Scott's Six(7) Fallacies

For a slightly more detailed description of Geoffrey Scott's six fallacies of architecture (with the addition of his own fallacy) click here. I'm still developing my understanding of the fallacies and these examples. I am not sure about a couple of them, most notably the empathy fallacy, and the Porphyrios gallery in Nebraska (you have to admit the building is gorgeous).

 

Romantic Fallacy (Poetic)

Modern Example: 

Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier. It represents its own age as an association with a machine itself.

Traditional Example: 

The Duncan Gallery, Dmitri Porphyros. The New Schinkel – Germany’s version of Greek Revival. He makes good architecture through allusion to very specific precedents. This architecture can be considered good on the grounds that it is beautifully constructed, is a villa in the country, and because we associate it with Greek architecture, or Greek Revival architecture, also on other very good grounds. Does Porphyrios really believe classism is not a style? He might also be placed under the mechanical fallacy. Or it could be argued that because Schinkel really was great Porphyrios can get away with imitating him, especially since he does it so well.

Romantic Fallacy (Naturalism and Picturesque)

Modernist Example:

(Naturalism) Einstein Tower, Potsdam, Erich Menelsohn. Uses natural curves and shapes.

Traditional Example: (Picturesque) 

New Piazza in Alessandria, Italy, Leon Krier. Expressionist and associative, very picturesque. Trying to make it look old and built up over time. Eclectic.

Mechanical Fallacy

Modernist Example:

860–880 Lake Shore Drive, Meis van der Rohe. They represent their structure.

Traditional Example: 

Design for a Concert Hall, Viollet le Duc. Most current traditionalists get this fallacy, except for early traditionalists, Aldo Rossi? Traditional forms but allowing them to be machine like----postmodernism.

Ethical Fallacy

Modernist Example:

Unite d’Habitation, Corbu. This was supposed to make moral citizens.

Traditional Example: 

Zeppelinhaupttribüne, Albert Spier

Biological Fallacy

Modernist Example:

?

This shouldn't be hard, just use your imagination, maybe the "Cloud Pavilion" in Zurich.

Traditional Example:

West Dean Visitor Center, Christopher Alexander. A windowsill at the wrong height makes you sick. Scientifically grounding traditional architecture.

Academic Tradition

Modern Example: 

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao Frank Gehry. No theory, no tradition.

Traditional Example: 

St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel, Duncan Stroik. Cut and past Palladio w/Spanish Colonial?

(7) Empathy Fallacy

Modernist Example:

 Goetheanum, Rudolph Steiner

Traditional Example: 

Heurtley House, Frank Lloyd Wright

The Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette

“Concrete is a material that does not cheat; it replaces, it cuts out the need for that trickster – coating. Béton Bruts says: I am concrete.” -Le Corbusier 

Oh, what dramatic words Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris!

It is not surprising that Le Corbusier, should have designed a monastery. After all, Modernists have often claimed precedents in the great Cistercian abbeys of the Middle Ages such as Fontaine, whose bleak, unfinished walls and stubborn austerity reflect the strict self-denial of its order. Perhaps more similarities have been found between this genre of architecture and modernism than actually exist if we were to understand the underlying principals of Christianity and those of a historicist ideology, nonetheless, La Tourette is a place where this exercise in concrete manages to at least not insult its function and role. (I'm still thinking about that last statement.

The Dominican monastery of La Tourette is located above the town of L’Arbresle about 25 kilometers outside of Lyon. This was Le Corbusier’s last major building and was begun in 1953. Though a staunch atheist, Le Corbusier designed several religious buildings. One can only ask why he was hired to do them, as his entire theory of architecture was diametrically opposed to religion. Regardless, the monastery still stands as a bleak monument to the dubious architectural innovations of the 20th century, and as a Mecca for aging modernist architects.

The form of the building is that of a large rectangle supported on piers, and located on a sloping hill such that the back of the building is at ground level and the front is some 25 feet above the field it looms over. The plan is laid out as a simple rectangle surrounding an open courtyard, yet upon entering the building, the complicated and intricate fluidity of the promenade, circulation and seemingly randomly placed structures is difficult to make sense of. Essentially, it is a U-shaped cell block for the monks closed off by the more solid chapel structure. The U shape puts the monk’s cells on the outside with circulation running around the inside and almost entirely open to the inside space through the use of large windows which use concrete in patterns which Le Corbusier designed after the music of the monk’s daily services.

The building is approached from the North by its least eloquent side and at the top – the wrong way round as it were. In the words of the modernists "the imposing wall of the church suddenly rises up against the sunlight, recalling (alluding to?) images of ancient walled abbeys."

From here we gain a view of the interior of the “cloister" and the cell block’s interior with its many windows. Indeed, the structure is imposing with its brutal concrete seeming to the viewer like a bunker or massive bridge pier.

The building is constructed almost entirely of reinforced concrete, used both structurally, and as venire structure supported from large “pilotis” as Le Corbusier called them, or central columns which raised the building off the ground and freed the walls of the façade for long strip windows. These pilotis unlock glimpses of the "central void" containing the enclosed cloister whose form bears none of the features of traditional cloisters; instead, one follows an internal “promenade intricately interwoven with diverse components contrasting sharply with the underlying simplicity of the plan."

What makes this a good example of the use of concrete is that it uses concrete as a finish material. Nowhere in this structure is there a use of a finish material or coating for the concrete that is the structure. From the “pilotis” that support the building to the walls and even windows, concrete is used in its raw unfinished form.

Béton bruts is a concrete finish that is achieved by using wooden planks as the form for the concrete. This leaves the concrete with a rough finish with the direct imprint of the sawn wood. Often this can be so convincing that if painted it can look just like weatherboarding or panels. This was not the intent of le Corbusier. He sought a sincerity in an architecture that did not “lie.” Throughout La Tourette béton bruts is used to give the concrete as rough a texture as possible in an effort to not only let us know it is concrete, but to never let us forget it. Because the concrete used these forms to get the rough finish, it was necessarily poured in place concrete. Depending on the forms that the concrete was to take it was smoothed to greater or lesser degrees. Here is an example of béton brut where we can see how the final finish reflects the formwork of the concrete.

While parts of the building retain the strict form of the rectangle, others break free of straight lines and achieve strange contours and curves, such as these light passages in ceilings of the side chapels.

The concrete is used right up to the details, formed up even to hold the paines of glass to be found in most of the windows.

Overall, the use of concrete in this building is not so amazing simply in its structural qualities. The “pilotis” system had been used many times by Le Corbusier. Rather, it was its combination of structure and aesthetics into a single unmasked entity: the building itself. The very austerity and starkness of the building was seen as beautiful and appropriate to its function as a place of self denial and meditation.

Here is a watercolour I did of La Tourette quand j'avais six ans!