Contents

Without and within: an introduction 9

Picturing fictions 15
Picturing territories 59
Territory and interior: United States 1880-1939 111
Territory and interior: United States after 1945 175
Prototypes for the continuous interior 243
Only within 271

I
Without and within:
an introduction

This boolc emerged from a premise that was sensed in my childhood.

I thought that there was an affinity between the landscape that
surrounded me (flat, regular and efficient) and the interior spaces of the
city in which I lived (sleek, modern and^ree). It seemed as though the
land, its markings, roads, buildings and indoor spaces were the various
manifestations of one source, one will. At the time, this imaginative bridge
was supported by little other than a few contextual circumstances that
were unavoidable: I lived in a bungalow surrounded by other similar
bungalows in a North American suburb, in sight of the transcontinental
highway and railroad and very close to an international airport, just
outside Montral. The city was undergoing massive modernisation to
both its infrastructure and its representational core in an extremely
condensed period, and furthermore hosting the Universal Exposition,
Expo 67. The total environment of suburban landscape, elevated
expressways, airport concourse, regional shopping malls, corporate
lobbies, railway terminal concourses, Mtro, underground city, experimental
architecture and Utopian meta-cityall new and brimming with
optimismprojected an indelible impression of one world.

Art rno(
loderne

Today, one is struck by the multitude of interiors that resemble

each other regardless of their location. Shopping malls, airports, office
lobbies, museumsinteriors for a mass publicall share the same
morphology, the same tropes. They have submitted to the devices of
publicity and become distended scenes of consumption. Such places are
not simply natural consequences of some spontaneous will, but are
products of instrumental systems and their explicit and implicit
programmes. The search for their ideas is at the heart of the following
collected essays, which, as a response to that apparently significant
childhood environment, describe the idea of the American territory,
its effect on cities and the contemporary public interior.
The North American territory, despite the specificity of its
topography, is an object of ideology. It is extensively urbanised, and
characterised by the freedom of movement and action it purports to
afford its citizens in leisure and work. In this atmosphere of freedom,
the frameworks of roads and property division are regarded as
transparent, as natural outcomes of routine processes: all are the
facilitations offered by the prevailing grid plan. The division and
organisation of North American land has proceeded on the basis of
ideological projections, made over two hundred years ago by Thomas
Jefferson in response to the abiding desire for freedom held by
American settlers. He devised principles, ideas, ideology, techniques
and practices in the service of individual liberty and self-realisation

which have become deeply ingrained: in the American modus

operandi.
In the contemporary condition, everything is connected by regional and
transcontinental motorway systems. Within this skein of lines, selfrealisation and enterprise are supposed to flourish. American ideas
of regional urbanisation find their representation in the symbolism of
the suburbs, whose affects are echoed in regional and urban
developments alike.
American and European ideas about space and place are entirely
different: the former is forged out of system-based strategies
superimposed on the World, and the latter from a meeting with the
World, in which resides the possibility of encounter with otherness.
This book is concerned with the interiorisation of territory as
effected and realised in the United States through its history: a story of
projection, domination, possession and exploitation. The developments
of American urbanisation ensue from system-driven encounters with
territory: the deployment of the grid, and the dispersion of constituent
elements of the city to the regions. Within this, architecture is reduced
to the order of sign. A trajectory links the making of the American space
(ideological, actual) to the paradigmatic, ubiquitous, and internationally
current infrastructure/retail/entertainment
environments that
have become a commonplace worldwide: continuous interiors.
The phemomenon is linked to the history of American confrontations
between the unknown and the other.
The trajectory that connects the frontier with the continuous
interior (in which there is only interior) is revealed in the processes of
incorporation of the frontiers of the American West; in the
correspondingly imperial pretensions of the American metropolis of
the late nineteenth century; in the dispersal of the city to a complex
of downtowns, Company Towns and residential arcadias; in the
representations of nature in urban parks; in the architecture of the
outlets and monuments of the dominant economic class; in the
development of regional urban models built on the allied promises
of technology and consumerism; in the connective, interiorised
developments tied to work and consumption; and finally, in the allembracing experience environments inundated by publicity and the
spectacle. All have employed the idea of free agency inscribed in
Jeffersonian ideology in order to seduce, inculcate, indoctrinate and
dominate their public.
The book's six essays trace a trajectory of significant events,
through which links between the present and the past may be
appreciated. This trajectory features a number of incidents, episodes
and motifs that have persisted, in my own thoughts and practice, as
representative, and, importantly, as representations. The subjects of
each of the essays follow from them.

