"The outside Is the Result of an inside": Some Sources of One of Modernism's Most PersistentDoctrinesAuthor(s): Thomas L. SchumacherSource: Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 56, No. 1 (Sep., 2002), pp. 22-33Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools ofArchitecture, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1425750 .

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THOMAS L. CHUMACHER "The Outside Is the Result University of Maryland

of an Inside"

Some Sources of One of Modernism's

Most Persistent Doctrines

One of the most pervasive doctrines of composition for modernism was the necessary correspon- dence between the interior and the exterior as expressed in Le Corbusier's maxim, "The outside is the result of an inside." Many Modern movement architects interpreted this maxim as requiring that both "space" and "program" be expressed on the exterior of their buildings. Although Modern movement architects and theorists themselves wrote little on this subject, a number of earlier writings, including some nineteenth- and twentieth-century books by traditionalists, reveal the academic roots of these precepts. This paper traces the development of these ideas.

Introduction "A building is like a soap bubble.... The outside is the result of an inside."

Le Corbusier'

"Architecture has always been essentially an abstract art.. ."

Henry-Russell Hitchcock2

Ask an architecture student today to account for some variation in the fenestration of an otherwise

repetitive facade of even a Renaissance building, and the answer will most likely be that the architect was trying to project some aspect of interior space onto the outside wall. The idea that interior-exterior correspondences should be the standard expectation of facade appearance is a widespread assumption in

contemporary architecture schools, and it is difficult to contest as the only norm of architectural expres- sion.

In much of the architecture of the Modern movement, two important assumptions were tacitly made about the inside and the outside. One was that a building's social program ought to be read quite literally on the outside of the building, without the aid of inscription. The other assumption was that the interior spaces and volumes ought to be read as well. These ideas are interconnected and often become conflated in practice. Function, taken here to mean the institutional identification or social

activity purpose of a building, is distinguishable from function as the fulfillment of environmental and comfort requirements (with which I am not concerned in the present essay), which in turn should be distinguished from functions (plural), that is, the specific programmed elements of the

building, the rooms and spaces of the interior.

The Importance of the Program The exterior of a courthouse may telegraph a number of different messages, ranging from the idea that the building is a courthouse and not a

post office, to the indication of an important chamber, to the fact that the building is a public institution, to the importance of the building in its

community, and so forth. The means by which and the degree to which each of these attributes can be articulated vary enormously from place to place and time to time. Courthouse may be plainly indicated

by an inscription over the door, a sign out front, or

by the Corinthian portico flashed behind a TV news- caster to indicate the United States Supreme Court. An important courtroom may be placed on the facade as a volume or it may be displayed via

enlarged windows or even via a blank windowless wall. The same Corinthian portico we see behind the newsreader may denote the existence of the chamber. That is, if the portico successfully projects "courthouse" then it must also project

"courtroom." Simply because Le Corbusier's High Court in Chandigarh, India, parades all its court- rooms on its front facade doesn't necessarily make this building any more expressive of "courthouse" than the U.S. Supreme Court, where the portico stands for the institution (and the chamber) as an architectural synecdoche. However it is accom-

plished, the signal of activity function is assumed by contemporary architects to be the preferred initial reading upon encountering a building.

These modern assumptions about what a courthouse or any other building should announce to the casual observer were not always the norm.

Among the romantics of the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries, the idea that a building might be Hungarian, French, or English was far more important than whether it was a library, a town hall, or a mansion. Goethe, for example, glori- fied the "German-ness" of German architecture, arguing,

And now I should not be angry ... when the

German art scholar, upon the hearsay of jealous neighbors, does not appreciate his

superiority, belittles your work with the misun- derstood word "Gothic," when he should thank God to be able to proclaim aloud that that is German Architecture, our architecture, when the Italian can boast of none of his own, much less the Frenchman.3

23 SCHUMACHER Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 23-33 ? 2002 ACSA, Inc.

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Sir John Summerson claimed that interest in

program was the single common denominator of theoretical assumptions within the Modern move- ment in architecture. In a seminal article in the RIBA Journal in the late 1950s, he summarized that, "the source of unity in Modern Architecture is in the social sphere, in other words in the architect's

program."4 Summerson further argued,

From the antique (a world of form) to the

program (a local fragment of social pattern); this suggests a swing in the architect's psycho- logical orientation almost too violent to be credible. Yet in theory at least, it has come about; and how it has come about could very well be demonstrated historically. First the rationalist attack on the authority of the

