Modern Urbanism in Puerto Rico: from abstract doctrines to concrete landscapes

Andrs Mignucci FAIA

Modern Urbanism in Puerto Rico: from abstract doctrines to concrete landscapes

Andrs Mignucci FAIA

In the late 1920s, three seemingly unrelated events would play a pivotal role in shaping the urban form of Puerto Ricos cities and towns, particu-larly its capital city, San Juan.

In June 1928, the Congrs Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne, CIAM, was formed as an avant guard international organization of archi-tects. Led by Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, and founded in Hlne de Mandrots Chateau La Sarraz in Switzerland, CIAM dominated the architecture and urbanism discourse worldwide for the next 30 years, spreading the principles of the Modern Movement and the advancement of architecture as a social art.

In September of the same year, 1928, San Felipe, a category 5 hurri-cane, devastated the island of Puerto Rico. With winds of over 200 mph, San Felipe diagonally crossed the length of the island, leaving over 300 dead, thousands without home, major damage to the sugarcane planta-tions, and an almost complete loss of the years coffee crop. With 85 million dollars in reported losses, San Felipe stroke a mortal blow to the islands already poor and fragile economy.

In October of the following year, 1929, the crash of the Stock Market in Wall Street marked the beginning of the Great Depression and, with it, the biggest financial crisis of the 20th century, affecting the economies of all the Western Industrialized countries until the onset of World War II.

These events triggered a number of policies, programs, as well as official and unofficial doctrines, local and foreign, which shaped the architectural landscape of the island. Despite its size, geographical location, and ap-

parent detachment from world currents, these policies formed the frame-work over which Puerto Ricos built environment developed.

Today, San Juan is a fragmented city in need of a paradigm shift in order to restructure its disjointed urban fabric. Any such effort has to stem from an understanding of the citys, and for that matter Puerto Ricos, urban history. While there have been many studies centering on Old San Juan and its patrimonial urban form, the relatively recent history of modern metropolitan San Juan is still a fertile territory for academic research. This article outlines the basic milestones of this history linking them to some of the international and national currents and forces that shaped its course.

BackgroundThe history of urban form in Puerto Rico is intrinsically tied to housing policies and development trends by the public and private sector. While civic buildings, as well as commercial institutions and workplaces, con-stitute important components of the city fabric, it is the housing stock that

Group photo from first CIAM meeting at La Sarraz, 1928.

People gathering outside the New York Stock Exchange in Wall Street, October 1929. Bettman/Corbis.

Aerial photo of Old San Juan show-ing La Perla outside the city walls. 1952. ICP.

fundamentally defines a citys character, morphology, and urban struc-ture.

At the turn of the 20th century San Juan was primarily a compact city, still centered around the historic walled city founded by the Spanish in 1521. Outside the city walls, Puerta de Tierra, Santurce, and Ro Pie-dras developed as urban settlements along the old carretera central, later renamed after Ponce de Len. San Juans geographical character, defined by strips of land intertwined with bodies of water, limited San Juans expansion promoting a linear growth pattern along this principal road. The first streetcar suburb, El Condado, was developed in 1906 by the Behn brothers. A few years earlier in 1903, they had acquired the rights of the old steam trolley which they had converted to electric power. Soon El Condado became the fashionable upper class district. After the first World War, a new wave of suburban expansion flourished. Barrio Obrero, one of Puerto Ricos first workers development was built in 1921. New developments, such as Miramar and Floral Park, were developed in cattle grazing lands between San Juan and Ro Piedras.

In parallel, a massive influx of peasant workers moved from the country-side to the city in search of new opportunities and better living conditions. Building their houses along the margins of the city edge and the water bodies, shanty towns developed with houses built of wood, zinc and card-board. By the 1920s shanty towns occupied the coastal edge of Old San Juan to the north (La Perla), Puerta de Tierra to the south (Miranda), and the edge of Santurce and Hato Rey along the Cao de Martn Pea (El Fanguito, Buenos Aires, Cantera). Lacking any basic infrastructure, the increased density and exponential growth of these settlements resulted in compromised health and sanitary conditions, malnutrition, and ex-treme poverty. Suffering from political neglect, the physical state of these communities only made evident the absence of any structured policy with which to deal with increasing problem of urban housing conditions.

CIAM and the ExistenzminimumCIAM was founded in June 1928, as an instrument of propaganda to advance the cause of the new architecture being developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. As an organization CIAM intended to define the basis of this new architecture and to promote it to potential public and private clients and the public at large. Their first meeting at La Sarraz, was organized in Paris by Le Corbusier and Gabriel Guvrkian, and in Zurich by Sigfried Giedion and members of the Swiss Werkbund led by Hans Schmidt.

The day the Stock Market Crash, Black Thursday, 29 October 1929, co-incided with the opening of CIAMs second congress in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. The congress was led by the Swiss members of CIAM, Schmidt and Steiger, and the German Ernst May. May had worked with Garden City planner Raymond Unwin. Already in 1926, Walter Gropius and Ernst May had lobbied for obtaining a subsidy from the German Government to develop housing settlements as testing grounds for stan-dardization and rationalization in housing. In the new Frankfurt, the basic planning strategy was related to Raymond Unwins concept of the satellite garden suburbs. Mays innovation was directed at new European cities like Frankfurt, which were typically extended by building new perimeter courtyard housing blocks along existing streets. Mays new strategy, not unlike the Behn brothers in Puerto Rico, was to build new settlements on open and inexpensive land, linking them back to the old center through an expansion of the streetcar system while providing large green areas in between.