An image of the founding colonial settlement of Savannah, Georgia,

set in a clearing between the sea and the dark forest; the Ordinance
Survey as devised by Thomas Jefferson; the photographs of the American
West by Carleton Watkins and Timothy O'Sullivan and their subtly but
significantly differing attitudes all together constitute a chain of
associated motifs. The second essay. Picturing territories, concerns the
particularly American address to the unknown, the territorial domain of
the other, and the variety of devices used to achieve its subjection.
The regularised distribution of single-industry towns along the raillines leading out of Chicago and the tied, or Company Towns, such as
Pullman; the Beaux-arts perspectives of the 1909 Plan of Chicago
overlooking an imaginary metropolis; the managed original nature of
New York's Central Park; the suburbs of my youth; the shopping mall,
with its air-conditioning, glycerine fountains and glistening artificiality;
the Mies-derived corporate architecture of the 1950s and 1960s; the
corporate headquarters of Kevin Roche and their infrastructures, directly
tied to the suburban dwelling; the natural/corporate atria typical of office
buildings, malls and hotels of the 1970s are all linked with each other
through time. The third and fourth essays. Territory and interior,
describe the occupation of the continental space through systems of
urbanisation specific to American ideology, the symbols and controls
employed to sustain those systems, first, through 1880 to 1945; and
second, after 1945, when the United States' political and economic
power shifted significantly, fuelling another order of self-realisation
and the deployment of other orders of symbolism, that created new
consensus, and an intensified interiority.
The underground networks of Montral and the refined corporate/
museum/retail interior of the Grand Louvre by I.M. Pel are the impetus for
the essay Prototypes for tlie continuous interior, which deals with these
two significant precedents for the preeminent contemporary condition of
extensive and all-embracing interiority.
The Utopian megastructures of Expo 67 and their relations; the
rambling, retail-glutted concourses of international airports; the
uncritical, system-oriented projects of the contemporary architectural
soi-disant avant-garde are significant motifs reflected in the final essay.
Only witiiin describes the dispersion of the architectural artefact as it
turns to the systemic character of the regional-urban context, surrendering
its built symbolism to the paraphernalia of publicity and its ordering
devices to determinations of the market: a vanishing point for all
public space.

The first motif is the architect's drawing: an act of beginning, in whose

pictured scenes are views of their ideas, of idealised worlds, of Utopias.
The essay. Picturing fictions therefore deals with the picturing artefacts
of architects, whose productions have relevance to the ideas affecting the
American space, its systems and its representations.

The characteristic features that have become increasingly common to the

experience of contemporary public interiors in the twenty-first century
are found in the developments of American territorialisation and
urbanisation. Pragmatic and ideological foundations support the entire
set of relations that exist between town, country, individuals and
authority. The typologies of the dispersed city-territory and its systembased principles have adapted an array of historical models as necessary,
and have become inseparable from the representation of plenitude and
its correlative freedoms. Efficient and effective, they have been exported

10

11

and adaptedalong with their ideology of transparencyto other

countries and contexts. Applications are found across extremely varied
building programmes, particularly those that offer the attractions of
public space, accommodating great numbers of people. The elimination
of exteriority and otherness, central to the United States's domination of
the West in the nineteenth century, is reiterated in these contemporary,
continuous interiors for public treaty, whose realms can be extended
indefinitely and connected to everything. They have assumed the
characteristics of infrastructures, gathering and funnelling people,
directing them with the clichs of publicity toward exchanges of
consumption, to which the treaty between them has been narrowed.
Such interior spaces are prey to the devices of the spectacle, which
inform their adhesive logic. Their control of movement and behaviour
has led to their false regard as natural phenomena and their consequent
description as spaces of flows. They reiterate characteristics particular
to the historical development of the American city, shaped by principles
of laissez-faire, which, similarly, have been portrayed as natural.
Reflecting the increasing dominance of American models of decisionmaking, considerations specific to spaces and places have been replaced
by the deployment of systems: generic, iterative, interiorising. Under this
influence, the architectural object has been profoundly altered: it
increasingly defers to the accommodation of systems, setting the scenes
of ideologically-driven environments, to enable natural activity. Like the
organisational principles, rhetoric and representations that effected
the dispersal of the American city across its territoryconceptually
rendering the whole territory a cityarchitecture has become less and
less identifiable with the single, discrete artefact. Instead, it has become
dispersed, diffused, distributed across many sites, and finally, virtually
present across all sites, until it has achieved complete command,
complete interiority, and with it, the fantasised condition of the natural.
This condition is not natural, of course, but acutely artificial: a projection,
whose determinations and representations are workings of ideology.
This projection does not meet the unknown, the other or the world,
but supersedes them, replacing them with its conditions and workings,
with its illusions of transparency, naturalness and freedom.

