fragment and the whole – forms part of the central argument of this book. Indeed, wholeness was once better understood – within traditional and premodern environments – and fragmentation was essentially a product of modernity. Today, a refreshed understanding of the fragment and the processes that manifests it – fragmentation – is therefore necessary for the restoration of a renewed wholeness.
This book also highlights the importance of optimising the potential of the existential and the instrumental relationships between a site and its context, which we undertake mainly – but not exclusively – through the work of Peter Eisenman in the United States from the late-1970s and Le Corbusier in India in the 1950s. The choice of architects, apparently with such diametrically opposed tendencies as Le Corbusier and Eisenman, requires some explanation. The categorisation of architects and their works into modern, postmodern, Neo-Rationalists, and so on, to begin with, is extremely problematic. Such divisions are essentially temporal classifications of convenience rather than evocative of distinct intellectual orientations. Eisenman’s works of the 1980s and 1990s have carried forward concerns central to modernists in their heyday, as did Le Corbusier’s post-Second World War projects anticipate postmodern concerns well before its formal proclamation. The projects cited in this book, we believe, transcend these artificial boundaries and are not necessarily or solely ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ in their orientation. The works of architects as geographically removed as Neutra and Correa from the 1950s demonstrate sensibilities that ventured way beyond the premises established by normative modernism. The evolved postmodern sensibility is crucial to our position, as it helps us re-evaluate trajectories of historical development in understanding relationships between site and architecture, and question ideas of progress, as well as problematic aspects of order and hierarchy (of both ideas and buildings).
In spite of their obvious differences, the works of both Le Corbusier and Eisenman show remarkable interest in the constructed nature of the site and in methods of reading these. Both have focused on the historical and mytho-poetic contents that sites and their contexts offer ...