The architects of Germanys Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, were eager to build as much cost-effective housing as possible, partly to address Germanys postwar housing crisis, and partly to fulfill the prom-ise of Article 155 of the 1919 Weimar Constitution, which provided for a healthy dwelling for all Germans. This phrase drove the technical defini-tion of Existenzminimum (the minimum subsistence dwelling) in terms of minimally-acceptable floor space, density, fresh air, access to green space, and access to transit.

The second congress was dominated by the social programs of the Ger-man architects centering around the idea of the minimum dwelling unit as well as the urbanistic models for the expansion of the European city. The term Functionalism also began to be used to denote the rather severe, nothing superfluous, optic of the New Objectivity, being used as early as 1925 by Adolf Behne in his book Der Moderne Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building).

Also in 1925, Le Corbusier had been elaborating on his Plan Voisin as part of an urban study for the Redressement Franais. He had expressed his dislike for the Garden City Movement, proposing instead the idea of tall skyscraper housing structures organized with large expanses of green open space in between. He advocated that the density of Central Paris should be quadrupled with 90% of the space free for vegetation. He described himself as an apolitical technocrat seeking only to apply the lessons of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford to the design of

Cover of Die Wohnung fr das Exis-tenzminimum (1930). NAi Archives.

Model. Plan Voisin, Le Corbusier. 1925.

Trolley System, ca. 1910, El Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Allen Morrison Collection.

housing and cities.

CIAMs second congress reflected an ideological schism between the French on one side, and the German, Swiss and Dutch groups on the other. On the one hand there was Le Corbusiers wish to accommodate architecture to the demands of large scale industrial capitalism versus the Dutch, German and Swiss effort to use the new technological ad-vances as a means to construct a new collectivist society.

These opposing forces, the pressures of capitalist development and the social mission of the State, would find echo both in America and in Puer-to Rico and to a great extent define the principal urban policies of the following decades.

Puerto Rico and the New DealIn America, three years later, the United States presidential elections of 1932 were won by the Democratic Party led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The United States was submerged in a deep economic crisis. In 1933, in response to the Great Depression, newly elected President Roosevelt enacted a series of programs focusing on relief, recovery and reform of the American economy. The 3 Rs guiding Roosevelts New Deal centered on relief for the unemployed and poor, recovery of the economy, and reform of the financial system. These programs included the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Social Security Act, and new programs to aid tenant farmers. One of these programs was a newly created program, The Federal Housing Administration, generally known as FHA. The program provided mortgage insurance for single and mul-

tifamily family housing on loans made by FHA-approved lenders. FHA insured mortgages would become a primary force behind the urbaniza-tion of Puerto Rico in the following decades.

Since the Spanish American War of 1898, the governor of Puerto Rico was appointed by the President of the United States, usually as a reward for political services or a distinguished career on behalf of the American government or its military. In 1933, Roosevelt appointed General Blanton Winship as Governor of the island following the governorship of Robert Gore, a businessman with little political experience. Although appointed by Roosevelt, Winship, a conservative, was at odds with the New Deals liberal policies. Both Governors were seen in Puerto Rico as incompetent and reactionary.

In the 1932 Puerto Rican elections, Luis Muoz Marin, the idealist young son of statesman Luis Muoz Rivera, was elected to the Puerto Rican Senate on the Liberal Party ticket. Muoz Marin had taken over the direc-tion of his fathers newspaper La Democracia and was an advocate of in-dependence with broad ideas on social reform. Despite the partys loss, Muoz Marns election to the Senate and his directorship of La Democ-racia, would give him a powerful platform with which to lobby in Wash-ington on behalf of Puerto Rico. Soon after the elections, Ruby Black, a reporter and friend of Munoz and correspondent of La Democracia in Washington, arranged a meeting between him and Eleanor Roosevelt. Muoz Marn wanted her to examine Puerto Ricos problems personally and convinced her to travel to the island. Puerto Rico was suffering the effects of the Great Depression compounded by the devastation caused

Time Magazine covers. from left to right: Eleanor Roosevelt (1933), Rex-ford Guy Tugwell (1934), Luis Muoz Marn (1949), Time Archive.

Above, Puerto Rican rural house types, 1940s.

Left, Thatched house with tobacco leave siding. ca. 1950.

Middle, Wood and zinc plank house. ca. 1949. Photo. Maynard Good.

Right, concrete house built by the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Adminis-tration. ca. 1944. photo: Dr. H. Claire Amstutz.

Thomas Lehman Collection.

not only by San Felipe in 1928, but also by follow up hurricanes San Ni-cols in 1931 and San Ciprin in 1932. San Ciprin alone left 257 dead and over 40 million dollars in losses.