antique; then the displacement of the classical

antique by the mediaeval; then the introduc- tion into mediaevalist authority of purely social factors (Ruskin); then the evaluation of purely vernacular architectures because of their social realism (Morris); and finally the concentration of interest on the social factors themselves and the conception of the architect's program as the source of unity - the source not precisely of forms but of adumbrations of forms of undeniable validity. The program as the source of unity is, so far as I can see, the one new

principle involved in modern architecture.5

The route to an architecture that seeks to

express program function (and interior volume) was a slow one throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in such canonical International Style buildings as Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau. Reyner Banham characterized buildings like the Bauhaus as

typical of the design process that was common to most avant-garde architects in the 1920s. Banham traced the origins of this idea specifically to the

unacknowledged influence of the great academician Julien Guadet's theories on modernist architects, adding, that "it may be taken as a general charac-

teristic of the progressive architecture of the early twentieth century that it was conceived in terms of a separate and defined volume for each separate and defined function, and composed in such a way that this separation and definition was made plain."6

Robert Venturi has also argued that, in much of twentieth-century architecture, "program func- tions are exaggeratedly articulated into wings or

segregated separate pavilions."7 The gradual substi- tution of such programmatic expression for tectonic

expression has many determinants during this

period, one of them being the architect's gradual estrangement from the engineer and the artist, starting in the middle of the eighteenth century." Partially removed from the technical expertise of the engineer and the aestheticism of the painter and sculptor, the late-eighteenth-century architect was drawn toward the social sciences, to the idea that architecture could be the independent variable

upon which behavior depended. Myths about the

origins of architecture began to change. Architec- ture was now seen as emanating from a social, not a constructive, source.

We can see the increasing importance of the social realm in a cursory comparison of two decisive theorists: Marc-Antoine Laugier, writing in 1753,9 and Gottfried Semper, writing one hundred years later.10 Laugier conceived an almost wholly constructive rationale for the origins of architecture. He assumed that the programmatic need for shelter was important, but generalized. For him, the manip- ulation of the primary elements to make that shelter-that is, the column and the architrave- is the initial act of man behaving like an architect.

Semper wrote his treatise after the intervention of the seminal social ideas of the Enlightenment and their application to architecture by Ledoux, Fourier, Bentham, and others. Semper was also

strongly influenced by the work of biologist Georges Cuvier, whose scientific innovation "was to shift

emphasis from description by the identifiable members of an organism, and classification by description, to classification by the function per-

formed."" This led to a classification of buildings by social, not formal or constructive, criteria. Semper divided architecture into four independent elements: the hearth, the platform, the roof (including the vertical structure), and the enclosure ("infill"). He wrote,

The first sign of human settlement . . . is

today, as when the first men lost paradise, the

setting up of the fireplace and the lighting of the reviving, warming, and food-preparing flame. Around the hearth the first groups assembled; around it the first alliance formed; around it the first rude religious concepts were

put into the customs of a cult. Throughout all

phases of society the hearth formed that sacred focus around which the whole took order and shape.12

The hearth is the first and most elemental of

Semper's forms. He continues, "it is the first and most important, the moral element of architecture [his italics]."" As Rosemarie Bletter explained, "the fire [is] an element without spatial dimension but one that bestows social significance on the site."14

In this regard, Semper was following Vitruvius, who averred, "the beginning of association among human beings, their meeting and living together... came into being because of the discovery of

fire."15 Further, Semper's "roof, with its supporting

member is read as a continuous unit," 6 thereby amalgamating two of the most discrete elements of all previous systems (including Laugier's): the column and the architrave. He also made a clear

separation of structure and enclosure, arguing that the earliest of human habitations were frame constructions with woven carpets as vertical spatial separators. "Only the potter's art," Semper argued, "can with some justification perhaps claim to be as ancient as the craft of carpet weaving [his italics]."17

Semper conceived the facade as, "a partition wall made with hands, the first vertical division of space

"The Outside Is the Result of an Inside" 24

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invented by man."18 Wall as divider precedes wall as

support in Semper's system. Although this is not to

say that Semper was unconcerned with structure and construction, the ideas limned above are a

precursor to the separation of structure and enclo- sure that became the plan libre of Le Corbusier and Mies, wherein the facade surface was not its own structure. And, without that structural and construc- tive essence, walls could become, in the words of Van Doesburg, "colour planes [which] form an

organic part of the new architecture."19 In other words, for Van Doesburg and his generation, the

planes are abstract.

Semper's destruction of one of architecture's most lasting structural conventions -that is, the clear distinction of vertical from horizontal members (column and architrave) - is an important step on the road to abstraction. Further, his insistence on the anthropological setting as the architectural

prime determinant indicates that architects could now see "program" alongside "structure" as a

significant generator of architectural form and surface.

