This book emerged from a conference held by the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard to review the career of the Spanish-born architect-planner Josep Lluís Sert, particularly in his role as dean of the School from 1953 to 1969. When architecture schools are involved in books about their own they often degenerate into wish-fulfilment and hagiography. Refreshingly this is not the case here – at least not entirely.
The essays cover various facets of Sert's career as he attempted to adjust to the changing climate of the 1950s and 1960s, when the rigid ideals of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) were coming under attack. Sert was president of CIAM from 1947 to 1956 and staffed the GSD with a number of core members, including Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Serge Chermayeff and Sigfried Giedion. His presidency of CIAM witnessed its unravelling from within, largely at the hands of the dissident Team 10 group. The underlying conviction of this book, however, is that Sert was thinking about critical alternatives to CIAM as early as the 1940s. These included using planning to foster community and the public realm, using architecture to symbolize the values of a society and respecting the local landscape and vernacular building traditions. Although these ideas are commonplace nowadays, Sert's grasp of them appears to have been limited and inflected by the CIAM mindset that he helped to create. This is not something that the authors seem to want to acknowledge fully.
By way of example, Sert arrived in the United States in 1939 and tried to establish an academic career by publishing a book on the CIAM 4 conference of 1933, which explored the ‘Functional City’ of leisure, work, transport and recreation. An admirer of the urban historian Lewis Mumford, and eager for some heavyweight support, Sert asked Mumford to write the introduction to his book. Mumford refused because the manuscript neglected entirely the social and civic functions of city planning, after which Sert re-drafted it to mention the ‘urban core’. Can Our Cities Survive? was published in 1942, complete with introduction by Mumford. In private, Mumford characterized Sert's treatment of urban communities as mere ‘verbal acknowledgment’. These ‘pallid efforts’, he said, were ‘an indication of the sociological superficiality of the CIAM analysis’ (p. 87). The essay that explores this episode sets aside Mumford's criticisms in order to take Sert at his word. His plans for Motor City in Brazil (1944–47) and Chimbote in Peru (1946–48) are presented as exemplars of ‘communitarian focus and vernacular expression’, a sensitive modernist updating of ‘Latin American town squares (praças) and promenades (passeios)’ (pp. 91, 94). When contrasted with Le Corbusier's 1945 plan for Saint-Dié in France, which is considered less satisfactory in terms of community planning, one can find little difference. And any references to a Latin American vernacular are so abstracted that they might as well be British new towns (see figs. 5.1, 5.2 and 8.2).
Another example concerns Sert's establishment of an urban design programme at the GSD. Conferences were organized to establish the terminology, agenda and curriculum of the programme, which commenced in 1960. Initially the urban designer was to be a ‘collaborator’ and ‘facilitator’ between sociologists, economists, legislators, conservation groups and so on (pp. 131–2). This was a far cry from the despotic ‘Lawgiver’ of Le Corbusier. But Sert became frustrated and soon re-imagined the urban designer as someone who could solve all the problems of the city through physical design, i.e. an architect working alone. This professional arrogance, a hangover from the CIAM era, was exposed in the radicalized climate of the 1960s. The keynote speaker at the urban design conference of 1968 characterized the architect as society's ‘arbiter of taste’: ‘beauty, no more than measles or syphilis, is to be entrusted to the uninstructed intellect’ (p. 159).
Even so, the case is made convincingly that Sert was receptive to many of the trends that were emerging in mid-century. Not least were his re-introduction of architectural history courses in Harvard, which Walter Gropius had abolished as if he were back at the Bauhaus, and his support for the innovative landscape architecture programme under Hideo Sasaki. Also noteworthy was his uptake of new ideas on bringing flexibility and indeterminism into planning instead of offering definitive solutions, which were being pioneered by groups like Team 10 and the Metabolists in Japan. But although Sert clearly struggled to incorporate these ideas, doing so in strange and inconclusive ways (Giedion as history teacher?), the authors in this volume remain too eager to mark him out as a pioneer of the key values of the post-CIAM era. The assertion that Sert's work points to ‘unacknowledged continuities’ with current initiatives like New Urbanism, for example, is simply untenable (p. 145). Current understanding of community planning, architectural symbolism and tradition, the vernacular and genius loci, were pioneered not from within CIAM but by those on the fringes. These too appear in this book but only in glimpses, such as a pre-Death and Life Jane Jacobs at the urban design conference of 1956, remarking on the ‘folly of creating a physical structure at the price of destroying the intimate social structure of a community's life’ (p. 136).
Nonetheless the book remains important and valuable, especially for the documentary material dredged out of the GSD archives. Numberless wide-ranging essay collections are being dedicated to exploring this period, arguing in general terms that the generational shift is less clear-cut than previously believed. By focusing so intensely on Sert, this book is able to make a much more compelling case. Ultimately, it builds into a fascinating and comprehensive portrait of an influential man who, having helped fashion the dominant orthodoxy of twentieth-century architecture and planning, found himself needing to reinvent it – or at least needing to be seen to try.