12

Acknowledgements
This book could not have been published without the financial assistance
of the Netherlands Architecture Fund, to whom I am very grateful.
It could not have been written without the continuous support,
both personal and financial, of the Chair of Architecture (Interior) at the
Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. I wish to thank Professor
Tony Fretton in particular for offering me the opportunity to write the
book as part of my visiting Professorship in Relation to Practice.
Colleagues at Delft have provided generous criticism over the course
of that time: Irene Cieraad, Christoph Grafe, David Mulder, Mechthild
Stuhlmacher, David Vernet, Leontine De Wit, and Jurjen Zeinstra.
Other colleagues and friends added cautions and perspectives which
were invaluable. I would like to thank Andrej Radman, John Glew and
Barbara van der Plas in this regard. I owe much thanks to family and
dear friends in the United ICingdom, the Netherlands and Canada who
have shared my burden.
The readers of the entire manuscript, Adrian Forty, Penelope
Curtis and Andrej Radman, generously offered precise commentary
and criticism, directly affecting the final form of the book. I thank
them wholeheartedly.
I thank my publishers, Eleonoor Jap Sam and Nina Post of episode
publishers in Rotterdam, for their faith, help, and patience since the
beginning of this project.
Furthermore, I wish to thank Joost Grootens for his elegant and
sympathetic design, and Inka Resch for its sterling realisation amidst its,
and my, chaotic denouement. I am grateful to Jetske van Oosten and
Use Rijneveld, who secured reproduction rights for the many images in
this book. The generosity of the many guardians of these illustrations
is genuinely appreciated.
Mark Pimlott

13

Picturing fictions

Before architecture appears in the world, it is proposed as an idea.

The vehicle for that idea is the architect's drawing. Therein, the architect's
intentions are portrayed, as are the intended architecture's relations to
its viewers, users and its context. The architect's drawing therefore plays
a significant part in representing a variety of intentions. The architect's
drawing can appear in a variety of forms, each of which may be described
as a picturing artefact, charged with realising the architect's intentions
and projected fictions.
These fictions are intended for the consumption of their patrons,
viewers or readers. They are located in cultures in which they have
currency, can be understood and identified with. They communicate
their burden of ideas and ideology to complicit audiences. They represent
therefore not only their authors' intentions, but something of their
audiences' expectations. In this, the picturing artefact contains
conventions and fictions of the architectural project that are invisible
in architecture's realised, constructed state, and often rendered
invisible by its very construction.
The artefacts selected for study in this essay have been influential
in the production of modern architecture. It is by no means an
exhaustive selection, but one that introduces and represents concerns
that arise in the essays that follow. The artefacts are by and large
familiar to architects and students of architecture, and increasingly,
to new audiences for architecture as offered by cultural institutions
and publications. Their authors similarly, have been influential, in
that theyfrequently through these very artefactshave affected
the production of architecture around them. The artefacts have served
as advocates of their author's positions. In this essay, therefore,
the drawings, paintings, photo-collages, cartoons and publications
of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Daniel Burnham, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe, Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas are described. It is
hoped that these descriptions will illuminate these artefacts beyond
their habitual presentation, as their familiarity has rendered them
iconic, signs of themselves, and paradoxically inscrutable. Placed in
company with each other, these artefacts are indexes of a Utopian
trajectory within modernity and modernism, whose far-reaching
projections are both driven and tempered by the artistic impulses of
their authors.
The trajectory may be seen as a succession of ideas proceeding from
one utterance to the next, in which one builds upon the achievements
of the previous. Despite the fiction of complete originality that resides
within modernity, modernism, and the efforts of the avant-garde.

15

Picturing

1. Robert Sokolowski, 'Picturing',

Re\new of Metaphysics 31 (1977)
3-28; and Robin Evans, Translations
f r o m Drawing to Building' (1977),
Translation from Drawing to
Building and other essays (London,
Aixhitectural Association, 2004)
153-193

fictions

contemporaries) by disputing, debunking and re-ordering their formal

and representational devices, thereby establishing his own meta-project.
The word picturing in this essay indicates the struggle to establish
the presence of an idea or reality through another agent: in this case
the architect's drawing. It is a difficult thing. As a representation, a
picture is inadequate. Its task is to make something that is not there
present, through its fallible devices. It stands in for its subject.
Representation marks the failure of being able to reproduce the real,
yet its very attempts marks the hope that the real may come into being
through its agency. The myth of the origin of painting (a subject of a
painting by Schinkel, among others) shows a woman tracing the shadow
of her departing lover (he is leaving for battle) upon a rock, in the hope
that this trace will somehow, by representing his departed presence, hold
him to her.' Representation is at once unbelievable and compelling.
The representation is a fiction that one must go to, approach, believe in.
In the cases shown in this essay, the picturing artefacts of architects
demand the consent and belief of their viewers. All sorts of forms of
persuasion are employed to attract the viewer. The artefacts lie and coax
and flatter and shock, so that their fictions might be considered to be
plausible as realities.

