HaSHIM SaRKIS

GEO-ARCHITECTURE: A PREHISTORY FOR aN EMERgINg AESTHETIC

Geo-Architecture In Town-Planning of the Three Human Establishments, one of his more elusive treatises on urbanism published in 1945, Le Corbusier eetingly uses the neologism geoarchitecture: With three explicit terms, the Three Human Establishments of our machinist civilization shall be determined [] It is useful to know the key of this biology, capable of achieving the functions, of taking on the tasks. The study of these three sorts of establishments will enable us to move towards certainty. Land use may be revised, which means: putting space to order, practicing human geography and geo-architecture [] a morphology capable of securing rankings and hierarchies, driving initiatives, and situating actions. Le Corbusier hardly ever used the term afterward but it did expose an inherent link between geography and his architecture. It also brought to light other allusions like the following comment in The Four Routes of 1941: At Buenos Aires, in 1929, as I was trying to tell the public where best to place the four routes, I began to think in terms of geography and world, and nally arrived by means of that and the lines which expressed it at a prophetic point of convergence where the lines would best achieve their end. The territorially based principles developed during World War II, namely the four routes and the three human establishments, would get eclipsed by the four land uses and the seven roads ratied earlier by CIAM and by Le Corbusiers own Athens Charter.4 The functional city would prevail, even if Le Corbusier tried to distance himself from it.5 Le Corbusier himself may be partly to blame. He continued to endorse the metropolitan model of CIAM while his urban proposals for cities like Algiers, Saint-Di, and La Rochelle challenged its singularity as a solution. Even in The Three Human Establishments, the rst part of the book takes on territorial form but the second brings back prose from previous metropolitan treatises as if they were consistent with his new ideas about extra-urban order.6

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 Despite its dilution, geo-architecture could provide a much-needed dimension to the renewed interest in the concept of territory, namely an aesthetic dimension. Operating beyond the performative and systemic approaches that guide and overwhelm much of the thinking about the role of architecture at the urban scale today, the concept suggests yet another moment where Le Corbusier complemented the functional with the expressive. Conversations with Geography The metropolitan does not totally disappear in The Three Human Establishments. It steps aside, allowing architecture to converse directly with geography. This conversation takes place at three levels: (1) between architecture and human geography, (2) between Le Corbusier and a geographer, and (3) between the form of the building and the form of the territory. 1. Forms of Life As clearly dened in the opening pages, the charge of The Three Human Establishments is to chart a way out of the chaotic spread of factories and suburbs that industrialization has brought upon the land. It acknowledges the failure of the concentric, metropolitan model of settlements to absorb these two phenomena. The challenge of overhauling the historic centers of cities that dominated the discourse around the Plan Voisin and La Ville Radieuse in the 1920s and 30s is now displaced by challenges beyond the metropolitan. The solutions presented are direct: revise the suburban dwelling unit into concentrated high-rise structures and consolidate the roads with the productive land uses. The cities and towns that have gone out of control will nd their bearings in geography: Geography has preceded, subsists and will endure whilst our civilizations are transitory. Geography speaks, proclaiming certain funda mental truths. Its discourse spreads its effect in proportion to mans improvement of his means of contact, of information, of penetration.7 Geography provides a spatial and temporal constant. The primacy Le Corbusier gives it draws from his early encounter with the emerging eld of human geography. In his youth, he had attended Jean Brunhess lectures in Paris.8 Brunhes, the holder of the rst human geography chair at the Collge de France, dened the eld as the interaction between the physical and the human.

Le Corbusier, Diagram of the Three Human Establishments, 1945. All material F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The interaction occurs around different land uses. Roads, housing typologies, and settlement forms are considered nonproductive land uses that have historically emerged as direct responses to their geographic setting. Suburban expansion of the metropolitan has destroyed this connection. In response, Le Corbusier proposes denser residential types like the tower that recover to the geographer its character if not its causal link to architecture. The productive land uses are also presented in projective terms, aiming to put order to the industrial morass by redressing the geographically deterministic logic that linked land use with the lands attributes. Each of the three land usesagriculture, industry, and commerceprojects its specic form onto the territory: agriculture in the form of a dispersed network, industry in the form of linear cities along highways and canals, and commerce following the concentric metropolitan model. (Fig. 1) Beyond its investment in describing differences in the territory based on climate, geology, and land use, human geography is also invested in describing the methods humans use to adapt to their environments.