In March 1934, Roosevelt was received in San Juan. Accompanying Mrs. Roosevelt was Rexford Guy Tugwell, Undersecretary of Agriculture, member of Roosevelts Brain Trust, and one of his closest advisors. Mu-oz took them to El Fanguito, one of San Juans poorest slums which reflected not only extreme poverty but also the impact and devastation of the hurricanes. Mrs. Roosevelt also visited La Perla another of San Juans shanty towns. The caption in one of the American newspapers read:

Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, wife of the President, standing at the edge of a pool of dirty water swarming with flies in the center of La Perla, a street in San Juan. The reporters article continues - During her in-spection trip through this section of town, Mrs. Roosevelt came upon this pool and asked the photographer to take a picture of it, to show really what it is like. During her shocking journey in squalor and dis-ease, the First Lady was followed by members of the populace clad in rags, naked children and barking dogs. She was deeply touched by the desolate scene and conferred with local welfare workers regarding possible remedies.

The publication of the images from the visit by newspapers in Puerto Rico and the United States outraged former American appointed gover-nors that ruled over the island, as well as the conservative incumbent.

Following his wifes report, President Roosevelt included Puerto Rico in the New Deal Programs. This put in motion an array of policies and strategies designed to aid and assist in the reconstruction of Puerto Ri-cos economy. One of these was the Plan Chardn directed by Carlos Chardn and orchestrated by Muoz Marn from the Senate, and the US Department of Agriculture in Washington.

The following year Roosevelt created two new programs. The first was the Resettlement Administration (RA) appointing advisor Rexford Guy Tugwell as its director. The RA, a Tugwell brainchild, was structured to relocate struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government. The new organization had four divisions: Rural Rehabilitation, Rural Resettlement, Land Utilization, and Suburban Re-settlement. One of the RAs projects was the Green Towns Program, a direct attempt by president Franklin Delano Roosevelts New Deal ad-ministration to address the problem of deteriorating urban conditions. The idea was to create better living environments in rural and suburban areas for the urban poor and working classes. The program produced three new communities, Greenbelt, Maryland, Greenhills, Ohio, and Greendale, Wisconsin.

The second was the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA). Established in the Department of the Interior in May 1935, the program was intended, according to a letter by President Roosevelt, not merely to provide immediate relief, but to direct the permanent reconstruction for the Island. Roosevelt had first extended federal aid to Puerto Rico through the creation of the Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration

above, El Fanguito ca. 1946. Gen-eral view and street scene. Photo. Clayton Gingerich. Thomas Lehman Collection.

left, El Falansterio Site Plan, 1935. DTOP.

right, El Falansterio, view of interior courtyard, ca. 1967. CRUV.

Eleanor Roosevelt Touring Poor Area of San Juan, March 15, 1934. Collec-tion ranklin D. Roosevelt Library Pub-lic Domain Photographs, 1882 - 1962. National Archives and Records Ad-ministration. Bettman/Corbis.

(PRERA). The PRERA was primarily focused on food supplies and as-sistance on health issues. The PRRA in contrast, pointed at the diversi-fication of agricultural production, the production of cheap and available electric power, better roads, reforestation, and adequate housing as es-sential goals of the Administrations program.

Three projects were developed in 1937 as part of the New Deal Pro-gram- the Casero Mirapalmeras in Santurce, The Falansterio in Puerta de Tierra, and the Urbanizacin Eleanor Roosevelt in Hato Rey. Mira-palmeras consisted of 131 units in 44 rowhouse buildings along with five commercial parcels.

El Falansterio, the Phalanstery, is a 216-unit collective housing project. Eighteen 3-story concrete modules house apartment dwellings organized around a collective courtyard. Tenement Group A, as it was originally known, was developed by the PRRAs Slum Clearance Division. It was originally intended to relocate families from the La Perla and Miranda slums in San Juan and Puerta de Tierra. Finally only families from Miran-da were relocated.

The Urbanizacin Eleanor Roosevelt was a residential subdivision also developed by the PRRAs Slum Clearance Division. It was sited The gen-eral plan consisted of 2,300 dwellings as well as parcels dedicated to commercial and civic use projected for 16,000 residents. The plan follow-ing Garden City layout principles included a central plaza as well as sport and recreational areas. It included five different single-family unit models, three duplex house models and thirty-two row house units. Both projects were built in 1937 and designed by Jorge Ramirez de Arellano, follow-ing the Art Deco-Moderne style typical of the late 1930s. While these are perceived as appropriately scaled developments, both at the building and the collective scale, the authorities understood that the increment of development was not big enough to attend the massive challenge of the slums. A larger scale move would have to be implemented.

The Functional City and the Separation of FunctionsIn Europe, the Great Depression had a disastrous effect on the New Building, primarily because of Germanys financial dependence on the USA. Many estates and projects planned in Frankfurt and Berlin were postponed indefinitely. The architectural profession became politically po-larized, symbolized by the firing in 1930 of the Bauhaus director Hannes Meyerwho had stressed, with his collaborators Ludwig Hilberseimer and Mart Stam, the importance of working class and collective housing

to be replaced by Mies van der Rohe, who had gained a reputation as a purveyor of luxury to the rich, and proceeded to turn the Bauhaus into a private school.

By this time Schmidt, Stam, May, and Meyer, the forces behind the Swiss Werkbund and the German Ring, formed an architects brigade to plan new cities as part of the first Soviet 5-year Plan. This left an open field for Le Corbusier to control the Congress.