Schinkel

Karl Friedrich

Schinl<el,

Perspektivische Ansicht
Rotunde, detail of
Altes
from

Museum,

2. Kenneth Frampton Modern

Architecture: A Critical History
(London, Thames & Hudson World of
Ai-t, 1992) 17, Kenneth Frampton
Studies in Tectonic
Culture
(Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1996) 75

Berlin, 1830,

D o u g C l e l l a n d , K.F.

Collected

der

portico

Architectural

(London, Academy

Schinkel:
Designs

Editions/

St l^artin's Press, 1 9 8 2 )

their products also share this familial characteristic. In the cases of the
architects observed in this essay, the work of one is followed by the next:
Karl Friedrich Schinkel is followed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Mies and
Le Corbusier offer ideas as contemporaries in parallel, despite
their differing areas of focustheir works and thoughts compete.
Norman Foster emulates Miesian spatial paradigms, yet subjects them
to considerations of technology and the processes of publicity.
Rem Koolhaas offers an appreciation and critique of the modernist
trajectory and its protagonists, and attempts to usurp them (and his own

16

The Altes Museum in Berlin (1830) by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841)

is a work of architecture in which the meeting between representation
and the real is achieved in actuality by the incorporation of drawing: a
work in which drawing plays a critical role in its concept and fact. The
building as constructed and decorated introduces the viewer to
representation and to the building's fiction. The building stands i n the
centre of Berlin, on a large square, the Lustgarten, opposite the
Kningliche SchloB
(Royal Palace), adjacent to the Dom (Cathedral) and the river Spree.
The charged setting requires the building to be monumental, to actively
and appropriately represent values. The demand is for the provision of
an idealistic scene for Prussia's capital, a statement of its pretence.
Schinkel develops an image for the young Prussian state (Schinkel was
Prussia's Architect-in-Chief for much of his career), creating a fiction of
origin and historicity.^
A photograph (overleaf) shows a detail of the Altes Museum: the
exterior vestibule sheltered by its portico, a panelled marble wall in
trompe I'oeil arranged i n a pattern emulating stone courses (these were
partly re-painted after the Second World War, and the allegorical scenes
on the two upper tiers no longer exist). Its base, string courses, and the
frames of the individual panels have all been painted so that they contain
at once actual and painted detail; the painted detail is superimposed on
the actual, exaggerating it. The panels, whether containing/aux-marhre
today or afiegorical scenes previously, are paintings arranged in a pattern
that conforms to an image of construction, mounted on an actual,
constructed wall that encloses the interior. The painted, panelled wall
serves as an introduction to the building's function as a space specifically
dedicated to representation and picturing. This distinguishes the
Following

17

(Schinkel).

p a g e : Berlin

("Mark Pimlott, 1994)

Picturing

3. Mario Zadow, Karl Friedrich

Schinicel 9 (Berlin, Rembrandt Verlag,
1980), Kurt Forster 'Schinkel's
Panoramic Planning of Central Berlin',
Modu/liS 16 (1983) 62-77

4. Doug Clelland, K.F. Schinkel:

Collected Architectural
Designs
(London, Academy Editions/St
Martin's Press, 1982)

building from all others in the city, -which are obliged to accommodate
mundane occupation. The building is therefore elevated from the
contingencies of fact. It is a representational objecta Monumenton
an urban stage that serves as setting for both State and Church.^
Many of Schinkel's projects are obliged to be part of a pictorial scene,
and depictions of them are frequently in context, a context often
composed of Schinkel's o-wn buildings and projects. Schinkel was also a
designer of stage sets and a painter. The Museum is part of a pictorial
scene, where it is presented as a kind of Picture. Once past the threshold
of Schinkel's colonnade of repeated, identical Ionic columnswhich
themselves are representations of classical models, hence neo-classical
the viewer enters spaces where picturing standsin for actuality and
coincides with it.
In the Museum's famous interior, the Rotunda, the visitor encounters
what could be best put as acute artificiality. The features of each capital,
string course, moulding, coffer and boss around the space are intricately
fashioned: one might be tempted to say they are delineated. Indeed, they
are overlaid with paint that has been applied so as to picture them, the
painted detail acting as a kind of Doppelganger of actuality, coincident
with it: the picture is fused with its actualisation. Representation and
architecture, drawing and project, idea and object are bound together.
It is instructive to consider the drawing of the Rotunda, as it appears
in Schinkel's Architektonisches Entwilrfen, a folio of drawings produced
for the instruction of architects and architecture students, of a selection
of what he considered to be his best work. The drawings were published
in part between 1819 and 1840, and as a complete folio, an ceuvre complte,
in 1873." The perspective of the interior is, like its realisation, very
delicate, with fine detail distributed over the entire surface. Each and
every moulding and ornament is precisely delineated. The lines of the
drawing are weighted so as to impart a sense of spatial depth in
the pictured space. This effect of depth is keenly felt in the constructed
interior. For example, the floor pattern at the centre of the Rotunda
consists of lines radiating out from a central circular black stone disc,
intersected by concentric lines. The points of intersection are marked
by diamond-shaped bosses. The concentric lines are spaced at gradually
larger intervals and incrementally broaden as they move away from
the centre. Similarly, the radial lines increase in width, and the bosses
get larger as they move away from the centre. In the engraving, this
perspectival effect seems natural and almost goes unnoticed.
However, in the actual space, the centre seems magnetic, drawing the
floor pattern to it. Looking at the actual floor is like looking at a
perspective rendering or a picture of what this floor might look like in
perspective. As the actual space seems to emulate the drawing, it appears
as a picture of itself. The viewer's perceptions are confounded by this
doubling: the interior, contrived to be exaggeratedly present, conveys
extreme artificiality. The viewer has been drawn into a complex play of
representation and its dilemma.
Schinkel's interior compels the viewer to see the space as a fact and
as a fiction all at once. The viewer is required to see fictionally, in order to
cross the threshold between reality (already cafled into question upon