Directives regarding the connection of activity program and facade appear in the literature at least as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Richard Etlin has uncovered how, according to the French Conseil des Batiments Civil (1805), "each

building had to announce on its exterior the char- acter [corresponding to] its function."20 I have added Semper to Summerson's example of Ruskin as the agent of the "social program" determinant, which by the early twentieth century was to begin to have a profound effect on architects' attitudes about form making.

That such ideas have been codified into the literature of late-twentieth-century theory is attested by Rudolf Arnheim's argument in his influ- ential book, The Dynamics of Architectural Form: "The simple principle to which all this comes down is that in a well-designed building there is a struc- tural correspondence between visual properties and functional characteristics. Similar function should be

reflected in similar shape; different functions in different shapes."21

Abstraction and Volumetric Expression

The New Architecture has ... made "front" and "back," "right" and "left," and possibly also "above" and "below" equal in value.

Theo van Doesburg22

The programmatic message that a building projects to the outside world is one issue. Another important issue is what the building projects of its internal

spaces. Along with program having been conceived as an independent variable in the design equation, so "space" and "volume" have been "liberated" from structure and construction. This independence has changed the way in which architects approach plan organization (so-called free plan), the making of rooms (so-called free-flowing space), the expres- sion of purpose (program function versus national and regional traits), and the design of the exterior surface (so-called free-facade).

In the 1920s, with the advent of the Interna- tional Style, the abstract white stucco and glass facade emerged, profoundly influenced by modern

painting. Peter Collins traced the influence of

painting and abstraction on the architects of the

early twentieth century. He argued that Gropius's students at the Bauhaus, "were initiated into the

study of architecture by manipulating abstract

shapes without any reference to building functions or the ultimate strength of materials, but solely with a view to achieving ornamental appeal in terms of

'significant form.""23 This abstraction appeared in the architecture of Adolf Loos around 1910, and was then further developed by Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus, the Dutch, and the Russians in the 1910s and 1920s. Writing just after World War II, Nikolas Pevsner observed the new abstraction in Gropius and Meyer's Faguswerke factory and the Werkbund Administration, both built just before World War I: "No moldings, no frills, were permitted to distract

one's attention from true architectural values: the relations of wall to window, solid to void, volume to

space, block to block."24 This premium on abstraction, confirmed by

Hitchcock's statement that covers this essay, was wedded to the idea that the inside should be

projected to the outside. H.R. Hitchcock and Philip Johnson portrayed this shift in expressive possibili- ties as the difference between the expression of mass and the expression of volume.25

Le Corbusier's "soap bubble" metaphor gave architects the paradigm. Since the 1920s, many avant-garde architects have taken this prescription rather literally, and they could assume it to be oper- ative for repetitive as well as hierarchical buildings; a repetitive facade must necessarily project a repeti- tive interior, otherwise "something is being hidden." And, although an adherence to the rigors of construction exigencies and budgets often may conflict with an equally rigorous display of internal volume or function (as when a neutral curtain-wall facade of repetitive structure covers a spatially hier- archical interior), some modern architects have succeeded in expressing both gradation and concat- enation. Louis I. Kahn's Exeter Library is a building that, through its massing and fenestration, reveals its importance without literally telegraphing its great internal space. The building's rigorous repetition of structural bays preserves the traditional conventions of masonry construction without resembling a banal office building.

Architects may disagree on "which what" of the inside should appear on the exterior surface, yet, among even the moderates among International

Style modernists, few would have allowed that the outside surface ought to determine interior distribu- tion. It's one thing to not project all the innards onto the outer wall; it's quite another for the outside wall to dictate, or even precede, the interior. The Place Vendome and Haussmann's boulevards in Paris, where the facades were built before the

buildings, are often the object of modern architects'

indignation and disdain, as if it were patently

25 SCHUMACHER

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obvious that such an act is immoral and inauthentic, despite the fact that these projects are brilliant urban gestures.

In most premodern architecture, the more important the building, the less the facade related to the rooms it covered and the more it related to the space it faced, be it street or square, whether or not the facades were built first. Giulio Carlo Argan maintained that in the Renaissance, as in antiquity, the most important and grandest facades displayed an architectural form that, "was not that of the solid volume whose facades suggested [the] internal structure, but a cubic void whose facades are the enclosing walls."26 Further, the greater the number of equal (and large) windows a Renaissance client could afford for his palazzo, the happier he was. Irregularity, to quattrocento and cinquecento clients (whatever its origins), symbolized the unkempt squalor of the Middle Ages.

