Alison Smithson How to Recognize and Read Mat Building

Dismantling and reframing programme and composition, mat-building envisaged architecture as a dynamic, flexible armature

We owe the term mat-building to Alison Smithson. Her commodity 'How to Recognise and Read Mat-Building. Mainstream Architecture as it has Developed Towards the Mat-Building' in Architectural Design of September 1974 included a definition of this blazon of building and an extensive list of works and projects from the 1950s to the '70s related to information technology. Several studies have recently revived the involvement in this topic.¹ As in the case of the buildings themselves, the appeal of re-reading Smithson'south article lies in its open and flexible theoretical framing.

Smithson reviewed the items discussed at Team ten meetings, pointing out that mat-buildings were not dependent on a specific architectural linguistic communication, and identifying sure contemporary works equally offshoots of this phenomenon. 'Mainstream mat-edifice became visible, however, with the completion of the Berlin Gratis University', she said − only what are the feature features of a mat-building? We aim to answer this question by analysing five case studies: iv projects mentioned past Alison Smithson and another in our own locale of Valencia. Our research, which gave rise to an exhibition, explains and provides articulate examples of the main mat-building strategies. The basic hypothesis focused on 3 compositional principles: metrics, programme and identify.

Original contest drawings illustrating the Complimentary University of Berlin by Candilis, Josic, Woods and Scheidhelm

To understand those decades of the last century, some context is needed. The link betwixt Team ten'south ideas and French structuralism had already been analysed, demonstrating the belief of that generation of architects in the new social sciences, the application of relational thinking to the plan, and the legacy of linguistics to be seen in the re-organisation of architectonic and urban concepts.^two Examples include the revised concept of association, the business organization for cultural identity, and the understanding of urban life as a function of the relationships among its inhabitants.

It is no coincidence that this happened at a fourth dimension of social and economic growth. Subsequently recovering from the 2nd World War, the countries of central Europe aimed for a welfare state requiring new programmes for a growing middle grade. Large housing estates, tourist facilities, universities and administrative centres were oftentimes commissioned with brusque lead-times and governed past notions of flexibility and growth. They all allude to Opera aperta (The Open Work) a term coined past Umberto Eco in 1962 in the realm of aesthetic theory, insofar every bit, every bit with works of art, their lack of formal definition is precisely the key to their potential multiplicity. 'The author is the one who proposed a number of possibilities which had already been rationallyorganized, oriented and endowed with specifications for proper evolution', writes Eco.^three

Courtyard at the Free University of Berlin. Starting time conceived in 1963 and completed 10 years afterward. FU-Berlin'south open-plan layout, a city in miniature, perfectly epitomised the dynamism and potential of mat-building

Much of the compages designed on the ground of these referents is systematic from conceptual and constructive perspectives, and shares strategies during its creative procedure. Mat-building seemed to utilize new tools that dismantled the compositional principles of the early modern period. In the concluding quarter of 1963, Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods worked in conjunction with the German architect Manfred Schiedhelm in two competitions, the results of which took critics by surprise. Although the pattern for the reconstruction of the centre of Frankfurt-Römerberg was non retained, it triggered a heated debate that culminated in the announcement of the winning design for the Complimentary University of Berlin.

The Frankfurt plan entails thoughtful interaction with a well-established setting. The local council that organised the contest wanted to rebuild the city centre in keeping with the historical character of a site that had been bombed during the war, past using 'boondocks planning featuring small blocks − either modern in way or imitating the onetime ones'.^iv However, the planning arroyo was based on a compositional network that could be adjusted to cater for the urban center's future needs. The authors divers the project as a flexible megastructure on a scale direct related to the pre-existing construction.

1963 competition drawing for the reconstruction of the eye of Frankfurt-Römerberg, by Candilis, Josic, Forest and Scheidhelm

Many of Candilis, Josic and Forest' aspirations finally materialised in the paradigmatic Complimentary University of Berlin whose open-plan design − typical of the universities in the 1960s − matched the characteristics of mat-building perfectly. This university is an infrequent example: its construction involved the French engineer Jean Prouvé and was overseen by the Berlin studio run by Manfred Schiedhelm, in collaboration with the American architect Shadrach Woods. In addition, the university was reconditioned and enlarged with a library past Foster + Partners, resulting in new reviews.

'In the Free University of Berlin, the module is a function of time: 65.63 metres (some other Modulor dimension), is roughly the distance covered by a ane-infinitesimal walk'

Le Corbusier and Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente's design for the Venice Hospital (1964-65) is seen as the culmination of a line of piece of work, merely could as well be deemed to be a sort of mat-building. The search for an chemical element able to echo itself and spread out culminated in the definition of the blueprint module, or Unité de Bâtisse: a book with no facades, lit past natural light directly overhead, with admission on the ground floor, and which spirals upwards and is complemented by a horizontal apportionment grid.