20

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (delin. V o n

Fincke) 'Perspektische Ansicht

von

der Galerie der H a u p t t r e p p e

des

l^useums durch d e n Porticos

auf

den

Lustgarten u n d seine

Umgebungen'/'Perspective
from the gallery of t h e

staircase of the m u s e u m
the portico onto the
garden and the
from

Doug

Collected

through

pleasure

surroundings',

C l e l l a n d , K.F.
Architectural

(London, Academy
Martin's Press,

view

main

1982)

Sciiinl<el:
Designs

Editions/St

fictions

approach to the building) and representation. One is invited to surrender

to the fiction of space, of architecture and of history. The Berlin of 1830,
in fact, is not the Rome of AD 30.
In the famous view of the vestibule of the museum engraved by
Von Fincke, people are pictured looking out towards the Kningliches
Schlo/5 and the city beyond from the first floor. Clearly, these people are
visitors to a museum. Two are shown conversing with each other on the
ground floor below; one has proceeded rather cautiously half-way up
the stair and peeks in; another has arrived at the top of the stairin
triumphanticipating the pleasures the treasures of the museum will
offer him; at a distance, two men and a women are together, one man
demonstrating his knowledge to the other, the woman looking
distractedly at the man walking up the stair; close to, two men seem to
be discussing serious, perhaps emotional matters; a father and son, or
guardian and ward, look at pictures of allegorical figures in a painting,
to whom they are rendered strangely equivalent; a final figure peers
around the edge of the portico out to the view of the city that the viewer
of the engraving shares. The interior, open to the air, is dominated by the
central columns of the great portico and the decorated, beamed ceiling.
The ceiling's ornament consists of panels, beads and coffers, consisting

Picturing

fictions

which frames both the view and the viewer. The drawing shows a building
legitimised by its deployment of ancient forms, in turn picturing a city in
a form that accords with a fantasy of itself.

Burnham

Karl F r i e d r i c h Schinl<et

5. Sarah Whiting, 'Bas-Relief

Urbanism: lITs Figured Field' i n
Phyllis Lambert [ed-l, Mies in
America (Montreal/New York, CCA
and The Whitney Museum of
American Art, 2001) 657

(delin.

V o n J g e l ) Schauspielhaus

(1821)

Berlin, Perspel<tivische

Ansicht

aus d e m Zuschaterraum auf d i e

Scene mit der Vorsteliung
beim

Einweihungs-Prolog

Aufgestellten
dem

der

In 1907, a group of Chicago businessmen and investors known as the

Commercial Club of Chicago asked Daniel H. Burnham and Edward
H. Bennett in 1907 to make a plan that would transform the impression
that Chicago made upon other cities (its competitors for trade) and upon
its citizens, through a radical revision of its urban form and image.
The Chicago Plan was a propaganda exercise of the city's entrepreneurs.
There were no guarantees of its implementation: the administrative
apparati to make it possible was as yet unavailable. (These would be
available in the 1940s, when Chicago's administration was dominated
by a generation educated in a period in which the Chicago Plan was a
part of the eighth-grade curriculum in the Chicago Public School
District).^ It would stake a claim for Chicago's superiority amongst
American cities, allowing it to be seen at once as powerful as New York,
and as representationally significant as the Capitol, Washington.
The entrepreneurs' idea would be pictured, and through these pictures,
Chicago would present itself as at once a city of commerce and a city
of administration.

