``A few blocks east of Detroit’s downtown, just across Interstate 375, sits Lafayette Park, an enclave of single- and two-story modernist townhouses set amid a forest of locust trees. Like hundreds of developments nationwide, they were the result of postwar urban renewal; unlike almost all of them, it had a trio of world-class designers behind it: Ludwig Hilbersheimer as urban planner, Alfred Caldwell as landscape designer and Mies van der Rohe as architect.''
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/living-with-mies/
Below is rift on CB's house.
At a guess this was an accidental post to LBO, but it makes a good story. For listmembers who don't know what the above means, I'll give a short art history lecture.
CB lives in workers paradise, as theorized by socialist and communist designers in Berlin and Moscow prior to about 1927. Think Bauhaus. But there is alot more to the Bauhaus than boxy modern. There is a whole design philosophy that goes with it.
There were equivalent (but less systematic) architecture and design movements in the UK and US that were considering how to `humanize' daily life for the new industrialized urban masses, and keep some sense of land and environment (country) alive in cities---a proto ecology environment reform movement. The most famous example in the US was Frederick Law Olmsted who planned urban parks for US cities. Central Park in NYC is one example and the first master plan for UCB and Stanford were others. Here is the wiki with a long list of similar projects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted
Golden Gate Park tried to follow Omsted, but was done by locals. If interested do the wiki.
For CB's building, the underlying design concept for both exterior and interior is the building module. This is a math ratio that is considered pleasing to look at, live in, and use (form follows function). The Golden Mean is only one ratio among many with many different uses. You notice the utility of a design module by realizing that some rooms and spaces are easy to furnish, easy to look at and walk through, with convienent natural light sources, and so forth. Other spaces are always awkward no matter what you do with them and are often dark, no matter what time of day or season.
Here is Corbusier's module:
http://www.infovis.net/imagenes/T1_N145_A2_Modulor.jpg
Here are some photos of CB's neighbors places:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/10/15/opinion/20101015_Lafayette.html
Spend a little time looking at these pictures. There is a lot of illusionist design going on to make the spaces appear larger than they probably are. Part of that is the fisheye lens, but that's not all there is to it.
``Mies, like many of his post World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras...''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Mies_van_der_Rohe
While that's what architectual history says, there was also a (possibly suppressed) political economy dimension, and that was the creation of (humanistic and beautiful) living spaces for the industrial age using mass production methods.
Mies, Corbuiser, Gropius where in competition with the Really Ugly Modern places like where I was born LA County Hospital (historic photo):
http://www.yesterdayla.com/Graphics/generalhospital.jpg
Note the similarity to Soviet Ugly (current photo of Russian Duma):
http://www.theodora.com/wfb/photos/russia/duma_parliament_building_moscow_russia_photo_gov.jpg
I think of these designs as Bureau State Modern.
Now I admit and clearly understand that Bauhaus went off the hook in its later transformation. Mise, Corbusier and others really created monsters of which the giant vertical slums of urban housing projects are examples. These ideas have to be used with a lot of care and understanding.
But at root these are still the best answers I've come across for low income housing. Somehow these basic ideas have to get upgraded to work out the global phenomenon of urban megaslums.
CG