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This interaction is achieved through recurring patterns of adaptation. To paraphrase Maximilien Sorre, a disciple of Paul Vidal de la Blache, architecture engages geography by expressing how peoples forms of life or genres de vie interact with their environment.9 Through persistent means of intervention, humans have managed to shape their environment in recurring types of engagement and through the use of tools that accumulate experience over generations. 2. The Unnamed Geographer After identifying these three land uses, and in a section titled Realities, the book leaps out of the scale of the urban toward the territorial and out of the national into the interregional in a manner that warrants a change of tools as well. In the chapter From the Ocean to the Urals, the architect turns to an unnamed geographer for help in shifting scales. The chapter is written in the form of a dialogue between Le Corbusier and an unnamed geographer who is initially asked to delineate the industrial city, and draws lines that connect mines and material sources in the French hinterland to factories of production and then harbors of exchange. The linear city is organized over the mines map of France, a map very similar to the ones found in Jean Brunhess Human Geography. Geography speaks. Here is a rst discourse, a map for the distribution of industries on French territory, legacy of a society which in the last century opened up the book of industry. Industry is here distributed as the men themselves were xed, punctuating the territory at distances dictated and motivated by the play contactinformation-penetration, itself regulated by the available speeds (the pace of the horse) and thus xing normal centers of administration.0 Geography speaks but its discourse seems to be outdated. The geographer is invited to reconsider the nationally bounded map. Industry and transportation cannot be conned to national boundaries. France is only a fragment of production, passage and exchange. The two Americas bear on the Atlantic estuaries and the East acts with all the fullness of its immense territories, its quarries, mines and its industrial forces. In response the geographer proposes a parallel line across the planisphere crossing over national boundaries and oceans. It does not follow articial political boundaries but relies on geography in order to effectively operate at

this larger scale. Following Brunhes, the geographer looks for forms like roads that have persisted longer than political boundaries, but he also looks to internationalize the concept of linear industrial cities, a topic most essential for the future statute of the world. Therefore, Le Corbusier and his geographer release geography from its nationalist connes. Its geonomic potential is reactivated to assist the architect in outlining new territorial forms.4

IF THE LINEaR INDUSTRIaL CITY TRaNSCENDS THE NaTIONaL, IT IS STILL BOUND BY gEOgRapHY.
If the linear industrial city transcends the national, it is still bound by geography. The routes are drawn over historic trade routes, and they meander through terrains delineated by topography parallel to waterways. However, the second reality in The Three Human Establishments, the airplane, generates a new mode of transport that detaches itself from the surface of the earth only to redraw this surface as an aerial view, as a two-dimensional image, which Le Corbusier celebrates by proposing a two-dimensional architecture that relates to this reality. Extending the space of its experience to include the aerial view, Le Corbusier employs architecture to give a gestalt to the territory. 3. Formal Exchanges Several exchanges between the forms of architecture and of geography are uncovered. The three types of territorial organization associated with the three land uses produce three distinct architectural forms: the linear for industry, the radial for commerce, and the grid for agriculture. At another level, these patterns overlap with different intensities producing architectural ensembles. The compositional order of the ensemble transforms the city into an assembly of self-contained urban formations with an open eld of territorial connections between them. This is evident in projects like Saint-Di, Firminy, La Rochelle, and Chandigarh. Importantly, geo-architecture imbues territorial formations with a sense of legibility and a sense of beauty. Beauty is both possible and necessary at this scale.5 Through geo-architecture, the relationship between territory and architecture is inverted:

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Architecture gives the territory its visible shape and does so from the discrete connes of the project. Geography is presented as an abstract organization of territory but also as landscape, as the visual expanse and evidence of a formation beyond the urban artice. Mountains, skies, rivers, and urban skylines are employed as constants of urbanism and as objects with poetic potential to inform Le Corbusiers visual strategies at different scales. By locking a skyscrapers height to that of a distant mountain; by folding an Unit in its horizontality into the horizon; by springing the So Paulo viaduct from its aerial two-dimensionality to relate to spatially and temporally distant places of the Brazilian hinterland; by unfolding and radiating possible worlds from its intensity, architecture becomes geo-architecture. A last level of formal exchange occurs again around the concept of forms of life. Within each land use a new rhythm and ethic of work and living are expressed in new territorial patterns, in the dispersal of the farms and the concentrations of commerce, all the way down to types of dwellings that he invents for each establishment. In the projects of Izmir, Saint-Di, and Marseilles, these new typologies of dwelling stand alone as testimonies for new forms of life ahead of the land uses that will support them, as if the new architecture is capable of radiating the new human establishment. Toward an Aesthetic of Territory Since the publication of The Three Human Establishments, several architects have taken on the challenge of dening the form of the territory. This has usually entailed dening the means by which the agency of the architect could give a sense of order to the territory that resonates with some hidden order, whether coming from human geography, from the historical landscape, or from urban and transportation planning. Articulating the aesthetic dimension of the post World War II American city, Kevin Lynch introduced a visual/cognitive order to the different scales that mediate between the frictionless and scaleless, networks produced by the transportation engineers inside and outside cities and the resultant disorienting environment of everyday commuters. The tools needed to redress this disorientation vary from one scale to the next. The visual is no longer sufficient and has to be complemented by other perceptual aids. Revealingly, Lynch applies the term form to the historic city scale in his book Good City Form, image to the metropolitan scale in his notion of imageability (in The Image of the City), and the equally tenuous term sense to the regional scale

