Part 8 in the Series: ‘Can the Box Make the World a Better Place?’
After the demise of the Bauhaus in 1930s Nazi Germany, many of its professors moved to America where it became evident that the future of Bauhaus design was in the city. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Director of the Bauhaus when it closed in 1933, relocated to Chicago. It was here that the box got bigger, and the modern city was born.
The steel frame had revolutionised architecture. Exterior walls no longer needed to be load bearing, resulting in the birth of the skyscraper. Like many American cities, Chicago was built on a grid plan, and the square plots were ideal for box-like architecture.
In Chicago, Mies van der Rohe realised the Bauhaus belief in the box for housing on a much larger scale, with the Lake Shore Drive Apartments (see above), one of his earliest projects. It was a simple modernist design, inspired by his view that ‘less is more’, that went on to be a template for glass and steel skyscrapers around the world. By building twenty-six stories high, Mies van der Rohe had created mass housing capable of accommodating over 400 people. Considering the relatively small plot, this building was more spatially efficient than anything the Bauhaus had achieved in the past, and a perfect example of literally expanding the concept of box-like design.
However, we can expand the box even further by looking at the grid plan found in both Chicago and New York. Like the box, it is formed by a repetition of squares or rectangles. Mathematically, a box is a cuboid. Unfold a cuboid and you are left with its two-dimensional net, consisting of six squares or rectangles. Therefore, the grid plan is effectively the net of a box, repeated.
The simplicity and rigidity of the grid plan was intended to encourage prosperity after the chaotic, undisciplined growth of early American cities, but was met with much criticism. The third American President Thomas Jefferson, concerned about the predicted growth of New York, said: ‘When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe’. Whilst surveying the land that was to become New York’s grid plan, John Randall was pelted, attacked by dogs, and even arrested. Later urban planners simply stated that the grid was inorganic and unimaginative.
However, present day New York has the largest economy of all American cities, and Chicago the third largest. This would seem to suggest that the grid plan has encouraged prosperity as planned, and been an economic success. But with our world continuing to urbanize, is box-like design still the way forward, or do we need to re-think our cities? That question and more will be explored in Part 9.
Image courtesy of tobesch on flickr