The fourth CIAM meeting in 1933 was held onboard ship, the SS Patris II, which sailed from Marseilles to Athens. The theme of the Congress, The Functional City, broadened further CIAMs scope from architecture into urban planning. Based on an analysis of thirty-three cities, CIAM proposed that the social problems faced by cities could be resolved by a strict functional segregation, and the distribution of the population into tall apartment blocks at widely spaced intervals. These proceedings, later published by Le Corbusier in 1943 as the Athens Charter, established the doctrine that would shape modern urbanism for the following decades. These points of doctrine were based on the idea of a separation of func-tions whereby the city fabric would be zoned according to four major use categories: dwelling, work, leisure, and circulation.

The Functional City was CIAMs most significant theoretical approach. Le Corbusier argued in his opening statement at the Congress that the projects shown in the Congress represented a biology of the world. Le Corbusier argued that CIAMs task was to create forms, human truths and certainties, and to establish a prism to judge them. The goal was to establish urbanistic rules to prescribe to authorities. CIAM had struc-tured and promoted the principles presented in the Athens Charter as a moral imperative to be followed by governments in their policies and architects and planners in their projects. As the war approached influential members of CIAM had to leave their re-spective countries. By 1935, prominent CIAM members Gropius, Moholy Nagy, and Marcel Breuer were already in London. Sert had left Spain. Also in 1935, Le Corbusier visited the United States followed by an ex-tensive tour of South America in 1936. In both trips he lectured widely and meeting with architects, planners, politicians, and officials to discuss the ideas behind the Functional City and its urbanistic principles. Their full impact would have to wait until after the Second World War.

Cover of Athens Charter, First Span-ish edition. A. Mignucci.

Aerial perspective. Urb. Eleanor Roosevelt. San Juan, Puerto Rico. 1934. UPR.

Model Unit Perspective. Urb. Eleanor Roosevelt. San Juan, Puerto Rico. 1934. UPR.

House. Urb. Eleanor Roosevelt. San Juan, Puerto Rico. 2010. A. Mignucci.

Shaping a new governmentIn 1938, Muoz Marn split from the Liberal Party and founded the Popu-lar Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrtico). The partys platform was an ambitious social reform program directed at establishing minimal wages, initiatives to provide safe shelter, food and water throughout the island, a diversified agriculture, and the creation of an industrial-based economy. Muoz Marn concentrated his grassroots political campaign in Puerto Ricos rural areas addressing primarily the jibaros, the Puerto Rican country peasant. In 1940, the Popular Democratic Party won a majority in the Legislature and Muoz Marn was elected the fourth Presi-dent of the Senate.

In tandem, Roosevelt appointed Rexford G. Tugwell as Governor of the Island. Tugwells training as an economist and as a social reformer would set him apart from his predecessors. Muoz and Tugwell would form an extraordinary team in shaping Puerto Ricos future.

With Tugwells support Muoz advanced legislation geared towards ag-ricultural reform, economic recovery and industrialization. This program became known as Operation Bootstrap (Operacin Manos a la Obra). It was coupled with a program of agrarian reform and land redistribution that limited the area that could be held by large sugarcane interests. Dur-ing the first forty years of the 20th century, Puerto Ricos dominant eco-nomic was based on sugarcane by-products. Operation Bootstrap en-ticed investors to transfer or create manufacturing plants, offering them local and federal tax concessions, while maintaining access to American markets free of import duties. The program facilitated a shift from an

agricultural to an industrial economy. It also led to a massive population shift from the countryside to urban areas.

In parallel, Tugwell at the helm of the executive branch and unlike his passive predecessors, launched a massive restructuring of the Puerto Ricos governmental structure establishing the Puerto Rico Electrical Power Authority in 1941, and the Puerto Rico Planning Board, the In-dustrial Development Corporation, the Government Development Bank, and the Public Transportation Authority in 1942. The restructuring was rounded after his tenure as governor with the establishment of the Puerto Rico Water and Sewer Authority in 1945. These new public corporations and government branches put in place both a policy framework as well as an investment program on public infrastructure that would support the urbanization of Puerto Rico in the coming decades.

In 1944 the Popular Democratic Party repeated the political victory of the previous elections. In a transition move toward self-government Presi-dent Truman appointed Puerto Rican agronomist Jess T. Pieiro as governor. In 1947, Congress approved legislation allowing Puerto Ricans to elect their own Governor. The Partido Popular won the 1948 elections by a landslide and Muoz Marn became the first democratically elected Governor of Puerto Rico. In 1951, the United States Government ap-proved Public Law 600, authorizing Puerto Rico to draft its own constitu-tion. The constitution was approved by a popular referendum and ratified by the United States Congress authorizing the creation of the Common-wealth of Puerto Rico.

Expansion of the doctrineIn 1936 Walter Gropius, former director of the Bauhaus and CIAM mem-ber took on the position of Chairman of the department of Architecture at Harvards Graduate School of Design. Soon after In 1941 Sigfried Giedion, CIAMs Secretary General was invited to give a series of lec-tures at Harvard which became the basis for his influential Space Time and Architecture (1941). The presence of both Gropius and Giedion in the United States most prominent Academic institution catapulted CI-AMs doctrine, particularly with respect to housing and urbanism world-wide. The principles of the Modern Movement in architecture gave way to the International Style, in which built form, at the scale of the building or at the scale of the city, would follow the same formal characteristics without regard to culture, geography, local economy and other place spe-cific traits.

