Postwar architecture

Dr. Brandt shows a single photograph to open the lecture: a hillside of concrete boxes stacked at angles above a river, each one a little room with a garden on the roof of the box below. 'Montreal, 1967,' he says. 'The world's fair was called Man and His World. Fifty million visits in six months, in a country of twenty million people. A twenty-nine-year-old architect, who had designed this as his thesis at McGill, built it as an experiment in how cities could house families in the density of an apartment block with the light, privacy and gardens of a house.' He changes the slide to a photograph of a row of identical concrete slabs in a field of mud. 'And this is how cities were usually housing families at the time. Both photographs are postwar architecture. Today's lesson is about how the same ideas could produce both.' Joon-ho writes two words: experiment, repetition.

Reconstruction and the modernist consensus

The Second World War destroyed cities across Europe and Asia on an unprecedented scale. Rotterdam, Coventry, Warsaw, Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo and Hiroshima were among hundreds of cities devastated by bombing. After 1945, governments faced a huge need for housing, schools, hospitals and infrastructure, and many turned to the principles of modern architecture to meet it. In North America, which was not bombed, the postwar decades brought rapid growth: new suburbs, highways, universities, airports and downtown office towers, financed by a long economic boom.

The ideas of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne, or CIAM, the international association of modern architects founded in 1928, guided much of this building. Its Athens Charter, drafted at a congress of 1933 and published by Le Corbusier in 1943, called for cities organized by four functions, dwelling, work, recreation and circulation, separated into zones, with housing in high blocks set in green space and traffic on separate roads. Applied at scale, these ideas produced both successes and failures. New housing gave millions of families light, air, heating and bathrooms they had never had. It also cleared whole neighborhoods, separated people from streets and work, and created estates that were hard to maintain and easy to stigmatize.

Brutalism and the expressive concrete

In Britain, Alison and Peter Smithson designed a secondary school at Hunstanton (1949 to 1954) with steel frames, brick panels, exposed pipes and electrical conduits, and no finishes covering the materials. The critic Reyner Banham called their attitude the New Brutalism in an article of 1955, linking it to Le Corbusier's béton brut, or raw concrete. Brutalism came to mean an architecture of exposed structure, rough concrete and strong, sculptural masses. It was used for universities, civic buildings, libraries, theaters and social housing, often as an expression of public purpose and honesty. Boston City Hall (1963 to 1968), by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles, with its heavy concrete upper floors stepping out over a brick plaza, is a famous American example.

Other architects used concrete for expressive and symbolic form. Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center at Idlewild, now John F. Kennedy airport, in New York (1956 to 1962) has a roof of four thin concrete shells that seem to spread like a bird's wings, and his Gateway Arch in St. Louis (1963 to 1965) is a stainless steel catenary about 630 ft high. Jørn Utzon won the competition for the Sydney Opera House in 1957 with a sketch of sail-like shells over a granite podium; solving their geometry, by cutting all the shells from the surface of a single sphere, took years, and the building opened in 1973. In Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer designed the government buildings of Brasília, the new capital planned by Lúcio Costa in 1957 and inaugurated in 1960, with curving concrete forms of great lightness.

Louis Kahn and the return of monumentality

Louis Kahn of Philadelphia, born in 1901, found his own voice only in his fifties. He believed that architecture should give form to the essential nature of an institution, and that buildings should be made of served spaces, the rooms for people, and servant spaces, the stairs, ducts and services that support them. At the Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania (1957 to 1965), brick towers for stairs and air ducts stand beside glass-walled laboratory floors. At the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1959 to 1965), two rows of laboratories face each other across a travertine plaza with a thin channel of water running toward the Pacific. At the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1966 to 1972), long cycloid concrete vaults are split at the crown to let daylight in, reflected by curved aluminum screens onto the vault. Kahn spoke of what a building wants to be, and his rooms of concrete, brick and light restored a sense of permanence and silence to modern architecture.

Regional and humane modernisms

Several architects showed that modernism could respond to place, climate and human scale. The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto used brick, timber and copper, curving walls and carefully shaped daylight. His Baker House dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1946 to 1949) has a serpentine brick wall along the Charles River, so that every room gets a view of the water at an angle. His town hall at Säynätsalo in Finland (1949 to 1952) gathers small brick buildings around a raised courtyard, reached by grass steps. In Japan, Kenzo Tange combined modern concrete with the proportions of traditional timber architecture at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (1949 to 1955), raised on pilotis on the axis of the ruined dome, and he built the suspended roofs of the Yoyogi National Gymnasium for the Tokyo Olympics of 1964. Younger Japanese architects in the Metabolist group, from 1960, proposed cities of replaceable capsules plugged into megastructures, realized on a small scale in Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (1972).

Expo 67 and Habitat 67

The Universal and International Exhibition of 1967 in Montreal, Expo 67, celebrated the centenary of Canadian Confederation on islands in the St. Lawrence, some of them enlarged and built new with earth excavated for the Montreal Métro. It was a showcase of experimental structures. The United States Pavilion by R. Buckminster Fuller was a geodesic dome about 250 ft in diameter, a lattice of steel tubes clad in acrylic panels, the largest of the domes he had promoted as the most efficient way to enclose space. The West German Pavilion, by Frei Otto and Rolf Gutbrod, was a cable-net tent of translucent fabric hung from masts, an early example of the lightweight tensile structures Otto developed for the Munich Olympics of 1972.