when he titles his book Managing the Sense of a Region. Here again, human geography plays an important role in the generation of the cognitive approach extracted from another, even if a mnemonic form of lifethat of collective memory as developed by French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. Since the 1960s and the publication of his Territorial Form essay, Vittorio Gregotti has been one of the most vocal advocates of a new aesthetic of territory. His contribution to the discussion was to elevate historic form to urban consciousness by enfolding the historic in the geographic through the phenomenon of phylogeny. Gregotti insists that the tools of the architect can still be useful at the territorial scale, but importantly, he expands architecture to include landscape as the medium and venue for the overlap between the different layers that dene the territory. Gregotti applies a duality of typomorphologies, the eld and the ensemble, to organize and relate across scales from the architectural to the territorial. There is no shortage of inuences from human geography in his work, starting with Max Sorre. These resonate throughout his long and rich career and have led to a repertoire of large horizontal and abstract forms applied against the topography of Italian hills. Gregotti shared this fascination with human geography and abstracted historical forms with Aldo Rossi, but while he brought landscape in to hold together the fragments and residues of the extra-urban condition, Rossi accepted, historicized, and aestheticized its fragmentation.6 Le Corbusiers concept of geo-architecture both precedes and projects beyond these 20th- century architectural engagements with the territorial. Today, it resonates in Kenneth Framptons megaform, Stan Allens landform building, and the territorial tropes of the New Geographies Lab at the Harvard GSDall aim to address territorial disorder through formal means. These three approaches concur in their appeal to a deeper affinity between architecture and geography than geo-mimicry, whether via geomorphology, horizontality, or through an interplay between historical and geographic forms. These positions, along with the scaled-up monumentalities of Alexander dHooghe and Pier Vittorio Aureli, also concur that form can turn territorial differentiation from a process of aggressive appropriation into an aesthetic. In contrast, Bernardo Secchi and Paola Vigan, echoing the work of Ignasi de Sol-Morales, accept the diffused condition of the territory, proposing isotropic form development. In their designs for Paris and Antwerp, they propose a variety of provocatively tentative forms and open clearings in the porous city.

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 Contemporary urban discourse may have very well become once again fascinated with human or social geography, especially because social geography has rediscovered space as one of the means by which capitalism prevails and persists. Henri Lefebvres long shadow and the work of Michel de Certeau, David Harvey, and Edward Soja come to mind in this respect. Independently, architecture has also become fascinated with physical geography. This can be detected in the theoretical inquiries of the likes of Stan Allen, Vincente Guaillart, Iaki balos, and Michael Jakob among others and in the historical revival of works such as Bruno Taut, Superstudio, and Yona Friedman (and certain obscure terms by Le Corbusier). This reengagement by architecture with geography in its human and physical dimensions does not necessarily mean a rapprochement between these sub-disciplines. However, their overlap in architecture suggests yet another potential role for geo-architecture. But can we still speak of a geo-architecture in the way that Le Corbusier used the term to project an aesthetic of the territory, to explore and express new forms of life? After numerous and tenuous trials, could an aesthetic exist beyond the visible or the sensible? Can the increasingly unrecognizable forms of settlement that have been described as everything from archipelago to cosmopolis to global city-region allow for effective intervention? Have the systemic approaches through networks and infrastructures not yet failed their self-dened

performative criteria? Have the neo-organicist adulations of informality not yet elevated this logic of illogic to the level of disbelief? Is it not time to reconsider the potential of form as a means of intervention at the scale of territory? Faced with another wave of regional urbanizations but with the persistent weakness of planning beyond the urban scale, we can infer that the agencies imagined by Le Corbusier and the ASCORAL team did not survive long enough to validate their own terms of practice. Furthermore, the strong association between single land uses and specic forms of living has also been diffused by a chaotic if sometimes deliberate mixing of uses. Above all, the exploitative attitude toward the land has long since been tempered by a stronger environmental consciousness that has introduced skepticism about xed form, especially at the larger scale. We may also have to reexamine the concepts of territory and aesthetic. In the connes of this essay I can only point to the recent investigations into the history of territory by scholars like Antoine Picon and Stuart Elden that have claried but also broadened the range of its uses between its natural, political, and representational attributes.7 In regard to aesthetics, I can also evoke Jacques Rancires denition of the aesthetic as a new regime in the arts that promotes autonomy of the forms of art from the forms of life in order for art to impact life. As such, if the form of the territory, proposed through architectural means, does not abide by the cultural and

Le Corbusier, Section through Firminy Youth Center, Stadium, and Chapel, Firminy, France, 1963.