Further, when observing architecture of the past, the "orthodox modernist" (Robert Venturi's term) takes great delight in discovering inside- outside relationships that appear to prevision modernism. Vernacular buildings, ancient ruins stripped of their revetments, and doggedly plain buildings like Cistercian abbeys are often cited as

buildings exuding the value of "truth" expounded by Ruskin. In the late 1950s, Le Corbusier wrote an introduction to a photo essay on the Cistercian Monastery of Le Thoronet in southern France. The book was entitled The Architecture of Truth.

In addition to a penchant for plain walls and the use of the same material on the inside as on the outside (and presumably all the way through), many modern architects have come to appreciate those historical examples where the interior volume relates to the outside wall, where the spaces are "projected" onto the facade. Venetian palaces have often been favorite examples for professors of design. This facade type seems to so perfectly mirror the parti, with its central room, the portego, typically faced with an open loggia. But it is unlikely that projecting the plan and section onto the facade was an important intention of the patrons or architects of the late Middle Ages, the Renais- sance, or the baroque. If anything, many of those facades illustrate the struggle to suppress such a reading.27

The repetition of similar bays is common in ancient, Renaissance, and Post-Renaissance public buildings. Some of those buildings are in fact deep, porch-like structures, and some are also relatively

nonhierarchical in terms of the spaces behind, not unlike a modern office building. But repetitive facades also show up in buildings whose internal spatial hierarchies are more pronounced. The Farnese and Massimo palaces in Rome (sixteenth century) are buildings whose facades rather deftly hide what a modern sensibility interprets as spatial discrepancies between internal void and the exterior wall. The facade of the Palazzo Farnese veils the double-volume grand Salone at the upper left of the facade. For his Palazzo Massimo, Baldassare Peruzzi had to choose between centering the grand room on the facade or on the courtyard; the two do not line up. He opted for the courtyard (Figure 1 ), a relationship that was more immediate because it was made perceptible via the promenade of the building. Also, some of the windows on the first attic floor light and ventilate the upper reaches of the grand salone, while others light smaller rooms above. Architects and architecture students who study the drawings of this masterpiece are the only persons who are ever aware of any inconsistency of internal-external alignment. They are also the only ones who care.

In these two palaces, the tension between the inside and the outside poses a dilemma for the

"The Outside Is the Result of an Inside" 26

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modernist architect. Confronted with a similar situa- tion deriving from contemporary functional distribution, the modernist would most often allow the inside to determine the outside.

Such aesthetic predilections do not originate with the International Style, however. Nineteenth-

century English architects and theorists began to

promote the idea that interior volume should make its way out to the facade and the massing of a

building. George Hersey sketched this development in his book, High Victorian Gothic, coining the

phrase, Automatic Functional Picturesque to describe the theory of E.B. Lamb, who argued, "by their size and importance, and the situation and decoration of the windows and doors, the principal rooms will sufficiently indicate their uses."28 Hersey further expanded the idea by examining the work of William White, noting White's, "emphasis on func- tional expression through volumes rather than facade details."29 But perhaps Hersey's most telling example is that of G.E. Street, the famous Victorian architect and theorist. Hersey quotes Street in this

regard twice, first in a diatribe against a particular building in Oxford, where, "from the exterior it is difficult if not impossible to obtain an idea of what the interior arrangement is, or what may be the

object of the building."30 Later in his career, in his

Royal Academy lectures of 1881, Street amplified this sentiment: "The construction of the exterior should, as far as possible, show the arrangement of the interior, and you ought at once to know some-

thing about the positions of the floors, the shape of the roofs, and the sizes and uses of the principal rooms, merely by examining the exterior of the

building."31 Coming from a Gothic Revival architect, this

sentiment sounds almost anachronistic to the twenty-first-century observer, as it very closely resembles the instruction given architecture students by teachers steeped in the theories of Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. However, although contemporary academic design studios often follow such prescriptions, few modernist masters wrote

about it. Van Doesburg seemed to have parroted Le Corbusier's dictum verbatim in his lectures: "The interior ought to determine the shape of the exte- rior."32 Le Corbusier himself sent out conflicting signals. In Towards a New Architecture, he first states that "mass and surface are determined by the

plan. The plan is the generator."33 Later he argues that "a mass is enveloped in its surface, a surface which is divided up according to the directing and

generating lines of the mass; and this gives the mass its individuality."34

Program and space have yet another dimension in relation to facade design, and a comparison between two projects by Le Corbusier may serve to further elucidate the relationship of program as interior volume to the exterior surface. In the Ozen- fant Studio of 1923, the street facades display the internal spaces fairly explicitly. The studio at the top of the house is covered by a huge window wall, and smaller-scaled ribbon windows cover the rooms below. Le Corbusier could justify his giant window as required to properly light a painting studio, but the spatial expression is also purposeful.