Habitat 67, designed by Moshe Safdie, was the most radical building at the fair. Safdie, born in Haifa in 1938 and educated at McGill University, had developed the idea in his thesis of 1961. Habitat is made of 354 identical prefabricated concrete modules, each about 38.5 ft long, 17.5 ft wide and 10 ft high, cast in a factory on site, fitted out with windows, kitchens and bathrooms and lifted into place by crane. Stacked in staggered positions up to twelve stories high, the boxes combine into 158 apartments of one to four modules each, so that the roof of each module becomes the garden terrace of the one above. Pedestrian streets on several levels connect the elevator cores. Over the years, some apartments were joined, and there are now 146 residences.

modules = 354
L, W, H = 11.7, 5.3, 3.0                   # module size in m
apartments_1967 = 158
apartments_now = 146

floor_area = L * W                          # gross area of one module, m2
print(f"One module: {floor_area:.1f} m2 gross, {L * W * H:.0f} m3")
print(f"All modules: {modules * floor_area:,.0f} m2 gross")
print(f"Modules per apartment in 1967: {modules / apartments_1967:.2f}")
print(f"Average apartment size in 1967: {modules * floor_area / apartments_1967:.0f} m2 gross")
print(f"Average residence size today: {modules * floor_area / apartments_now:.0f} m2 gross")

# In sq ft, for comparison
sqft = floor_area / 0.3048 ** 2
print(f"One module is about {sqft:,.0f} sq ft gross")

One module: 62.0 m2 gross, 186 m3
All modules: 21,952 m2 gross
Modules per apartment in 1967: 2.24
Average apartment size in 1967: 139 m2 gross
Average residence size today: 150 m2 gross
One module is about 667 sq ft gross

Each module gives about 670 sq ft of gross floor area, and an average apartment of 1967 used just over two modules. Prefabrication was meant to make Habitat cheap. In practice, because only 158 units were built instead of the larger project Safdie first proposed, the factory never reached the scale needed for economy, and each unit was very expensive. Habitat remains a successful place to live, protected as a heritage monument by Quebec since 2009, but it did not become the model for mass housing Safdie had hoped.

Canadian postwar modernism

In the 1960s and 1970s, Canada built a series of new universities, cultural institutions and civic buildings that many historians consider its finest modern architecture. Arthur Erickson of Vancouver, with his partner Geoffrey Massey, won the competition in 1963 for Simon Fraser University, built on the top of Burnaby Mountain and opened in 1965: a single linear megastructure of concrete terraces, quadrangles and a great covered mall, designed so that students of all disciplines would meet. Erickson's Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (1971 to 1976) was designed to house the great carved poles and house posts of the Northwest Coast peoples, with tall concrete post-and-beam frames and walls of glass that recall the plank houses of the Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw and other nations, looking out over the sea. His Robson Square in downtown Vancouver (1973 to 1983) is a three-block civic complex with law courts under a sloping glass roof, government offices and terraced gardens with waterfalls, a public landscape in the middle of the city.

In Ontario, Ron Thom's Massey College at the University of Toronto (1960 to 1963) wrapped a quiet courtyard in brick in an updated version of the Oxford college, and his Trent University in Peterborough (from 1964) climbed the banks of the Otonabee River in rough concrete. Raymond Moriyama's science museum for Ontario in Toronto (1969) stepped down the side of a ravine. Across the country, centennial projects in 1967 produced concert halls, museums, libraries and arts centers in dozens of cities, a burst of public building on a scale Canada had never seen.

The critique of urban renewal

By the early 1960s, the results of postwar planning were being questioned. Jane Jacobs, a writer living in Greenwich Village in New York, published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. She argued that the planners' ideal of towers in parks and separated functions was destroying the qualities that made cities work: short blocks, mixed uses, old buildings among new ones, and enough people on the street at all hours to keep it safe and lively, which she called eyes on the street. She helped stop a highway through Lower Manhattan, and after she moved to Toronto in 1968, she joined the campaign that led the Ontario government to cancel the Spadina Expressway in 1971.

Urban renewal fell hardest on poor, Black, immigrant and Indigenous communities. In Halifax, the Black community of Africville, founded in the nineteenth century on the shore of Bedford Basin, was demolished between 1964 and 1970 and its residents relocated, an act for which the city formally apologized in 2010. In many American cities, highways and renewal projects cut through Black neighborhoods, such as the Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul, divided by Interstate 94 in the 1960s. In St. Louis, the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project of thirty-three eleven-story slabs, completed in 1954 to designs by Minoru Yamasaki, deteriorated quickly through underfunding, poor maintenance and segregation, and its first blocks were demolished in 1972. The critic Charles Jencks later dated the death of modern architecture to that demolition, as you will see in Lesson 12. Historians now stress that the failure was as much political and economic as architectural.

Exercise 11: a postwar building and its context

This exercise takes about four hours.

• Choose a building from 1945 to 1975 in your city: a university building, library, church, school, apartment block or civic building.
• Sketch it from three viewpoints, including one that shows how it meets the street or the ground.
• Draw a site plan at 1 in = 40 ft showing what is around it now, and find an older map to see what was there before it was built.
• Record the materials and the condition of the building, and any later changes.
• Deliverable: a sketchbook page with the sketches and site plans, and a paragraph on what the building replaced and how it has aged.

Self-critique checklist

• Have I found out what stood on the site before?
• Have I described the building's materials accurately, distinguishing concrete, block, brick and render?
• Have I considered who used the building and who was displaced by it?
• Have I avoided judging a postwar building only by its current condition?