Post war housing, Germany. Bad-Drrenberg, Gross-Siedlung, 1930. Bundesarchiv Bild.

Walter Gropius study for high-rise buildings with green spaces (1929). Originally published in Rationelle Bebauungsweisen (1931).

Casero Ponce de Len, Ponce, Puerto Rico 1948. Biblioteca Digital Puertorriquea, UPR.

23 de Enero Housing Complex, Cara-cas, Venezuela. Carlos Raul Villan-ueva, architect (1955-57). UC.

In September 1953, Jos Luis Sert, President of CIAM, succeeded Gro-pius as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. There, he initi-ated the worlds first degree program in urban design. Through an inter-national network of colleagues, faculty, recent graduates, and students the principles of CIAM propagated worldwide. Through his work in South America and particularly his work in Havana Cuba, Sert had an enor-mous influence in Puerto Rico. In 1959, Sert co-authored with Reginald Isaacs one of the reports that lead to the creation of the School of Archi-tecture at the University of Puerto Rico.

The modern imageAfter the creation of the Commonwealth, Muoz Marn and his clos-est advisors, Teodoro Moscoso, Rafael Pic, among others, wanted to project a new image for Puerto Rico. In terms of architectural style, the Neo-classical and the Spanish Revival had been used by the American government as a symbol of its power and authority over its colonial ter-ritories. The Art Deco style, popular in the 1930s, was associated with the Roosevelt PRRA and New Deal Programs. Like his contemporaries, Juscelino Kubitschek in Brasil, Rmulo Betancourt in Venezuela, and Jawaharial Nehru in India, Muoz embraced modern architecture as part of this new image and as a symbol of Puerto Ricos progressive new gov-ernment. Already in 1943, Tugwell had brought Richard Neutra as chief consultant of Puerto Ricos Public Works Committee, spearheading the design of new schools, health centers and district hospitals . The new Supreme Court, the International Airport, by architects Toro y Ferrer, and the buildings for the University of Puerto Rico in Ro Piedras by Henry Klumb, were among many new buildings which exhibited the crisp white

architecture of the modern style. A change of scale 1: the private sector and the residential subdivisionIn 1948, the Everlasting Development Corporation, led by John Darling-ton Long proposed a subdivision project for the Hato Rey area. The Ur-banizacin Puerto Nuevo consisted of 7000 single family detached units directed at low income families with the ability to purchase their home through FHA financing. Up to this point new neighborhoods in San Juan were based on developments were land parcels were structured so each owner would construct their houses as in the case of Baldrich, El Ve-dado, Floral Park and others. With Puerto Nuevo, the track housing sub-division entered the Puerto Rican scene at a massive scale. Centralized recreational facilities consisting primarily of sports fields and community centers formed part of the development. Soon new strip commercial

Puerto Nuevo under construction. 1949. AACUPR.

Casero Aibonito, Puerto Rico 1956.photo: Elmer Lehman. Thomas Leh-man Collection.

malls followed to support the basic necessities of the new housing neigh-borhoods. These however did not constitute elements of an integrated urban fabric. Instead, they followed the CIAM model of the segregation of functions, establishing individual pods for each use connected by a street and road network constructed by the projects developer. Within these large territories, the developer controlled and proposed the street system, the parceling structure, the infrastructure and utilities network, the recreational facilities, as well as the dwelling types.

Soon the State followed establishing planning parameters standardizing the urbanizacin model. This model, basically unaltered, would become the primary driving force of development in the island for the next 50 years.

With the Everalsting Development Corporation, another aspect of devel-opment entered the Puerto Rico scene - the developer as political activ-ist and lobbyist. In order to build Puerto Nuevo, Long, a developer from South Carolina, argued that he needed not only the FHA commitments on the housing mortgages, but tax incentives and substantial variations on the planning regulations. When Muoz Marn became governor he told Long that no such agreement was in place and that the government could not privilege a private developer. In the coming years, Long lobbied intensely in Congress through his States Congressmen to derail Mu-ozs efforts for a new Constitution for Puerto Rico. Mr. Longs attempt of sabotaging the constitutional process proved unsuccessful and left the island soon after.

A change of scale 2: the public sector and the housing projectThe Housing Authority (Autoridad de Hogares) was founded in 1938 to deal with the housing crisis and the slum clearing program. In 1949 the State Government built Casero Las Casas, Puerto Ricos large scale public housing project, along with other public housing projects through-out the island such as the Caserio Ponce de Len in Ponce and the in Aibonito. These were not in the Deco Style, as The Falansterio, but in the more modern, unadorned International Style proposed by CIAM and the New Objectivity proponents.

In 1953, the Autoridad de Hogares developed a large scale social hous-ing project. With 2,610 housing units, Llorens Torres became one of the largest public housing estates in Puerto Rico and the United States. The Housing Authority was restructured as the Puerto Rico Urban Renewal and Housing Corporation (Corporacin de Renovacin Urbana y Vivi-

enda CRUV) in 1957. In the following decades over 300 residenciales were built totaling over with 54,000 low income rental units with another 32,000 units base on Section 8 rental program.