On both the front and rear facades of Le Corbusier's Villa Stein at Garches, no such tele-

graphing of internal volume occurs. The ribbon windows that spread out across the front of the

piano nobile are the same as those of the less

important bedroom floor above; the kitchen on the left receives the same window treatment as the

library in the center and the stair hall on the right. The double height of the entry hall is unexpressed. The facade of the Villa Stein at Garches is unmis-

takably telling us something very different about its internal contents from the Ozenfant Studio; it refers

back, via its facade parti if not its style, to the tradition of the piano nobile houses of the Italian Renaissance and the French baroque. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, in their seminal essay, "Trans-

parency, Literal and Phenomenal," commented on this condition at the Villa Stein at Garches.

Describing the space behind the rear facade (a condition similar to that in the front), they write,

"on first examination this space appears to be an almost flat contradiction of the facade; particularly on the principal floor, the volume revealed is almost

directly opposite to that which we might have antic-

ipated. Thus the glazing of the garden facade might have suggested the presence of a single large room behind it."35

Of course, it is the "second examination," as it were, that led Rowe and Slutzky to their conclu- sions. "First examination" is what critics would have seen in the 1950s (when the article was written) - that is, an interior projected onto the facade. In other words, Rowe and Slutzky were tacitly criti-

cizing the assumption concerning inside-outside

relationships. By contrast, the architects of the seventeenth

and early eighteenth centuries - like Peruzzi before them - did not see fit to express what they would have considered the banalities of individual rooms on the exteriors of their buildings. Rather, they resolved a regularized repetitive exterior to an inte- rior of great variations in room size, scale, and

proportion. Post-Renaissance social life, both aristo- cratic and bourgeois, was ever so much more

complex than that of the Renaissance, and room

shapes, sizes, and functions began to proliferate in the seventeenth century.36 By the end of the seven- teenth century, the arrangement of space for

increasingly specific uses (the art of distribution in French) was beginning to catch up with composition as a primary activity in the architectural design process.37 We see this process in the theories and

practice of J.F. Blondel, an architect at the forefront of the development of modern distribution and hier-

archy in the plan. To Blondel (see Figure 2), the facade did not express this hierarchy directly or

volumetrically, but rather through scale and regu- larity. As Richard Etlin has explained,

Blondel had to manipulate two distinct systems of organization which had to be coordinated together at the same time that each satisfied different and sometimes opposing

27 SCHUMACHER

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demands.... The difficulty resided in combining a facade with regularly spaced windows all the same size with correctly proportioned rooms of different dimensions.38

The results of Blondel's design process are anathema to a modernist sensibility. For instance, the fact that the same-size windows often light and ventilate both closets and public rooms is obviously a condition that a twentieth-century functionalist would not countenance.

As the variety of room and program types proliferated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some architects sought to reconcile

regular exteriors, or at least exteriors not generated by interior arrangement, with irregular interiors. For picturesque buildings, however, there was no perceived problem to be resolved because the same romanticism that savored picturesque images of a classical past also appreciated medieval asymmetry and haphazardness, in which a combination of rooms of wildly different contour could easily be accommodated. But, although the picturesque tradi- tion made it easier for individual rooms to assert themselves, this did not mean that the various bulges, wings, pavilions, and protuberances regularly corresponded to the specific spaces behind. Some- times they did, and sometimes they did not.

During the "heroic period" of the Modern movement (1920-1940), however, it was the academic writers who gave substance to these ideas; the directive saturates the academic treatises of the early twentieth century, books written to promote neomedieval and Neo-Renaissance styles and methods, not modernism.

Howard Robertson explained his theory of inside-outside relationships in The Principles of Architectural Composition (1924):

The portion of the elevation corresponding with some principal element of the plan will be appropriately richer in treatment and in general

"The Outside Is the Result of an Inside" 28

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accentuation. More simply and monotonously treated portions will correspond with internal corridors and connecting links of the plan, and minor emphasis will convey the presence of

secondary, but nevertheless important, plan elements.39

Two years later, Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis maintained that "the plan determines many of the elements essential to the composition which cannot be fixed by the elevations or facades, and to which the latter must conform."40

Other examples proliferate. Arthur Stratton, in Elements of Form & Design in Classic Architecture (1925) had a similar opinion: "In all good design the

plan finds expression externally, and features subor- dinate to the general outline of a building are in direct relation to the plan."41 As practical applica- tions within neoclassic and Neo-Gothic practice, however, the most important feature of plan- elevation correspondence concerned the massing of dominant and subordinate elements, which were

only remotely related to interior spaces. The almost axiomatic centrality of major rooms roughly corre-

sponded to the almost axiomatic centrality of the elevations and masses.

