Concrete frames

Fully aware that it might be one of his last built works, it was Le Corbusier’s intention that the Carpenter Centre would provide ‘the key to the solution of reinforced concrete’⁶⁰ – indeed he believed that there were certain ideal – in the Platonic sense – forms to which a particu­

lar material might aspire. A brief scan of the chapter ‘Mass-production

houses’ in Towards a New Architecture reveals that, even at that early stage in his career, he had already experimented with various different structural forms for concrete, but the one that was to have the greatest longevity in his work was based on the domino frame which first entered his work in 1914 (Figure 1.1).⁶¹ Here a floor slab, a first floor slab and a roof garden slab are linked by a simple dogleg stair and supported on slim columns to which the façade and the walls have relinquished their former structural role, giving them the freedom to be positioned at the will of the architect. The lowest slab was raised from the ground on blocks, a suitably indeterminate and universal foundation condition.

Revealing the political implications of something as seemingly innocuous as a structural frame, Colin Rowe wrote of the Maison Domino and its off­

spring, the Villa Savoye, as being ‘symbols of emancipation’ which carry implications of ‘social liberty’.⁶² Its development was paralleled by Le Corbusier’s statement on the ‘five points of a new architecture’ – pilotis, horizontal windows, free façade, free plan and roof garden, the various aspects of which will be touched upon in the course of this argument.

Le Corbusier’s famous 1914 image of the domino frame, what Curtis calls ‘an industrialised equivalent of Laugier’s Primitive Hut’,⁶³ is actu­

ally deceptive – the idealized smooth slabs and pilotis never built.⁶⁴ The slabs of Le Corbusier’s concrete buildings were not in fact of a uniform flush thickness.⁶⁵ The majority were built with the Hennibique system, a ribbed slab produced by placing hollow clay tiles on a flat wooden scaffolding with spaces between, the result being a lighter, stronger and cheaper structure. When the formwork is removed the tiles remain in extremities. The result, an entity’.⁶⁶ His work was not, however, always so rational.⁶⁷

Of the pilotis that supported the slabs, Le Corbusier wrote: ‘Please admit in passing that “naked man”, what I call pure man, has used this resource in all times and places’.⁶⁸ One such column could take on several forms and meanings. Curtis writes that:

It might serve to lift the body of the building into space, to define a route, to introduce a cadence into the interior; it might be round or oval in plan, parallel-sided or tapering in elevation, smooth or rough in finish. And, depending upon the weights to be borne and complex of intentions sur­

rounding its use, the piloti might evoke different references. In the entrance hall of the Villa Stein de Monzie the four oval pilotis suggest simultaneously the idea of a classical vestibule (Palladio’s four-column idea) and the notion of aviomorphic struts.⁶⁹

Coupes verticales sur l’ossature

Coupe sur le plafond

Les fondements

Figure 1.1

Dom-ino , pour exécution en grande série

Maison Domino (1914) L’ossature standard

Columns, circular in plan, were favoured by Le Corbusier, perhaps because they alluded to the Doric order that he so admired.⁷⁰ For Rowe the circular section ‘tended to push partitions away from the column’, which meant that it did not aid the delineation of structural cells. It ‘offered a minimum of obstruction to the horizontal movement of space’ and

‘tended to cause space to gyrate around it’.⁷¹ By far the majority of Le Corbusier’s pilotis have neither base nor capital.⁷² Describing them as

‘atectonic’ Frampton calls such columns ‘abstractions of the idea of sup­

port’ owing to the fact that beams are not expressed in the flush plane of the ceiling.⁷³ With regard to structure Le Corbusier himself asked:

How should it be built? By ‘suppressing’ I do not mean repressing or con­

demning. By ‘expressing the structure’ I mean: affirming its structural compo­

nents, making them visible and making of this tendency the central postulate in our architecture. Whether we express a column or not (beyond its task of helping support the building) is just a question of one’s aesthetic, and we need not quibble over it. We can go from one extreme to the other, which will only indicate the range of the infinitely varied modalities for possible solutions. If you relish such things, you can easily begin petty bickering.⁷⁴

When, for example, it was found that extra reinforcement was needed at the head of each piloti, just beneath the slab of the Carpenter Centre, Le Corbusier toyed with the idea of creating a mushroom capital as was used on a massive scale on the Parliament Building at Chandigarh.⁷⁵ However, the illusion that the slabs were hovering would be spoilt by drawing attention to the way in which they were being supported. Fortunately for him the requirement for an ‘air floor’ made the formation of smooth slabs possible as the capitals of the columns could be recessed within the depth of this void. At the same time the extra reinforcement that was needed at the cantilevered edges could be similarly masked, once again creating the flush plane so necessary to Le Corbusier’s aesthetics.

Soltan often had his architectural sensibilities offended when working with Le Corbusier – ‘sometimes, he did not exclude the possibility of raping (a little) the virtue of architectural chastity’ – presumably rational structure and a pragmatic use of materials.⁷⁶ Emil Hervol, the engineer for the Carpenter Centre, also experienced numerous instances in which Le Corbusier’s philosophies took priority over pragmatism as Curtis has recorded:

For example, he suggested an optimal slab thickness in the overhang­

ing areas which [the job architect] Sert disallowed ‘Because of Corbu’s blue system or something’   ⁷⁷ And when everyone was confronted with the problem of the auditorium span, Hervol suggested that the span be reduced by the placement of hidden columns in the auditorium’s side walls – a suggestion that was greeted with horror by the Cambridge archi­

tects who felt it was dishonest and anyway broke the grid. But when Hervol left out the redundant column next to the weight bearing stair wall to save cost, he was chided: evidently the architects preferred structural dishonesty to breaking the grid.⁷⁸

Indeed ‘Emergency measures’ had to be used to support the cantilevered curved studios, including a brise soleil which extended down to ground level to become a pier.

A further instance of structural ‘dishonesty’ is cited by Curtis. The pilotis of the Carpenter Centre vary in girth, supposedly in recognition of the amount of weight that they carry. Taken to its logical extreme this idea would have resulted in pilotis of innumerable different diameters spread around the building. Instead, however, the columns were sized according to the load that they seemed to be carrying:

the column becoming an increment thicker for each additional floor sup­

ported. In some cases this system resulted in slender columns rising unbraced through clear space for two stories. These had to be so packed with steel reinforcing that concrete could not be poured but had to be crammed manually. The diminishing column sizes were not equal to stan­

dard formwork dimensions, and standardized reinforcing solutions were found to be impossible too. The reason for this, of course, was that the weights above were actually varying, even when the column size did not acknowledge it. Columns of the same size would often require totally dif­

ferent reinforcing solutions from the engineer despite the assertion of the architect that they were ‘bearing the same weight’.⁷⁹

In spite of this Curtis refers to the structural skeleton as ‘extremely ele­

gant’⁸⁰ with ‘parallels’ in the ‘classical orders used in combination, or even (since the architect himself spoke of a “forest of firs”) the diminution towards the tops of trees’.⁸¹ Certainly Le Corbusier seemed to have been more interested in issues of composition and geometrical harmony than he was in any sense of structural honesty. As he wrote in Towards a New Architecture, with regard to the ‘delicate distortions’ employed by Phidias and his workers on the Parthenon, ‘the engineer is effaced and the sculp­

tor comes to life – contours go beyond the scope of the practical man, the daring man, the ingenious man; they call for the plastic artist’.⁸²