Another singular example is Alison and Peter Smithson'due south design for Kuwait entitled 'Urban Written report and Demonstration Mat-Edifice (1968-72)'.^five This project involved 2 points of particularinterest to the discipline under study here: its empathy with Arabic civilisation and tradition of open spaces, and the introduction of climate control elements. The architects of the Kuwait project, despite its after engagement, in one case once more employed a mat-building design considering it enabled them to include the vast and heterogeneous programme required past the original ideas competition.

Urban Study and Demonstration Mat-Building for Kuwait, past Alison and Peter Smithson, empathises with Standard arabic culture and its tradition of open spaces and climate command

Oblivious to the theoretical framework of these discussions, but undeniably immersed in a discipline, many works of architecture reproduce mat-building principles with remarkable simplicity. This is the example of the building designed and built between 1970 and 1974 for the Universitat Politècnica de València past L35, an architectural do from Barcelona. Similar other contemporary campuses, the design of this campus incorporates the departmental program into its functional distribution, and is congenital of prefab concrete characterised by an obvious formal clarity.

Completed in 1974, the groundscaping programme of the Universitat Politécnica de Valencia in Espana by L35 Arquitectos typifies and rationalises the mat-building ideals of flexibility and growth

Compositional principle 1: Metrics

A mat-edifice is a large-calibration, high-density structure organised on the ground of an accurately modulated grid. A first look at any mat-edifice geometry shows a ground program in the form of a regular grid that constitutes the general order. Yet, farther assay of the drawings reveals certain specific characteristics.

Commencement, the size of the module used for the projection is surprising. Frankfurt, Berlin and Venice have the red and blue serial of Le Corbusier's Modulor in mutual. Georges Candilis and Shadrach Woods met and began their careers at Rue de Sèvres, and their indebtedness, in this respect, is clear to see. In any example, in each of the 3 proposals but a few centimetres provide the starting bespeak for designing buildings hundreds of metres in size (Figure A).

Figure A (click to overstate)

In addition, the Modulor series forms the module which is multiplied in both directions to create all kinds of variations. In Frankfurt, Berlin and Kuwait half modules were also employed. In Venice, in that location are few complete modules in the plan since nearly lack a quadrant (Figure B).

Figure B (click to overstate)

The bones Frankfurt module is approximately half that of Berlin, and is determined past the width of the pedestrian streets: iii.66 metres (Modulor dimension) which just happens to be the same equally the archways around the Odéon theatre in Paris.⁶ The complete module measures 36.47 metres, ie, the depth of the side by side buildings. In the Free University of Berlin, the module is a function of time: 65.63 metres (some other Modulor dimension), ie, roughly the distance covered by a one-infinitesimal walk.

The formal structure of Venice Hospital starts with consecutive additions: several Unités de Lit or bed modules (based on a module of ii.96m, a Modulor dimension) combine with several service rooms to form a Unité de Soins, or treatment module. Four Unités de Soins and the corresponding corridors constitute a Unité de Bâtisse; and finally, the hospital consists of a specific number of Unités de Bâtisse, square rooms about 60m along each side.^seven Le Corbusier uses a completely dissimilar procedure to form a size very like to the one used by his colleagues in Berlin (Effigy C).

Figure C (click to overstate)

On the other paw, Alison and Peter Smithson'south buildings in State of kuwait, using a basic module of twenty metres (4 x 5 metres), and the Universitat Politécnica de Valencia, with a 36m module (based on the 3m series), approach the Frankfurt scale and demonstrate the effectiveness of circular-figure metrics.

Furthermore, it must be said that the concluding upshot does not exceed a specific maximum dimension, ie, 400 metres, or a six-infinitesimal walk, according to the other scale used. It would seem that larger dimensions would overwhelm and jeopardise the pattern.

Finally, the analysis of the underlying patterns in each case written report revealed a circuitous grid of strips forming a tartan-similar material. Each strip tin be understood to be a widened grid line that houses a gear up of specific functions. This purpose-built grid is only a framework or fixed base upon which a volume may (or may not) be built. Information technology is precisely this ambivalence that enables compositional flexibility resulting in stratified and profusely perforated buildings (Figure D).

Effigy D (click to enlarge)

Compositional principle 2: Programme

Issues related to the program also ascend in the form of shared strategies in mat-building. In the words of Alison Smithson's definition, 'Mat-building can be said to epitomise the bearding collective, where the functions come to enrich the fabric, and the private gains new freedoms of activeness through a new and shuffled order, based on interconnection, shut-knit patterns of association, and possibilities for growth, diminution and change'. The five instances studied practice indeed respond to this premise, directly linked to the relational thinking prevalent in the 1960s and '70s.