Some of the academic theorists of the early twentieth century exhibited remarkable balance

regarding the relationship of the interior and the exterior. Realizing that only certain aspects of inte- rior organization and structure would necessarily make themselves felt on the facade, Robertson made a case for accommodation (but hardly a

compromise):

[S]ince we are dealing with solids, the internal forms, of which the elevations are merely the

envelope, are bound to find some expression on the exterior. An analogy is that between the

covering of the body and its internal structure and organs, which, while not expressed in detail on the exterior, dictate nevertheless the

general contours of the human form.42

Robertson had a caveat, however. He held that too close an inside-outside correspondence might wreck an otherwise good facade: "Expression of

plan in elevation may be carried to absurd lengths. It is a common failing, for instance, to stress unduly the height of a hall which is an important plan element, in order to make its location more evident.... The mere presence of importance of bulk and position cannot always be directly indi- cated in facade."43

A.E. Richardson and Hector Corfiato - two rather late apologists for classical architecture (1 940s) - contended, "as external statements of interior arrangements alone are insufficient to

provide aesthetic effects, it is obvious that other aids are required."44

By the mid-twentieth century, the idea that the internal spaces of buildings ought to provide the norm of external expression - and that any vari- ation from this norm is understandable and

justifiable only as an ironic deviation from the norm - was tacitly accepted by modern architects.45 The pervasiveness of the doctrine is apparent in the

argument set forth in a polemical text of the early 1980s: The Decorated Diagram, by Klaus Herdeg.46 Herdeg faults Gropius's followers at Harvard for not

following the Bauhaus principles closely enough and introduces his case with a comparison of Le Corbu- sier's Errazuris House in Chile (1930) (Figure 3) and Marcel Breuer's "Exhibition House" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, of 1949 (Figure 4). Herdeg praises Le Corbusier's house and criticizes Breuer's, and his primary gambit of criticism is that, although both houses have "butterfly" roofs, the roof covering Le Corbusier's house displays a tighter relationship to the interior spaces than does Breuer's. "In the Errazuris house ... the V-shaped roof interlocks with and thus enhances the meaning of several other aspects of the house."47 In con- trast, the valley of the butterfly roof in Breuer's house, "instead of being placed in a spatially and symbolically meaningful position ... happens to coincide with the wall between the bathroom and utility room."48 Herdeg presses his case with words

like "direct conflict" and "discrepancy."49 He continues:

In the bulletin which the museum published on the occasion of the house's exhibition we are told that the double-story package of the

garage and "parents' apartment" is design to be added at a later stage .... Yet however

plausible this design decision may be from a

diagrammatic and practical viewpoint, it becomes utterly implausible when the form of the volume of the house is considered. Surely one would expect an addition to be joined where the two roof slopes meet, rather than made into an arbitrary extension of one of the other of the butterfly wings.

Although Herdeg is not describing specifically a facade issue, the inside-outside correspondence is there, nonetheless. Buildings like the MOMA Exhibi- tion House, Herdeg avers, "devalue what were the once rigorous standards of architecture."50 Herdeg finishes off his argument with another example from Le Corbusier: the Besnos House, Vaucresson (1922). Here, Herdeg explains away the lack of correspon- dence between space and facade by explaining that Le Corbusier was being ironic: "[the] outside having little correspondence with what lies behind it in total opposition to the modern movement belief that the exterior of a building should reflect its interior."51 Again, Herdeg compares Le Corbusier to more-recent architects, this time Ulrich Franzen and Philip Johnson, concluding that their "false-fronts" on Fifth Avenue in New York are to be abjured because they lack the sophisticated irony displayed at Vaucresson.52

Space, Independent of Matter As American architectural education evolved from Ecole des Beaux-Arts style to "Bauhaus" style, it retained more than just the French teaching vocab- ulary. The traditional concept of inside-outside correspondence finds its latter-day paradigm in the Bauhaus-inspired student projects of the post-

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3. Le Corbusier, Errazuris house, Chile, 1930, section (Le Corbusier, Oeuvre compl&te, 7929-34). 4. Marcel Breuer, MoMa House, 1949, New York (from Herdeg, The Decoroted Diagram).

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World War II era. These highly abstract projects are sometimes referred to as the "exploded cube." The

exploded cube project is composed of consistently structured elements, either with a limited envelope or as a picturesque assembly, like drawers being pushed and pulled in and out on the x, y, and z axes of a kind of all-sided dresser. Students in schools of architecture across the U.S. were given exploded-cube projects in elementary design studio courses. One of the rules of the game was to main- tain volumetric correspondence between inside and outside; no volume could be added or removed, a kind of "conservation of space."