A change of scale 3: from streets to highwaysIn 1956, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Federal-Aid Highway Act. With an original authorization of 25 billion dollars for the construction of 41,000 miles (66,000 km), the Highway Act financed new street and road infrastructure throughout the US. mainland and Puerto Rico.

A significant side effect of the Highway Act was the direct subsidization of the suburban highway system, making commutes between urban centers to suburbs much quicker, furthering the flight of citizens and businesses and divestment from inner cities, and compounding vehicle pollution and excessive petroleum use problems.

In Puerto Rico, the train and the tramway had already succumbed to the lobby of the automobile and petrol interests in the 1940s. With the

Inauguration of the Luis Llorens Torres Public Housing Project. San Juan, Puerto Rico. 1953. Biblioteca Digital Puertorriquea, UPR.

Slum relocation debris, 1954. Biblio-teca Digital Puertorriquea, UPR.

Proposed Circulation Network. San Juan Metropolitan Area. Wilbur Smith & Associates. 1967.

Highway Act, a massive building program during he 1960s reconfigured the urban structure of San Juan, not as a continuous network of streets and urban blocks but a larger scale network of roads, arteries, bypasses and expressways. By 1967, Metropolitan San Juans urban structure had been programmed through the Metropolitan San Juan transportation study prepared by Wilbur Smith and Associates. This study served as the fundamental blueprint for the Department of Transportation and later the Puerto Rico Highway Authorities transportation infrastructure program.

From CIAM 10 to Team 10Already in 1953, when Sert took over as Dean at Harvard, CIAMs doc-trine was being challenged by a younger generation of architects. These young members of CIAM led by Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo Van Eyck, Jaap Bakema, and Georges Candillis argued that housing and urban design models could not be imposed without considerations of

culture, climate and place. Essentially the qualitative attributes of cities had been replaced by quantitative planning processes leaving both the individual as dweller outside of the equation. The other point principal of contention was that a tabula rasa approach to urban renewal and that the abandoning the city centers neglected the citys history and had turned CIAMs policies on urbanism into policies of suburbanism. Sert was well aware of the problems having promoted the idea of The Heart of the City as the theme for the new CIAM VIII Congress planned for Hoddesdon England in 1951.

The future members of Team 10, the British Alison and Peter Smithson, and the Dutch members, Aldo Van Eyck and Jaap Bakema, put forward a new set of concepts as drivers to guide CIAMs efforts. Terms like iden-tity, scales of association, clustering, and mobility came into play. These changes, the departure of Le Corbusier, and the progressive weakening of the CIAMs leadership forced its dissolution in 1959 after CIAMs 10th Congress in Dubrovnik.

Members of Team 10 looked at traditional urban structures such as the courtyard structures in Latin America and the Mediterranean as models for new collective housing and urban settlements. Candillis of the Gamma Group, looked at the Bidonvilles of Algeria and Morocco as references for a new urban structure exhibiting a reciprocity between building form and public space as opposed to the isolated buildings in the landscape advocated by the older generation. The mat building as a building-urban form established a figural approach to public space based on the circula-tion spine as a primary structuring element, the serial disposition of ele-ments, and the mutual definition between building form and open space. Projects such as Van Eycks Orphanage in Amsterdam (1961) and the Free University of Berlin (1963) by Candillis Josic Woods became mod-els and examples of this new building type.

New Models for Puerto RicoIn Puerto Rico, the Public Housing and Urban Renewal Corporation (CRUV) under the leadership of Carlos Alvarado, developed a number of alternative models to the prevailing public housing compounds which, because of their dependence on Federal funding did not depart from HUDs Minimum Property Standards and Design Guidelines. A signifi-cant project was Jan Wamplers proposal for La Puntilla. Trained at Har-vard under Jose Luis Sert, Wampler developed a 5-story mat building composed of buildings with interior courtyards of different sizes and hier-archies. Inspired by the plaza and courtyard structure of Old San Juan,

CIAM Grid illustrating the bidonvilles of Northern Africa. Carrieres Cen-trales, Casablanca. CIAM Gamma Group. 1953.

Orphanage, Amsterdam,1955-1960. Aldo Van Eyck Architect. NAi.

Transportation Study. San Juan Metropolitan Area. Wilbur Smith & Associates. 1967.

Wampler proposed a framework within which residents would complete their unit according to their means and possibilities. The award winning project on self-help proved to costly and intellectually ambitious to be carried out.

A second experimental project, Habitat Puerto Rico, was designed by Moshe Safdie in 1968. Funded by the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), the project was commissioned as a prototype for providing low-cost housing to moderate-income families in Puerto Rico within the budget constraints of the Title 236 moderate-income housing program. The proj-ect was developed in two phases and for two different sites between

Architect Albert Mayer and Carlos Alvarado, Executive Director of the CRUV discussing the La Puntilla proj-ect. 1967. CRUV.

Perspective and model. La Puntilla project. Jan Wampler Architect. 1967. CRUV.

Habitat Puerto Rico. Moshe Safdie Architect. 1968-74. Massing Diagram and Model. Canadian Architecture Collection, McGill University (2001).

Habitat Puerto Rico. Moshe Safdie Architect. 1968-74. Re-used prefabri-cated module, Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Photo: Jorge Rigau. Puerto Rico Ja-Ja bitat. Satyrical caricature. Unknown artist. 1969.