Under Claude Lévi-Strauss's influence, structuralism embraces social phenomena like an 'abstract arrangement constructed from relations among elementary units'. Indeed, the structure would be 'a set of rules for defining relationships and correspondences'. These words tin can be practical literally to the functions of a mat-building, based on dismantling the programme's functions, emphasising circulations and destructuring formal hierarchies.

Analysis of plans for Frankfurt-Römerberg, by Candilis, Josic, Woods and Scheidhelm. Though hardly distinguishable on the original drawings, dissimilar activities, such equally offices, shops, housing and cultural facilities, enable the resulting mat-edifice to exist seen as a living organism

In the Frankfurt and State of kuwait projects, the architects mention functional hybridisation as a value added. In both cases, the design includes offices, shops, housing, hotels and cultural facilities: dissimilar activities enabling the edifice to always be seen every bit a living organism. In Frankfurt, each of these parts of the programme is hardly recognisable on the general plan. Candilis, Josic and Wood were called 'anti-monumental architects' − a label they were very proud of − because their urban intervention had no hint of representation more in keeping with the site's symbolic nature. In Kuwait, the Smithsons do not detail the regulations; there are no furnished plans or sections − the activities on each level are simply described in the architects' report. Administrative services are laid downwards similar layers, moving from public to private realms, pierced by vertical advice towers and ventilation shafts.

The Venice infirmary also uses layers of functions similar to those in Kuwait. The Unité de Bâtisse or basic pattern module follows a pre-established order past levels. The basis floor built on pilotis is a public area consisting of two mezzanines where general services are provided and admissions take identify. The side by side level is used for medical aid (surgeries and operating theatres) and is also subdivided into two mezzanines that separate circulations from the other areas. The top floor is occupied by wards. Since each Unité de Bâtisse is intended to accommodate a medical service, calculation them together enables all functions to be interwoven similar an intricate pipage network. Some ramps and corridors are reserved for doctors and patients while the vertical cores are occupied past lifts for visitors and 'dirty' and 'clean' service shafts.

Analysis of the program of Venice Hospital by Le Corbusier showing apportionment paths

Assay of departmental plan and circulation flows at the FU-Berlin. Lack of hierarchy is an inherent characteristic of mat-buildings

Kuwait and Venice also resemble each other as regards circulation. In both cases the freedom of movement permitted by an unobstructed basis floor − emphasised past dotted lines on Alison and Peter Smithson's plans − contrast with the movement in a building conditioned past vertical apportionment cores.

Meanwhile, the Berlin and Valencia projects brand it clear that the departmental programme characteristic of European universities in the 1960s is suitable for mat-building. Get-go, academy operations tally with the relational concept of the mat-building insofar as they prioritise correspondences between departments rather than the traditional separation into independent faculties. This fosters informal pedagogy based on the spontaneous encounters between students, teachers and researchers in the broad corridors. It also caters for increasing numbers of students and changes in curricula which require flexible structures that can exist enlarged. And, finally, it encourages the free-flowing substitution of knowledge in keeping with the mat-building'south inherent lack of hierarchy.

Topological organisational diagram for the Universitat Politécnica de Valencia mapping out the relative position of the elective departments and their distance from the centre of the university. This organisational diagram thus becomes the basis for the plan

Walkways and courtyard at the Universitat Politécnica de Valencia in Spain by L35 Arquitectos

In Berlin, the real teaching occurs in the common areas such as interior walkways, courtyards and the gentle ramps between the 2 levels of this distinctly horizontal organism. In Valencia, the pattern process is dictated by a painstaking report of the departmental programme: depending on the number of semesters in which a student on 1 caste course attends two different departments, the architects quantify the intensity of the human relationship betwixt the two departments. They and so utilise these data as coordinates to draw a topological system diagram that establishes the relative position of the departments and their distance from the eye of the university: the Agora. After this analysis, the resulting organization diagram is accuratelytransferred to the general plan. The architect of the mat-building is, above all, an organiser.

Compositional principle iii: Place

Business firm and city have an identical nature to which the mat-edifice offers a structural synthesis.^eight The dialogue with the (urban) place to which the mat-building belongs − or, at least, helps build ex novo − is the third principle in common to the five cases analysed. Not for nothing did some reveal the well-established metropolis to be a staunch supporter of the project. This is the case in Frankfurt: the site of an old urban fabric destroyed during the war is now equipped with a network that has recuperated some of its former morphological features within a new order: the previous grain texture, the connection with the firsthand setting and the functional multiplicity of the replaced fragment tin be seen in the new, reorganised formalisation. The Candilis, Josic, Woods design demonstrates the common values of the traditional city and the urban fabric composed by the mat-edifice.