Only when "space" could be distinguished by modern architects as independent of structure could the exploded cube have been developed. "Space," in the general (singular) sense as a positive, inde-

pendent, and abstract essence is the final aspect of this argument. Architects are often called molders of

space, but the term space was not always an essen- tial word for architects. Peter Collins suggested that

"space," before the turn of the twentieth century, was itself an idea subsumed within structure:

Whereas the Rationalists, such as Violet-le- Duc, could conceive only of the structure of churches as providing the archetype for a new

way of building, Wright took the space, and it is this that distinguishes Wright from the other

great architects of his generation .... Hence-

forth, space was regarded as the twin partner with structure in the creation of architectural

composition.53

Wright confirmed that to him space was some-

thing independent; writing many years later, he

argued for "the essential of the architectural change from box to free plan and the new reality that is space instead of matter."54 So strong is the modern notion of the independence of "space" that some

recent critics have interpreted an interest in abstract

space to architects going back to the Renaissance.55 For modern architects committed to the

expression of program function and volume, space could now operate in the service of that function and seep to the outside of the building. Premodern facade hierarchy had derived from ideas of perma- nence, the demands of masonry construction, and the spanning of great distances. Long spans meant thick walls, buttresses, or side aisles. The exterior surfaces of masonry buildings, when they registered anything of the internal organization, registered the

struggle to create the clear span. With the advent of the new materials and

structural techniques all this changed. It was now

possible to span virtually any distance with a flat ceiling and enclose the volume with thin membranes. No longer did the articulated pieces of construction have to intervene to give concrete form to the expressive intent; construction could be abstracted.

Conclusion Whereas for Rowe and Slutzky, and later Herdeg, Le Corbusier represents the dissenting attitude

concerning inside-outside correlations, to most modernists he is responsible for having created the common wisdom that the norm of facade expression should be internal volume. Perhaps that is because he was one of the few architects to write about it. Moreover, his distinction between free facade and ribbon window (two of his five points for the "new architecture") would seem to support this interpre- tation. Both of these elements are made possible by the separation of structure and enclosure, itself made possible by the reinforced concrete or steel frame, and both inventions openly indicate the exis- tence of the frame behind, whatever surface is hung on it. The ribbon window announces the existence of the structural frame by the visible absence of

vertical support on the exterior. The free facade, more inchoate and abstract, might seem to imply some other expressive intent. But Le Corbusier described both elements in precisely the same manner in the Oeuvre Complete: "The windows can ... run from edge to edge."56 For Le Corbusier, the plasticity of the facade is a more general adumbra- tion of the idea of the frame.

Bruno Zevi insisted on a literal freedom for the free facade and asked architects to abjure any facade regularity (see Figure 5):

There is no reason why every window in a

building should be just like the next one and not have a character of its own. Once you get rid of the tyranny of classicism, windows will be all the more effective if they are different and can convey a host of messages. Classicism breaks the facade into vertical and horizontal sections. But eliminating the juxtaposition and superimposition of modules will make the facade whole again.57

Zevi made no pretense of a functionalist argu- ment. His interest in having all the windows different was not that they might light and ventilate each room perfectly, but that they may convey some message about the nature of modernism as compared to classicism. His windows are all different precisely because they couldn't be all different in a classical building. That so many architects have taken Le Corbusier's metaphor literally is perhaps a testament to the seductiveness of the inside- outside continuum, and the seductiveness of Van Doesburg's abstraction. It is a highly particularized yet omnipresent version of the idea that architec- ture should be like the human body, as offered by a recent magazine ad for a high-fiber cereal: "If you take care of the inside, the inside takes care of the outside."

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5. Bruno Zevi, facade and window studies (from The Language of Modern Architecture).

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Notes 1. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1927), p. 167. 2. H.R. Hitchcock, Painting Towards Architecture (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948), p. 11. 3. J.W. Goethe, "Of German Architecture," from Goethe's Werke (Weimar, 1896, 1 Abth., xxxvii), pp. 127 ff. 4. John Summerson, "A Case for the Theory of Modern Architecture," RIBA Journal (June 1957): 309. 5. Ibid. 6. R. Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York:

