CITÉ INDUSTRIELLE, UNE

Unbuilt project designed by Tony Garnier, completed 1917
Une Cité industrielle, Etude pour la construction des villes (An Industrial Town, Study for the Construction of Towns, 1901–04, 1917),
Tony Garnier’s vast and complex project consisting of 164 plates for an imaginary
industrial town, incorporated classical, contemporary, and futuristic aspects. Modernist
architects considered it a significant pioneering work in modernism, one that retained
classical elements. Garnier himself, however, never participated in the Modern
movement. He practiced architecture without being overly concerned with the conflicts
between modernity and tradition. Later interpretations have compared the affinity of U ne Cité industrielle
with contemporary trends, such as the Garden City movement, debates on workers’
housing, Utopian literature, and the socialist tradition. Une Cité industrielle was foremost an innovation in
regional and town planning.
Garnier won the Rome Prize in 1899 as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris
and studied in Rome for four years. There he worked on Une Cité industrielle (which outraged the
conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts) and a project for the restoration of the ancient
city of Tusculum. Garnier exhibited drawings for Une Cité industrielle in 1904. The final, expanded 1917
version incorporated numerous projects that were realized in Lyons, Garnier’s native city,
to which he returned in 1905. The same year, Garnier met the 33-year-old radicalsocialist
mayor, Edouard Herriot. The two launched a program of construction that would
last three decades.
Une Cité industrielle is an astoundingly thorough visualization, from its overall conception down to
individual houses. Garnier emphasized zoning, circulation, hygiene, and industry,
considering both communal and individual aspects of life in a town of 35,000 inhabitants.
The general plan is based on the French academic tradition. However, the parklike setting
and the emphasis on pedestrian routes are comparable to the English Garden City
movement led by Ebenezer Howard and to the ideas of Camillo Sitte. The site was to be
near raw materials, sources of energy, and communication routes. The three main
functions of the town—production, housing, and health facilities—are clearly
distinguished. Residential and public areas are placed on a plateau, and the industrial
complex is situated on the periphery by the river. At the center of the residential area is a
cluster of public buildings, including an assembly hall, museums, libraries, theaters, and a
sports center. Around the railroad station is a mixture of tall residential and commercial
buildings, including an open market and a clock tower. Residential quarters are arranged
on an urban grid divided into lots of 15 by 15 meters. Each building is linked to a
pedestrian route so that people could cross the city in all directions independently of the
roads. All houses are detached. Courtyards are eliminated, and every room is lit and
ventilated directly from the outside. Each bedroom has at least one south-facing window
that lets in plenty of sunlight. All the interior walls and floors are made of smooth
material. Only half the residential area was to be built up, whereas the other half was to
form a kind of a communal garden.
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Garnier’s emphasis on hygiene, space, and the separation of pedestrian and automobile
traffic would resonate widely in the early 20th century. His conception of urban zoning
would have a profound impact on 20th-century town planning. Le Corbusier, who met
Garnier in 1907, was the first well-known architect to publicly acknowledge the influence
of Une Cité industrielle in 1921. Une Cité industrielle relies on reinforced concrete for the buildings that gives them a bare and
austere appearance. The houses are mostly free of ornamentation, with the exception of
several classical sculptures. The simplicity of material and means of construction were to
lead logically to great simplicity of expression in the structure, which then would support
a variety of decorative arts. Such ideas reveal an affinity with traditional architectural
theory, emphasizing preestablished harmonies. At the same time, Garnier’s influence
forced French architectural education to be more open to the concerns of New Urbanism.
Intellectual currents of the late 19th century provided inspiration for Une Cité industrielle. Many French
intellectuals embraced ideals of social progress deriving from the socialist tradition of
Charles Fourier, visions of a scientific and technological utopia espoused in both French
and foreign novels, and renewed interest for antiquities. Une Cité industrielle resembles the ideal city in
Emile Zola’s Travail (1900–01); the assembly hall of Une Cité industrielle has inscriptions from Travail. The absence of
a church, prison, court, police station, or military barracks fits with some of the
contemporary Utopian ideas, including the premise that society would provide medicine
and basic foodstuffs. Garnier’s premise rested on a systematic physical organization that
would best sustain the needs of the individual in a regional setting. In Lyons, Garnier
built a series of exemplary public buildings, such as a slaughterhouse-cattle market
complex (1909–13), an Olympic stadium (1913) with Greco-Roman allusions, and the
Grange-Blanche Hospital (1915), all of which were integrated into Une Cité industrielle. Une Cité industrielle enabled Garnier
to integrate his conceptions into Lyons, an existing, complex city, and thereby contribute
significantly to 20th-century architecture and urban planning.