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geographic terms of territory, then the displacement could help in imagining other possibilities of social association, of living together. The geo-architectural strategy of throwing the net very wide toward the oekumene (a term used by Sorre and subsequently by Greek town planner Constantinos Doxiadis among others) and of skipping over the urban prompts a recalibration of ways of life and differences between them that should become primary to any investigation of territorial form today. The citys categories and hierarchies are no longer entirely pertinent to describe the forms of collective living at hand. Importantly, and unlike the scientic method and the movement it entails from description to prescription, from prescription to action, and from action to perform ance, an aesthetic method encourages a more gestural proposition. It relies on superimposition, suspension, or displacement of expectations without integration into the complete description of the reality at hand and without a necessary path from description to prescription. In aesthetic terms, the structure of the problem does not yield the structure of the solution. Territory proposed through architectural means may not, should not, correspond to the one produced by political boundaries or geomorphological ones. Such an aesthetic posture may be closer to John Keatss notion of negative capabilities or Friedrich Schillers idea of play, but it clearly resonates with

Le Corbusiers notion of geo-architecture. Geo-architecture is able to create geography through architecture precisely by displacing given territorial formations. New forms of architecture imagine new forms of life. The reciprocity between the two does not call for the respect of forms of life by architecture as much as a constant engagement through strategic disengagement. The ensemble of Firminy illustrates how a composition of disparate elements placed at the center of the city pull the different land uses into a composition that in turn reaches out toward the geographic setting. Among the pieces of the ensemble, the youth center, placed on the ridge of the hill, projects a new but untested optimism for the citys youth. Set against the intensied social life of the Unites dHabitation hovering in the distance, the arch of the center and the canopy of seat ing area stretch the natural bowl of the stadium into the skyline without mimicking it. (Fig. 2) The chapels frustum foregrounds the hillscape into the architectural ensemble. The chapel, the stadium, the Units, and the youth center are all unied by a ground section and by a skyline held in suspense over the shape of the land and against the silhouette of the historic city. This displacement preserves integrity to architecture the same way the word architecture is preserved in the neologism geo-architecture. Instead of geo-mimicry that folds architecture into a natural setting and a naturalist vein, geo-architecture maintains its tectonic integrity against the land. Its distinctly concrete forms inscribe new forms of life on the surface of the earth.

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3 Ibid, 98. 4 Data Driven Detroit, Residential Parcel Survey, February 2010, accessed January 17, 2014. http://www.detroitparcelsurvey. org/interior.php?nav=reports 5 Broadacre City: A New Community Plan, Architectural Record, April 1935: 24352. 6 Hilberseimer, Ludwig, The New Regional Pattern: Industries and Gardens, Workshops and Farms (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1949). 7 New York: Reinhold Publishing, 1943. Arrhenius 1 Mies van der Rohe, quotation used on front cover, Bauwelt 38, 59 Jahrgang, Berlin, 16. September 1968. Translation of quote to English by author. 2 Brandlhuber +, p. 33, Bauwelt 38, 59 Jahrgang, Berlin, Mrz 2011 (translation of quote to English by Brandlhuber +) 3 Hans Stimmann, Urban Design and Architecture After the Wall, in World Cities: Berlin, ed. Alan Balfour (London: Academy Editions,1995), 4854. 4 See specically Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, The Activity of the Masters After World War II, in Modern Architecture/ 2, History of World Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 31114. See also Sven-Olov Wallenstein, 0.2 AKADThe Silences of Mies (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2008). Parolotto 1 New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 2 U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, Per capita VMT peaked in 2004 and has declined each year since then for a total decline of 7.5 percent, accessed January 17, 2014. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ policyinformation/travel_monitoring/ tvt.cfm 3 Elisabeth Rosenthal The End of Car Culture, The New York Times, Sunday Review section, June 29, 2013, accessed January 17, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com /2013/06/30/sunday-review/the-end-ofcar-culture.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& 4 A project of San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA), http:// sfpark.org/ 5 Area C, bilancio del 2013, Municipality of Milan website, January 16, 2014, accessed January 17, 2014. https:// www.comune.milano.it/portale/wps/ portal/!ut/p/c0/04_ Busquets 1 Joan Busquets, Miguel Corominas, and Centre de Cultura Contempornia de Barcelona, Cerd and the Barcelona of the Future, Reality versus Project (Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contempornia de Barcelona and Direcci de Comunicaci de la Diputaci de Barcelona, 2010). Christiaanse 1 Based in Rotterdam with branch oces in Zrich and Shanghai.