Decoration

in

Koningl. Schauspielhaus

Berlin/Perspective view

zu

from

the auditorium onto the stage,

with the representation of the
decoration installed for t h e
i n a u g u r a l p r o l o g u e , in t h e r o y a l
theatre for Berlin, f r o m
C l e l l a n d , K.F.
Architectural
Academy

Schinkel:
Designs

Editions/St

Doug
Collected
(London,

l^artin's

Press, 1 9 8 2 )

Author's note: Kurt Forster, at a

seminar at the Canadian Centre
for Architecture attended by the
author (1981), discussed the serial
or mass production of building
components. This was not only
those components used f o r structure
made possible by cast iron, but even
decorative elements that would
normally have been made by hand
individually. The drawings of the
museum show building elements
produced i n cast iron, terracotta and
re-constituted stone, capable of
perfection and potentially infinite
mechanised repetition.

in turn of repeated tiny elements, all carefully delineated, as though the

work of some as yet non-existent machine. Like the elements distributed
across the elevations of the exterior, a relatively few architectural
elements are standardised in their design and then repeated, something
which could be easily achieved by employing new production technologies.
Thus, the hand-crafted nature of the Classical or Renaissance interior
is replaced by something that both pictures and approaches perfection
by means of mass-production.
The ceiling in the engraving is densely lined, making it visually
ponderous. The viewer understands that he is looking at an important
interior, where the ceiling is the underside of a great roof sheltering
treasures within. The roof appears to be supported by the columns of the
portico, suggesting that the two storey interior shelters under the
protection of a larger reified structure. The structure is significant: it is
Architecture. This seems abundantly apparent to the pictured visitors
to the building, as does the powerful relationship between the Museum
and the Kningliche Schlo across the square, which appearsat least to
the little figure taking hold of the Museum to look out towards the
Palacealmost as an object of veneration. The Palace constitutes both
the view and the setting for the building. The view is also populated
with buildings proj ected by Schinkel for the centre of Berlin, a city very
much in process. The pictured view therefore represents an ideal
condition, an idealised Berlin, envisioned by Schinkel, advertising his
ambition. The device of the ideal view is also proposed in Schinkel's
drawings of the interior of the Schauspielhaus, which offers a view of the
stage. The viewer is a member of the audience. The backdrop is a view of
Berlin, with the projected Schauspielhaus at its centre, framed by other
Schinkel projects and by the architecture surrounding the proscenium.

22

6. Manfredo Tafuri, Francesco

Dal Co, IWodem
Architecture/1
(London, Faber & Faber/Electa,
1986)40

The scheme can be read in the context of the aims of the City
Beautiful movement, which proposed urban arrangements that were
antidotes to the unchecked and un-beautiful expansion typical of
American cities, and the social ills (poverty, squalor, disease, alcoholism,
labour unrest) that came with their expansion. The rational layout of
buildings, organisation of urban elements, distribution of industry,
commerce and housing, public parks and representational civic buildings
(deployed to project civilising values to the populace) were all germane to
plans influenced by the Movement. In the case of the Commercial Club
Plan, the image of the city would be made by a fabric of generic buildings
interspersed with monumental classical buildings placed at the nodes of
a new street pattern, squares and the terminations of great boulevards.*"
Many drawings of the plan were produced by Burnham, showing the
revised Chicago in plan, aerial perspective and views. The drawings were
mostly executed as large painted panels by Jules Gurin, an architect
trained in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The Chicago that is pictured
is reminiscent of Baron Haussmann's Paris of the nineteenth century.
This resemblance is most likely intentional, for Paris was revised in
order to achieve goals that were beyond beautification, devised, instead,
to assert administrative control by carving the city up, at once eliminating
the city's poorest districts (and its pockets of diseases and civfl unrest);
making discrete administrative and economic zones (the arrondissements);
and implanting infrastructures for sanitation, transport and the
movement of military forces (for the enforcement of civil obedience).
This picture would have been appealing to Chicago's entrepreneurs,
whose obstacles to more comprehensive financial success were analogous
to those of nineteenth-century Paris.
In the plan, one can see the grid of the city, filling the view, expanded

23

Picturing

fictions

into an extended territory that was already representative of the

entire urbanised territory of the American West. On it is superimposed
a great arcsuggesting a boundary for the urban centreand an axial
grid whose lines lead to a square at the city's meeting with Lake Michigan.
The plan therefore incorporates two types, two images of a city at once.
There is the grid-city with its promise of unfettered development and
potentiality, Jeffersonian in nature; and, carved into it, a city of boulevards,
parks, vistas and imposing buildings, European and authoritarian in
nature, the complete antithesis of the Jeffersonian ideal. The plan infers
that a different orderan order of controlhas been grafted onto the
existing structure, and that this order, like that of the grid beneath, can
extend across not only the city but the entire American territory. The
Plan's ambitions extend beyond even those of Haussmann: its axial lines
can be more closely associated with those of Versailles, though the apex
of this composition is not the Roi-soleil, but the monumental authority
embodied in the Civic Centre.

Daniel

Burnham, Edward

Bennett; Commercial

Daniel

Burntnam, Edward

Bennett, Commercial
Chicago

(painting

Chicago, from

H.