CHURCH ON THE WATER

Designed by Tadao Ando; completed 1988 Hokkaido, Japan
Tadao Ando’s Church on the Water (1988) signaled a critical shift in the designer’s
approach and for that reason was widely heralded in the international press. Ando’s
earlier residential works were structured private domains that were isolated from their
surrounding urban contexts. The chapel, however, was a communal building designed for
an idealized landscape, Ando’s response to an earlier chapel on Mount Rokko (1986),
rather than for a specific site or client. This is why published presentation drawings do
not reflect the realities of the site, a point that would be otherwise odd, considering the
importance of nature in the design. It is also the reason that such a long period passed
between the building’s design in 1985 and its construction in Hokkaido in 1988.
In the Church on the Water, nature becomes an active force. The sanctuary is
essentially an open-ended shallow box, overwhelmed by a flat artificial pool. When the
only separation between the two territories, a large glass wall, is rolled to the side, it
erases any distinction between interior and exterior. Notably, this is also the only one of
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Ando’s churches in which the altar area is depressed rather than raised, a gesture that
increases the sense of spatial continuity and that is echoed in shallow terraces in the pond.
In the 1986 essay “Mutual Independence, Mutual Interpenetration,” Ando wrote,
“Within a site, architecture tries to dominate emptiness, but at the same time emptiness
dominates the architecture. If a building is to be autonomous and have its own character,
not only the building but the emptiness itself must have its own logic.” There are clear
parallels between Martin Heidegger and Eastern thought that make it difficult to
determine the roots of Ando’s phenomenology, but this character of nothingness, found
in the blank pool, holds an important place in both philosophical systems. It is not God
but, rather, man in nature that is the focus of this chapel. As Ando declared, “To
experience God in this natural setting, perhaps, is to experience the encounter with one’s
own spirit” (Ando, 1989). Elsewhere, Ando goes further: “For me, the nature that a
sacred space must relate to is man-made, or rather an architecturalized nature. I believe
that when greenery, water, light or wind is abstracted from nature-as-is according to
man’s will, it approaches the sacred” (Ando, 1991).
The building was intended not as a religious structure but simply as a commercial
chapel for wedding services. In a country where only an infinitesimal percentage of the
population is Christian, the fashion of having “Christian” weddings is merely a reflection
of Westernization. Thus, many of the conventional accoutrements of a church are
unnecessary, in keeping with Ando’s characteristic ascetic minimalism. With economic
pros-perity in the 1980s, young Japanese also embraced the larger Christian wedding
ceremony as an opportunity for display. As a result, Ando’s wedding chapels share with
several other projects from the 1980s an irony: although he established a critical attitude
in opposition to the comfort and decorative tendencies in architecture of the period, his
works were embraced by the very consumer culture he denounced.
Some critics have implied that this was merely a “radical chic” gesture by fashionable
Japanese, but it is worth noting that Ando’s work was also compatible with a narcissism
characteristic of the time. In 1986, Ando was developing a conception of space based on
the physicality of the body and the use of the walls and floors as framing devices,
articulated in his 1988 Englishlanguage piece “Shintai and Space.” In Japanese, the word
shintai has three meanings; the most common use of the word refers to religious icons and other
objects intended for worship. In addition, the word indicates one’s own body or a course
of action. Had Ando used Japanese characters in writing his piece, he would have had to
choose one of these meanings. In English, it was possible for him to fuse them; he
explains that shintai refers not only to the body but also to “spirit and flesh” and declares that
the genus loci of a site is grasped only through the shintai.
It is difficult not to measure the space with one’s body. Small granite pavers in the
sanctuary are only slightly more than shoulders’ span in length. The markings of
formwork on Ando’s trademark concrete walls are the size of a single bed, and because
the walls of this building are almost three feet thick, the imprints of form-tie separator
cones are very close together. Risers are shallow and benches low, and the chairs for the
nervous bride and groom are fragile perches. Thus, despite Ando’s austere and even
brutish use of unfinished concrete, the building has a delicacy and human scale.
Kenneth Frampton notes that the Church on the Water was “patently influenced” by
Kaija and Heikki Siren’s Otaniemi Chapel (1957) for the Helsinki Institute of
Technology. The building is less often considered in literature today because the concepts
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that Ando initiated here are more skillfully carried out in subsequent works. The religious
implications of architecture as a site for the body in nature are more convincingly
executed in the later Water Temple (1992). The shallow proportions of the Church on the
Water’s sanctuary led to Ando’s many outdoor amphitheaters, in which inconsequential
stages and the lack of a backdrop make nature the real drama—including the first, the
Theater on the Water (1987), planned for another site at the same Hokkaido resort. Even
the avatar-like cross standing in the pool and the framework of crosses on the roof of the
church later reemerged as freestanding colonnades forming spatial filters in Ando’s
works from the late 1980s.
Francesco Dal Co has written that Ando is “completing building after building with
astonishing speed, but only able to do so by falling back on the design and conceptual
procedures he had worked out in earlier researches.” In this designer’s work, it is often
not the variations on concepts that are of interest but their genesis. More than 15 years
after its completion, the Church on the Water remains a source of inspiration for the
architect; it is clearly the model for Ando’s Chapel of the Sea, completed at the end of
1999 as part of the Awaji Island Yume Butai.