Sarkis 1 Le Corbusier, The Three Human Establishments, (Punjab Government, Department of Town & Country Planning, 1979). 2 Authors translation. In French, it reads: En trois termes explicites, seraient xs les tablissements humains de notre civilisation machiniste. Il est utile de connaitre la clef de cette biologie apte raliser les fonctions, apte assumer les tches. Ltude de ces trois sortes dtablissement nous permettra davancer vers des certitudes. Loccupation du sol pourra tre reconsidre, ce qui signie proprement: ordonner lespace, faire de la gographie humaine et de la goarchitecture, termes qui sont apparus petit petit en ces temps, dans de graves mmoires, dans des rapports et des tudes. On rclamait une morphologie capable dassurer les classements et des hierarchies, de conduire les initiatives, de situer les actes. ASCORAL, Les Trois Etablissements Humains (Paris: 1945). 3 Le Corbusier, The Four Routes (London: D. Dobson, 1947). 4 Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973). 5 On this issue of suppressing the aesthetic in favor of the functional, see Francesco Passanti, The Aesthetic Dimension of Le Corbusiers Urbanism, in Josep Llus Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, ed. Eric Mumford and Hashim Sarkis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 6 The term was seemingly used somewhere else even if it resonated with many of Le Corbusiers neologisms. If Le Corbusier himself was the forger of this new word, he did not make much use of it. Neither did scholars of his urbanism. Somehow since its appearance at the end of WWII in this rather hurriedly assembled text and a rather rough and much delayed English translation of the second French edition, the term geo-architecture was subsequently repeated in some lectures, including one in Switzerland in 1957 and another in Brussels in 1958. Tracing the possible options of the term reveals how indelible geography was with urban planning. The term may have been entered into the atelier at Rue de Svres through one of the interdisciplinary doors opened by members of ASCORAL. The correspondence between Le Corbusier and economist Franois Perroux, director of the newly founded Insitut de Science Economique Applique, suggest that the geographer Franois Gravier may have been a possible conduit. Historian Patrice Noviant conrms that Gravier reviewed the manuscript of The Three Human Establishments. (see Patrice Noviant, Les Trois Etablissements Humains, in Le Corbusier, une encyclopdie, edited by Jacques Lucan, (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987). According to Daniel Le Coudic, director of the Center for Goarchitecture in Brest, the term originated in American geomorphology

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and was then used to describe the large New Deal projects such as the TVA that combined engineering with architecture and planning and that the American historian of architecture Carl W. Condit used in this context as well in 1947. Le Coudic infers that it is most probably in this context that Le Corbusier also heard the term and appropriated it. Le Corbusier, The Three Human Establishments, 148. Pierre Saddy, The Riches of Nature, in Casabella, January-February 1987, 118. Jean Brunhes, Human Geography: An Attempt at a Positive Classication, Principles, and Examples (Chicago: Rand, McNally and Co., 1920). Ibid., 149. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 152. This idea of geographic continuity over time is central to the work of Gaston Roupnel, a historian/ ethnographer who was highly inuential on the agricultural ideas in the book. Roupnels work was also cited by Fernand Braudel in his formulation of the longue dure. The Europe of industrial codependency is also conjured again in Le Corbusiers plans for Valle de la Meuse and in Berlin. In a lecture delivered in Brussels on June 26, 1958, Le Corbusier suggests that it was the geographer, not him, who expanded the map toward Europe. Fondation Le Corbusier, Correspondence (U3-8-307), 14. Le Corbusier, Les Trois Etablissements Humains, 149. Vittorio Gregotti, Territorial Form, in lArchitecture dAujourdhui, 1966. See Antoine Picon, What Has Happened to Territory?, in Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment, ed. David Gissen, special issue, Architectural Design, May-June 2010: 9499. See also Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). It is important to note, however, that the currency of the term during WWII, at the time of The Three Human Establishments, had to do with the sudden dissociation of the physical dimension of territory from its administrative and political determinants.

Baan 1 The most recent Kumbh Mela took place in Allahabad, India from January 14-March 10, 2013.

Notes

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