1968 and the time of the projects termination in 1973. Phase I (1968-69) was designed for a twenty-acre lot on a 76-metre / 250-foot high hill in the San Patricio sector of San Juan, and remained only in its planning stage. This first phase foresaw the construction of 600 to 800 hexagonal modules, arranged in clusters of 12, to form 264 dwellings set within a steep slope overlooking San Juan. This topographically steep site was ultimately rejected by the FHA in favor of a second site, known as the Berwind Farm, on which some preliminary construction occurring be-tween March 1969 and 1973. The second scheme was much more mod-est in scale, consisting of only 150-300 pre-fabricated hexagonal units, also clustered in groups of 12. The basic shape of the modules designed was a split-level hexagon aggregating to form a 14-story high-rise tower. Each unit featured a private terrace and garden located on the roof-top of the module below. A prefabrication plant was built on-site and the project started construc-tion in 1969. The intended location of Habitat Puerto Rico on inexpensive and underdeveloped hilly terrain was not an insignificant reason for the projects failure. The steepness of the site posed particular construction problems, which added to the overall cost of the project. Under the pres-sures of the financial crisis, the government withdrew its financial sup-port forcing the developer to abandon the project with only 30 modules produced and in place.

A third, more modest project, was the Elderly Housing Project in Cidra by Jorge del Ro. In both, La Puntilla and Cidra, cultural elements are inte-grated into the fabric where the ideas of clustering, scales of association, and appropriate size are explored.

Elderly Housing Project in Cidra, Puerto Rico. Jorge del Ro, architect, 1977.

These examples however were the exception and their influence did not extend beyond academic or professional circles. In Puerto Rico as in most of the western world, the CIAM model continued to be held as the development model supported not only by the public policies of the gov-ernment but by the forces of the private market as well.

A change of scale 4: the commercial mall and a New Center for San JuanIn 1968 the first indoor mall in Puerto Rico opened in what was now the geographic center of the Municipality of San Juan. Located in central Hato Rey, Plaza Las Americas became an instant success. A self contained network of shops, restaurants, and now offices, the mall interiorized ac-tivities traditionally located along the citys streets and sidewalks. The malls air conditioned interior and a dynamic mix of new stores offered a new shopping environment. Soon, the mall became the prevailing com-mercial model throughout the Island striking a blow to small urban retail

Aerial View. Plaza Las Amricas shopping mall. To the right is the Nemesio Canales Public Housing Project. 1968. BPPR.

Section perspective. Nuevo Centro de San Juan. 1969. AT.

Aerial Perspective.

Section.

Plan showing projected pedestrian bridges. Toro y Ferrer, 1969.

Nuevo Centro de San Juan. 1969. AT.

Proposed Urban Design Plan.

shops in the city and town centers. Today, Plaza Las Americas holds over 2.2 million square feet of retail and 11,000 parking spaces and is the larg-est mall in the Caribbean and the third largest in Latin America.

The same year, a committee made up of public officials and prominent private sector businessmen was organized to promote the development of a new Downtown for San Juan in lands to the east of Plaza Las Ameri-cas. The committee was presided by Teodoro Moscoso, Muoz Marns Secretary of Economic Development with assistance of a group of archi-tects and planners affiliated to the Puerto Rico Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The projects vision for the downtown was described as follows:

The role of the NCSJ as a Downtown and its design is based both on historic and modern times. Historically the earliest city centers provided three basic functions 1. The regional market place or Agora; 2. The re-gional communications center or Forum; and 3. The center for important religious and cultural institutions and civic monuments or Acropolis. On this ancient threefold function rests the philosophy for a new vital down-town. Four hundred years ago, the Spanish established the Law of the Indies for the development of the cities in the new World. Today, among other things, we see the results of these early efforts in the city plazas surrounded by church, city hall and shops. The Downtown of tomorrow must strike a balance between conservation and enhancement of the past and shaping and exemplifying the future. The Plan for the NCSJ has been prepared so that it can adjust to this future situation and thus serve better its metropolitan population thereby enhancing both its utility and beauty.

The Nuevo Centro followed closely some of the principles exposed by Sert in The Heart of the City which registered the proceedings from the CIAM VIII Congress and had become an important reference source for planners and architects. The design for the Nuevo Centro de San Juan projected the construction of 1640 apartments for 8200 residents, mixed with offices. The project was zoned vertically, separating the car from large pedestrian terraces at an upper deck, common in elevation to all buildings projected as part of the complex. These would be linked by pedestrian bridges spanning from deck to deck.

The following year, the Municipality of San Juan followed suit by sponsor-ing two studies for the area immediately to the north of the Nuevo Centro. Commissioned to the engineering firm Lebrn, Sanfiorenzo & Fuentes,

Model Neighborhood Area Study. Lebrn, Sanfiorenzo & Fuentes. 1970.

the Model Neighborhood Area (MNA) and the Martin Pea Channel Im-provement Study envisioned a complete redevelopment of the sites oc-cupied by the shanty towns, many of them already relocated in the public housing projects. The Nuevo Centro and the redevelopment plans for the Martin Pea Channel would come to a halt with the economic downturn that was to follow.

