Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Christian Norberg-Shulz, 1988. New World Architecture. NY: Princeton Architectural Press. |
Reviewed by Richard Capobianco
This short book is a revised version of three lectures on American architecture given by Christian Norberg-Schulz at the Architectural League of New York in 1987.
The lectures restate many of the insights that Norberg-Schulz has presented in his remarkable phenomenological studies over the past twenty years. Yet, of special interest in these lectures is his more concerted effort to incorporate into his phenomenological account of the house and of the city an appreciation of the building and dwelling especially characteristic of the modern and contemporary world. He observes that the modern world is an "open" world which resists the stabilizing, systematizing, and hierarchizing tendencies of closed traditional societies. American culture, in particular, has celebrated an "open" world, and the associated existential meanings have been compellingly concretized in the building up of American society.
In the lecture on "The House," Norberg-Schulz shows how Jefferson, in the design of his own home, Monticello, modified the classical vocabulary in ways that manifested the American virtue of "openness." Jefferson used porches, bay windows, and terraces to open the interior of the house to the natural world in an "active" way that was not characteristic of the classicism in the Palladian tradition. What is more, he used classical columns and pediments not so much to define a figural whole as to define directions and individual places.Writes Norberg-Schulz:
The point of departure is not the wish for creating an articulate, plastic body of the traditional classical kind but to define a composition of spaces. The open world of America was thereby expressed; it was understood and visualized for the first time.
Jefferson was the first in a long line of American architects‑-including Wright, Venturi, and Stern‑-who have designed houses that have profoundly corresponded to the distinctive openness and freedom of movement of the modern American experience.
In the lecture on "The City," Norberg-Schulz examines how the meanings of American life have been made manifest in the building of the American city. Old World cities emphasized place; the path or street in the European city "led to a goal where the purpose of the movement was explained as part of a closed systems of meanings." In the American city, however, "the street becomes the primary fact," thus concretizing a different set of existential meanings: movement, change, flux, openness, freedom, possibility, and opportunity.
The primacy of the street in the American town or city was already in evidence in such apparently Old World towns as Williamsburg. Norberg-Schulz observes that the main artery, Duke of Gloucester Street, is a long, broad avenue, and "although it has a public building at either end and a Market Square in the middle, there is hardly any feeling of an enclosed, urban space in the traditional European sense." He adds that "The plan of Williamsburg is laid out in relation to goals, but at the same time it expresses a new sense of infinite space."
The triumph of path over place in the American city was accomplished with the gridiron plan. Lewis Mumford had bitterly criticized the design element as essentially nihilistic, but Norberg-Schulz defends the grid, praising it as fully manifesting the American spirit. Streets and avenues which go "nowhere" as in New York and Chicago express the American commitment to an open and dynamic world in which people create their own identities and destinies. Furthermore, the urban grid represents a stark refusal of unearned privilege: each building or cluster of buildings must earn its distinction within the egalitarian framework of the checkerboard pattern.
After examining in greater detail the nature and history of American urban architecture and design, Norberg-Schulz concludes that the American city "represents a valid alternative to the traditional European city." These splendid lectures represent an advance in our understanding and appreciation of the existential meanings concretized in modern and contemporary architecture and design.
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