Club

Francesco

of

by Jules

Gurin)

'Plan of C h i c a g o . View. looi<ing

of the
and

proposed

Civic Centre

buildings, showing

it as

of the

country.' 1909
Chicago

&

Faber/Electa,

(London,
1986)

Plaza

of

surrounding

Plan of

History

Architecture/1

Chicago,

i^useum

tliiigJ

Ebenezer

H o w a r d , Garden

(1902) from
Francesco

Manfredo

Dal Co,

Arcliitecture/1
&

Faber/Electa,

/Modern

(London,
1986)

City

Tafuri,

Faber

of

of
Tafuri,

Modern

the

centre of the system of arteries

circulation

west

Manfredo

Dal Co,

H.

Club

Chicago. Plan 1909, Plan

The plan is also partly indebted to the territorial propositions of

Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities o/Tomorrow (1902), where an axial grid
was to be extended over a national territory to create a net-work of
relatively small interdependent cities connected by rail. The rail
connections were intended for goods and not people, who would remain
in their cities, being productive in their specialised work and happily
entertaining themselves in their city's parks and glazed shopping arcades

Faber

Picturing

7. Daniel Burnham, Edward H.

Bennett [eds.], Plan of Chicago
(The Commercial, Club 1909);
(reprint New York, Da Capo
Press, 1970) 115-118

(Crystal Palaces). The Howard plan was devised to replace the iniquities
of the contemporary city with civic authority, morality, industry
and amenity. Essentially, each city would be a contented factory, whose
Authority was implicit in the organisation of the city plan.
The Commercial Club Plan suggests both a territory of controlled
production (which had been a reality of Chicago's urban organisation
since the 1860s), and a domain of embodied authority, not just in the
obvious form of the Civic Centre, but in the form of the city itself.
This idea is evident in the axial, aerial perspective by Gurin:
the city is depicted in the rain at dusk, and a large urban plaza,
concourse-like and apparently reserved for the movement of important
transport, is dominated by the hulking, domed Civic
Centre. To cither side of the plaza are either museums, law courts or
subsidiary civic buildings; each is raised on a plinth to establish its
importance in relation to ordinary buildings, which can be seen here as
being rather Parisian in character. The drawing, like other views in the
series, invokes a fantasy of Paris, or iurope transplanted to the mid-West:
'The central administrative
building, as shown in the illustrations, is
surmounted by a dome of impressive height to be seen and felt by the
people, to whom it should stand as the symbol
of civic order and unity. Rising from the plain on which Chicago rests,
its effect may be compared to that of the dome in St Peter's in Rome...
Such a group of buildings as Chicago should and may possess would be
for all time to come a distinction of the city.
It would be what the Acropolis was to Athens, or the Forum to Rome,
and what St Marii's Square is to Venicethe very embodiment of civic
life."
The urban mass is depicted as a dense, homogeneous urban fabric,
cut through by gridded streets and axial boulevards to form roughly
equivalent blocks, repeating and extending to infinity, contiguous with
the horizon: the West. Extending until the horizon, Chicago becomes the
only feature of the world: there is only its mass where each block is in the
image of the other, its representational spaces and nodes, its bloated civic
monuments. Everything else is eliminated.

Mies van der Rohe

8. Sarah w h i t i n g , 'Bas-Relief
Urbanism IITs Figured Field', in
Phyllis Lambert ted.],Mies in
America (Montral/New York,
CCA and The Whitney Museum
of American Art, 2001)655
9. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies van
der Rohe (Chicago, Paul Theobold
Company, 1956) 179

When Mies van der Rohe was established in Chicago as the director
of the Illinois Institute of Technology, the powers of the city's
administrators had increased significantly since 1909. Large portions of
land in the city's impoverished Near South Side had been cleared
of communities to accommodate the growth of IIT and other institutions." A
similar strategy of urban clearance was used to set aside an area for a
multi-purpose hall to accommodate 50,000 people for conventions,
political and cultural meetings, trade shows and even theatrical and
musical events.' A site drawing comparable in manner to those produced
for IIT was used to describe the Convention Hall from the air.
In both cases, the drawings were used by the clients for publicity
purposes, to announce the schemes in the regular and specialist press.
These drawings use both drawing and photography to create a
collage, & photo-montage where the architectural or urban proposal

26

Ludwig
for

Mies van der Rohe,

a glass

skyscraper,

illustration board

(1922), Mies

der Rohe archive, M u s e u m

Modern

Art, New

project

charcoal

York

of

on

van
Ludwig
Convention

Mies van der

Hall,

Rohe,

Chicago.