The Oil Crisis and the End of Modern UrbanismThe stock market crash of 1973-1974 and the oil crisis of 1973 put an end to Puerto Ricos development drive. The 1973 oil crisis started in October 1973, when the Arab members of Organization of Petroleum Exporting

Aerial view showing Plaza Las Ameri-cas under construction (bottom left) and shanty towns along the Martn Pea Channel. San Juan, Puerto Rico. 1967. DTOP.

Countries (OPEP), along with Egypt, Syria and Tunisia, proclaimed an oil embargo on the USA in response to the US decision to support Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The embargo, which lasted until March 1974, had a lasting effect on the US and Puerto Rican economy throughout the 1970s putting a halt to infrastructure investment and curtailing the financing of housing and other construction projects by the banking sys-tem. The 1973 oil price crisis, along with the 1973-1974 stock market, have been regarded as the first event since the Great Depression to have a persistent economic effect.

In March of the previous year, 1972, the first of 33 buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe urban housing project in St. Louis Missouri was demolished by the Federal Government. First occupied in 1954 and completed in 1955, Pruitt-Igoe by the late 1960s had come to represent the extreme pov-erty, crime, and segregation associated with large scale social housing urban tenements. The high profile failure of Pruitt-Igoe and its ultimate demolition became, for critics like Charles Jencks and Peter Blake, the emblematic icon of the failure of modern architecture and urbanism.

The Fragmented CityDuring the 1970s, the Puerto Rico Planning Board stopped being a policy maker becoming instead a regulatory agency which reacted to proposals but did not put forward a proactive vision of the urban environment. The Consulta de Ubicacin combined with the Zoning Code became a plan-ning tool for evaluating extensive projects in areas without infrastructure and adequate access as well as rezoning massive tracts of land for new development. Most of these new developments, located in large parcels

above, Police occupation of the Llorens Torres Public Housing Proj-ect. 1996.

right, Closed gate at Urbanizacin Baldrich, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2009. A. Mignucci.

Aerial photo showing the urban struc-ture of suburban San Juan. The area highlighted in yellow shows the pe-rimeter closing of the San Francisco, San Ignacio and Santa Mara residen-tial urbanizations. Shown in red are the access control points. San Juan, Puerto Rico 2009. Google.

in the urban periphery and in rural agricultural farms, contributed to the ever increasing sprawl of Puerto Ricos urban landscape. An urban form composed of deteriorating city centers, large scale residential subdivi-sions, public housing projects, shopping centers, and office parks began emerged as the image of Metropolitan San Juan.

During the following decades crime escalated throughout Puerto Rico causing a sense of fear and insecurity among the population. The crime increase was generally attributed to a growing drug trade and associated gang wars. In the 1990s the government pursued a battle against urban crime by mobilizing the National Guard and elite police squadrons to oc-cupy by force targeted public housing projects throughout Metropolitan San Juan. This triggered a new policy of enclosing the housing projects with perimeter fences and guard houses to control access control points. Others like Las Acacias and Villa Panamericana were demolished follow-ing the Pruitt-Igoe example.

In parallel, resident associations reacted by closing their residential sub-divisions with fences and guard houses as well. Inside the urbaniza-ciones basic public services, previously maintained by the Municipality, had to be privatized as the resident associations took control of the public realm within their neighborhoods. Politicians, not having a clear strategy against crime and fearing political backlash passed legislation approv-

ing the closing of whole neighborhoods. Soon recreational centers, com-mercial centers, offices, and residential condominiums exercised some type of security and access control. Scholars like anthropologist Teresa P.R. Caldeira in Brazil and sociologist Zaire Dinzey-Flores in Puerto Rico have studied gated communities, the fear of crime and violence and its impact on the built environment. Caldeira has defined them as priva-tized, enclosed and monitored spaces for residence, consumption, lei-sure and work characterized by the privatization of the public realm, by their demarcation and isolation by walls, and fences, by their inward turn, away from the streets, by the control of access through security systems control, and by a tendency to constitute a socially homogeneous environ-ment. Properties outside these protected and controlled zones are seen as second rate and are devalued in the real estate market. At the same time the public realm outside the compounds has increasingly deterio-rated as a no-mans land without direct stakeholders and a citizenry to support it.

At this crucial juncture starting the second decade of the 21st century we live in a fragmented city.

ConclusionsPuerto Rico no doubt shares with other countries many the maladies previously described. In the United States and across the globe there is a new sensibility regarding sustainability and growth, which has spurred a critical overhaul of many of the 20th century urban development policies. Already cities like Bogot, Portland, and Barcelona have shown success in implementing new strategies and putting in place a clear vision for their future. Puerto Ricos paradigm shift will need to start with such critical re-assessment of the policies and forces which have shaped our everyday environment over the last hundred years.

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Andrs Mignucci FAIA is a Puerto Rican architect and urbanist. He studied architecture at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mignucci was awarded the National Architecture Prize in 2001 and in 2002. His landmark public space project, La Ventana al Mar, has won awards in the American Institute of Architects Puerto Rico Chapter Design Awards, the Puerto Rico Architecture Biennale, the Miami + Beach Architecture Biennale (Bronze Medal) and the Iberoamerican Architecture Biennale held in Madrid, Spain.

Andrs Mignucci teaches design at the School of Architecture at the Polythecnic University of Puerto Rico and is Director of the Laboratory of Urbanism and Housing at the University. In 2005 Andrs Mignucci was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.