Praeger, 1960), p. 20. 7. R. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 31. 8. See P. Collins, Changing Ideals in Modem Architecture (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1978). 9. Marc-Antoine Laugier, trans., An Essay on Architecture [1753] (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977). 10. G. Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten (Frankfurt: Verlag fur Kunst on Wissenschaft, 1860). 11. Joseph Rykwert, "Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Style," in D. Porphyrios, ed., Architectural Design Profile: On the Methodology of Architectural History (London: Architectural Design, 1981), p. 12. 12. G. Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 102. 13. Ibid. 14. Rosemarie Bletter, "Gottfried Semper," entry in the MacMillan Ency- clopedia of Architects, vol. 4 (New York: MacMillan, 1982), p. 27. 15. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, in I. Rowland and TN. Howe, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 34. 16. Ibid. 17. G. Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture, p. 103. 18. G. Semper, "Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten oder pradtische Aesthetik," vol. 1, p. 7, quoted and translated in J.

Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), p. 30. 19. Theo Van Doesburg, "Towards a Plastic Architecture," in de Stijl, VI, 6/7, 78-83, reprinted in H.L.C. Jaffe, de Stijl (New York: Abrams, 1971), p. 189.

20. R. Etlin, Symbolic Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 49. 21. R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1977), p. 204. 22. Van Doesburg, "Towards a Plastic Architecture," reprint, p. 187. 23. P. Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, p. 274. 24. Nikolaus Pevsner, Outline of European Architecture (London: Pelikan, 1958), p. 285. 25. H.R. Hitchcock and P. Johnson, The International Style (New York: Norton), pp. 40-49. 26. G.C. Argan, The Renaissance City (New York: Braziller, 1969), p. 30. 27. See T Schumacher, "Palladio Variations," The Cornell Journal of Architecture, III (1987): pp. 12-29. See, also, C. Rowe and R. Slutzky, "Transparency, Literal and Phenomenal," Perspecta 8 (1958): 45-54. 28. George Hersey, High Victorian Gothic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 38. 29. Ibid, p. 40. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 43. 32. Van Doesburg, "The Will to Style: The Reconstruction of Life, Art, and Technology" (Text of a lecture given at Jena, Weimar, and Berlin), reprinted in H.L.C. Jaffe, de Stijl (New York: Abrams, 1970), p. 160. 33. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 28. 34. Ibid., p. 36. 35. Rowe and Slutzky, "Transparency, Literal and Phenomenal." 36. See Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990). 37. See Michael Dennis, Court and Garden (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986). 38. Richard Etlin, "Les Dedans: J.F Blondel and the System of the Home," Gazette des Beaux Arts (April, 1978): 140. 39. Howard Robertson, The Principles of Architectural Composition (London: The Architectural Press, 1924), p. 133. 40. N.C. Curtis, Architectural Composition (Cleveland: J.H. Jansen, 1926), p. 117. 41. A. Stratton, Elements of Form and Design in Classic Architecture (London: Studio Editions, 1925), p. 129. 42. Robertson, The Principles of Architectural Composition, p. 127. This is the same publisher and the same year of the publication in English of Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture.

43. Ibid, pp. 137-138. 44. A.E. Richardson and H.O. Corfiato, Design in Civil Architecture, vol. 7, Elevational Treatments (London: The English Universities Press, 1948), p. 18. 45. In the early 1980s, Beaux-Arts-trained architect Jean Paul Carlhian expressed disdain for the U.S. Supreme Court building because the courtroom wasn't displayed on the exterior. He proposed building a new one. (Conversations with the author and other participants of a Char- rette for Urban Design in Washington, National Building Museum, 1981.) 46. Klaus Herdeg, The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983). 47. Ibid., p. 6. 48. Ibid., p. 10. 49. Ibid., p. 11. Surely, only one schooled in the precepts I am

describing here would see this as a problem. 50. Ibid., p. 12. 51. Ibid., p. 18. 52. Ibid., pp. 20-24. 53. Collins, Changing Ideals in Modem Architecture, p. 71. 54. Wright, "Destruction of the Box," from an address to the Junior Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, 1952, reprinted in E. Kaufman and B. Raeburn, Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 285. 55. Arnaldo Bruschi, in his assessment of Bramante, claimed for the Renaissance architect the capacity to conceive of "space in itself, in the

shape of a void thought of as having a three-dimensional quality of its own: emptiness not conditioned by the shape of the walls around it, but on the contrary, conditioning them" (Bruschi, Bramante, London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 74. It is difficult to say whether this is an instance of a modern critic anachronistically ascribing a quality to a long-dead architect, or a case of an architect, Bramenti, who invented something neither he nor his contemporaries were able to put into words. 56. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, 1910-29 (Zurich: Les Editions d'Architecture, 1964), p. 128. 57. B. Zevi, The Modem Language of Architecture (Seattle: University Washington Press, 1978), p. 8.

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