Urban plans of Frankfurt showing the original dense grain of the textile (above) and the reorganised formalisation of the Candilis, Josic, Woods and Scheidhelm proposal (below)

The care with which Le Corbusier depicted the buildings typical of Venice near the hereafter hospital reveals a regard for the celebrated city similar to Candilis, Josic and Woods' mental attitude to Frankfurt which, in the case of Venice, also concerns cultural identity. It is, in fact, the campiellos (squares) and calli (streets) of Venice that construction the in-patients' floor: an immense tapestry raised in a higher place the lake on an increasingly large building. In this way the different Unités de Bâtisse reverberate these two elements of Venice urbanism as if the construction of the hospital was an enlargement of the metropolis it was built for.

In Kuwait, the minarets of mosques are used as nodes of a visual spider web that fragment the mat-building and canalise the galleries while anchoring the new design to the tradition of the place.The minarets operate every bit a network of fixed points in the territory that offset the lack of urban definition in a way mentioned by the Smithsons in the article 'Fix', published in the December 1960 issue of the AR.⁹

Plan of Le Corbusier's Venice Infirmary (outlined in ruddy) showing how it is raised above the site, like a tapestry or slice of city

Section through the Venice hospital showing its clear horizontal functional stratification

On the reverse, the universities of Berlin and Valencia are both isolated from the consolidated city. Each could, still, be said to be a city in itself − with Berlin capable of spreading outand weaving its networks betwixt the isolated buildings of Berlin-Dahlem, and Valencia capable of recreating a recurrent urban utopia of those days by employing a horizontal stratification that strictly separates vehicular traffic (on the basis floor) from pedestrians (on a platform characterised by spontaneous social interaction).^x

Before Alison Smithson chosen this blazon of architecture 'mat-building' in 1974, Shadrach Woods had already referred to the Complimentary University of Berlin equally a 'groundscraper'. In some sketches for that competition Wood alleged, 'In skyscraper type buildings disciplines tend to be segregated. The relationship from one floor to another is tenuous, almost fortuitous, passing through the space-machine-lift. In a groundscraper organisation greater possibilities of customs and exchange are present without necessarily sacrificing any serenity.'

Visual web of the Smithsons' Kuwait projection using minarets as nodes and familiar stock-still anchoring points in a territory that lacks urban definition

Both terms were equally expressive and summarised some strategies opposed to modernity as information technology had been known so far. Form did non follow function; on the contrary, at that place were noaprioristic forms simply certain human activities that would somewhen define them. The city was non functional simply relational, not made of isolated objects on a costless ground flooring. Now, ashapeless congenital mass was spreading out and arresting whatever variations in the plan. This is no identify for atypical figures only for a system decumbent to serialise, regulate and repeat them. All these standpoints reveal the logical continuity of compages in keeping with the environmental concerns of the '60s and '70s. Shadrach Woods devoted his last books to explaining this new direction to American readers − What U Tin can Do (Rice Academy, 1970) and The Man in the Street (Penguin Books, 1975) − and an ironical Alison Smithson reproached him for such theories which, in her opinion, merely made sense wherever the Modern Movement had not all the same made inroads.¹¹

REFERENCES

1. Since the Harvard Design Schoolhouse published Instance: Le Corbusier's Venice Infirmary and the Mat Building Revival, Hashim Sarkis (ed), Munich, London, New York: Prestel Verlag, 2001, many academic manufactures have been published in different journals.
two. Jean-Louis Violeau: 'Squad 10 and Structuralism: Analogies and Discrepancies', in Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel, Team 10. 1953-81. In Search of a Utopia of the Present, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005, pp280-85.
3. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, p19.
four. Georges Candilis, Bâtir la vie. Un architecte témoin de son temps, Paris: Infolio Éditions, 2012, p231.
v. AR September 1974, pp179-ninety.
six. As the banana builder Manfred Schiedhelm recounts, this Corbusian Modulor dimension of 3.66m was considered functionally 'very suitable' in the Candilis, Josic, Wood studio. The architects' office was near the Odéon theatre and they often went past information technology.
seven. María Cecilia O'Byrne Orozco, El proyecto para el Hospital de Venecia de Le Corbusier, thesis. Director: Josep Quetglas, Departament de Projectes Arquitectònics, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2007.
8. Alan Colquhoun recalls Alberti's analogy when addressing the 'superblock', in Nerveless Essays in Architectural Criticism, London: Black Canis familiaris, 2009, p78.
ix. Alison & Peter Smithson, 'Fix', AR Dec 1960, pp437-39.
ten. According to Reyner Banham, '60s university campuses are the fulfilment of sure urban utopias which, in many other cases, never got off the cartoon lath. Run into Banham: Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Contempo Past, London: Thames and Hudson, 1976, p131.
11. Alison Smithson, 'A Worried Human. Human being in the Street. By Shadrach Forest', AR November 1976, pp317-xviii.

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Source: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/the-strategies-of-mat-building

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