?photo-

collage of model superimposed

aerial p h o t o g r a p h
der

(1953), Mies

Rohe archive, M u s e u m

Art, N e w

York

of

on
van

Modern

fictions

Picturing

13. Phyllis Lambert, 'Mies Immersion:

Introduction', in Phyllis Lambert
[ed.], Mies in America (Montral/
New York, CCA and The Whitney
Museum of American Art, 2001) 210

14. Detlef Mertins, 'Living in a Jungle:

Mies, Organic Arxhitecture and
the A r t of City Building', in Phyllis
Lambert [ed.],Mies in America
(Montral/New York, CCA and The
Whitney Museum of American Art,
2001) 633

15. Junior League of Savannah,

Malcolm Bell III [et a\.],Historic
Savannah (Savannah, Historic
Savannah Foundation, 1968) 5
Ludwig
Illinois

r^ies van
Institute

campus,

ROI^G,
Technology

photo-collage

superimposed

on

(1942), Mies van

M u s e u m

der
of

of

aerial
der

of

Rohe

Modei'n Art,

model

photograph
archive.

New

Yorl<

10. Phyllis Larrrbert, 'Mies Immersion:

Introduction', in Phyllis Lambert
[ed.], M e s in America (Montral/
New York, CCA and The Whitney
Museum of American Art, 2001) 205
11. George Baird, 'Looking for "the
Public" in Mies van der Robe's
concept for the Toronto-Dominion
Centre', in Detlef Mertins [ed.]. The
Presence of Mies (New York, Princeton
Architectural Press, 1994) 175
12. Sarah Whiting, 'Bas-Relief
Urbanism IITs Figured Field' in
Phyllis Lambert [ed.], Mies in
America (Montral/New York,
CCA and The Whitney Museum
of American Art, 2001) 663

acquires a degree of credibility through the incorporation of fragments

of actuality. IVIies had been using this technique since the 1920s, most
notably in his projects for a glass skyscraper in FriedrichstraSe, Berlin
(1921); the Adam department store, LeipzigerstraSe, Berlin (1928); a bank
building, Stuttgart (1928); and the remodelling of Alexanderplatz, Berlin
(1928). The intention of the photomontages was to project a world of order
that would simultaneously co-exist with and oppose the chaotic
contemporary urban environment.'"
This was also true of the photomontages produced for IIT and the
Convention Hall. A rectangular area in the photograph of the existing city
is excised and replaced with a blank sheet, a clearing, that serves as a
field for one major and two minor building blocks. One might say that
Mies's project as pictured is indifferent to its surroundings. However, it
has been persuasively argued that Mies was in fact sensitive to the
immediate surroundings of his projects, that his compositions were made
with rather than against the existing building fabric." It has also been
argued that Mies wished his spatial propositions to extend, conceptually,
into the surrounding city, as the effects that Mies sought were to be
appreciated from the ground and not from the air." These compositions
would seem to be Mies's interpretation of the omnivalence of the
ubiquitous American grid. The montages however, suggest antagonism

28

Peter Gordon,
i t stood

the

courtesy of
Inc.,

View

29th

of

Historic

Ithaca, New

Savannah

March,
Urban

as

1734,
Plans,

York, 14851,

U.S.A.

fictions

instead of any inferred continuity. Mies's buildings are always proposed

as protagonists in a play alongside the buildings of the city; a play that
pits simplicity and clarity against complication and chaos; light against
darkness; nobility against baseness.
In the collages for IIT and the Convention Hall, the city is characterised
as a sort of wilderness, 'a jungle'.'"' The empty space onto which Mies's
buildings are placed is at once a plinth, and a clearing. Mies himself
characterised the contemporary city in this way; 'In an interview of
1955... he revealed that his point of reference had shifted from the
centripetal metropolis to the decentralised, non-hierarchic, and
centrifugal urban landscape, ever expanding and changing. "There are
no cities, in fact, anymore. It goes on like a forest, that is the reason
why we cannot have the old cities anymore: that is gone forever,
planned city and so on. We should think about the means that we have
to live in a jungle, and maybe we do well by that.'"^'^
This is a powerful image-type which is often seen in the depiction
of cities at early stages of their development, at their origins. One such
image, from America, is an engraving of Savannah, Georgia, made by
one of its original settlers, Peter Gordon, in 1734. The town had been laid
out the year before. Here, there is clear distinction between the area of
occupation and a wilderness beyond it, one which was considered
dangerous and hostile, due to attack by aboriginals to the West and
Spanish troops to the south ('Whatever the source for the plan, military
considerations played a major role. The smallness of the lots and
squares made the town more compact and easier to defend.'^ In this
drawing, there is a contrast between the organisation of the town
(orderly, civic) and the wilderness: the panic-filled space beyond it.
The drawing has a mythic aura. The city exists in a clearing, a templum.
The clearing for the settlement holds this idea, as do the clearings made
by Mies in his drawings and projects for IIT and the Convention Hall. The
confusion between templum and temple is evident and productive here.
The clearings in Savannah and Chicago are places for Architecture. The
architecture is the protagonist, opposed to a hostile nature: in this case, the
historical city.