Course Syllabus

Columbia University
GSAPP, A6817
Fall 2016
Tuesday, 11-1, Buell 300S
Mary McLeod
Office hours: Thursday, 2-3:30


“Built in Uncertainty”: Shadrach Woods, A Search for a System
A Research Colloquium


“It isn’t geniuses we need now.”
—José Antonio Coderch, 1960


“Our primary concern is neither the making of objects in space, nor the enclosure of spaces, however, significant these may be. Our concern is the organization of places and ways for dwelling today, and to the extent of our possibilities, tomorrow.”
—Shadrach Woods, 1962


“We are concerned, not with ‘architecture’ or ‘town planning,’ but with the creation of the environment at every scale. . . . The problems which we face in making our world are entirely new. . . . The concept of society towards which we strive: that of a completely open, non-hierarchical co-operative in which we all share on a basis of total participation and complete confidence. . . .We cannot think of planning in static terms, in three-dimensional space, when we live in a four-dimensional world. The realization, for instance, that the scene of action of reality is not a three-dimensional Euclidian space, but rather a four-dimensional world, in which space and time are linked together indissolubly, sets are civilization apart from any others.”
—Shadrach Woods, 1964


“The fault of course lies not in the plan but in ourselves. . . . We do not practice democracy nor do we live in an open society . . . we hold these up as ideals to be revered, while going about the sordid business of getting and spending.”
—Shadrach Woods, 1964


“And if there are no more cities, we return to savagery.”
—Shadrach Woods, 1967


“We could go on to understanding and accepting the planet as a single city-organization. The physical form of the global city, the geometry of its web of communication, the constellation of points of intensity of activity, of production and exchange cannot be predetermined. Those constellations are constantly shifting; the web deforms and reforms itself to accommodate them.”
—Shadrach Woods, 1975 (posthumous)


This colloquium investigates the architecture and thinking of Shadrach Woods and the firm Candilis- Josic-Woods, using the archives of Shadrach Woods, located in Avery Library. It is the intention of the class that students gain a detailed knowledge of these drawings and papers, conduct interviews (taped and transcribed oral histories), select documents for a publication, and write introductions to texts and descriptions of projects for this publication. The course is envisioned as a research workshop for a book to be published by GSAPP of Shadrach Woods’ writings with some illustrations of projects. While the focus is on primary research, it is hoped that students will also gain a solid background in architectural developments relevant to the practice of Candilis-Josic-Woods (notably, the architecture and planning theories of Le Corbusier, CIAM, Team 10) and a knowledge contemporary social, economic, and cultural currents in postwar France and in the United States (such as colonial housing, postwar reconstruction in France, the Grands Ensembles and housing policy, emergence of the Welfare State, the development of mass leisure and consumer society, the Lindsay administration and New York City urban development, American architecture education, etc.). In conjunction with the seminar, there will also be a series of presentations by individuals who worked with or studied with Woods (such as Waltraude Woods and Peter Papademetriou) and by scholars who are familiar with aspects of the firm’s work or the cultural context of the period (such as Maria González, Inderbir Riar, Gabriel Feld, and Rosemary Wakeman).


Woods’s production, along with that of others at Candilis-Josic-Woods and his fellow participants in Team 10, represents a significant shift in the evolution of modern architecture. Though deeply indebted to the work of Le Corbusier and of the first generation of modern architects, Woods and his colleagues sought another kind of modern architecture, one that was more responsive to human needs and desires, and less rigid in its formal resolution. They did not reject functionalism or the commitment to mass housing, but these second-generation modernists saw social parameters (community, street life, urban culture, social exchange, and collective values) as important as—or more important than—more pragmatic concerns, whether structure or program. They were eager to create spaces and forms of habitation that accommodated and fostered everyday life--a richer, and more fulfilling everyday life. Their emphasis on uniting architecture with ordinary urban culture—what Tom Avermaete has somewhat provocatively called “acculturation”—might be seen as part of a broader postwar movement known as the “New Humanism.” However, insistent they were on these human subjective elements, however, Woods and his partners, along with their fellow Team 10 members (Bakema, de Carlo, the Smithsons, van Eyck, and others) also confronted the large-scale realities of postwar construction and the emergence of a full-fledged consumer society. Many of their projects were huge; one large group of housing projects that C-J-W designed was erected under a program called “Operation Million.” Leisure, entertainment, and mass-education were all important areas in their explorations. The formal implications of this change in focus are at times paradoxical: while the architecture of C-J-W is deeply indebted to the postwar work of Le Corbusier—concrete; plain surfaces, primary colors, brise soleils or balconies—it dispenses with platonic forms and regular geometry, and the sophisticated planar plays and transparencies of “Purist” composition, for forms of organization that accommodate growth, change, and more complex social patterns. With Woods’s idea of the “stem” and “web,” the notion of boundary or formal definition itself comes into question.

 

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