Albert Pope, ZRO Zone Research,

Redevelopment of the Fifth Ward,

Houston, Texas, 2007
Oblique view of the Fifth Ward
redevelopment proposal that shows
an isolated view of spine 2.14 looking
from south to north. The build-up of the
part-to-part relations of the three building
types develops along the axis parallel
to the viewing plane along the southern
cluster and perpendicular to the viewing
plane along the northern cluster.

80
Albert Pope

THE
UNI-
FIED
PRO-
JECT 81
Albert Pope argues that a unified The built environment is divided against itself. This division comes
from the stringent classification of urban construction into mutually
architectural and urban project is exclusive spheres: ‘building’ and ‘infrastructure’. One sphere contains
not possible without addressing the buildings of all types ranging from the poorhouse to the opera
house, and is inclusive of architecture. The other contains what
conceptual divide that exists between we classify as urban infrastructure – the overall layout of streets
building and infrastructure. It is a and services upon which buildings are constructed. These divided
split that was first set in motion by spheres constitute conceptual ghettos whose isolation obscures
solutions to some of our most pressing urban concerns. These
the breakdown of Modernism in concerns – all demanding a clear conception of the urban whole –
the 1960s and was reaffirmed by cannot be resolved within the confines of either domain.
The separation between building and infrastructure is not new
the rise of Postmodernism. Since to the design discourse and can be recognised in a slew of binary
then, architectural form and urban terms that have animated discussion over the last half-century:
infrastructure have not only remained art/engineering, form/utility, icon/tool, intuition/calculation,
immeasurable/measurable and superstructure/base. This essay argues
disjointed, but have been overtly that the balkanisation of the physical environment into opposing
celebrated by the collages and categories stems from the stubborn conceptual division that keeps
urban objects locked tightly into non-intersecting knowledge bases
juxtapositions of the contemporary with opposing cultures – one for building, one for infrastructure
and the historic in our cities. – if not opposing states of mind. The intention is to break down
this structural separation in order to facilitate what might be
considered one of the most urgent tasks of urban discourse today:
the construction of a unified project, a project that draws its built
forms directly from contemporary urban infrastructure, ultimately
constituting a new architecture of the city.
The unity of architecture and urbanism was, of course, one of
the hallmarks of Modernism. Indeed, it was under the flag of such
unity that the Modernists’ battle against the academy was largely
fought and provisionally won. This victory was most apparent in

Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, Greimas Square mapping the split between
Spain, 1997 urban building and urban infrastructure
left: View of the main entrance from Calle below: The relation between building and
de Iparraguirre. The axial relationship infrastructure is set up on a simplified Greimas
between the museum’s main entrance Square where oppositions are mapped onto two
and the Calle de Iparraguirre reconstructs axes and resulting quadrants are occupied by
the traditional relationship between four urban scenarios.
a hierarchical monument framed by
secondary street walls. Jeff Koons’s Puppy
looks down the axis of the old street in
a typical manner save the ‘irony’ of the
sculpture’s subject matter. Absent the rich
cognitive context provided by the 19th-
century plan, the Guggenheim would be an
entirely different building.

82
overcoming the academic restriction of capital ‘A’ Architecture (preferably pre-modern) as long as it was not specified by the
to the design of monuments and tombs. Modern design was architect. This dichotomy reconstituted the conceptual divide
progressive in as much as it opened the benefits of design to the between building and infrastructure that is still in effect today.
built environment in its entirety, and so included not just privileged To simply call for an end to this dichotomy and the
patrons of the cultured classes, but the widest possible constituency. formation of a new unity between contemporary architecture
Key to this extended scope of services was the extension of design to and contemporary urbanism is not, however, sufficient. While
urban infrastructure. Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer’s the basis of a new unity of building and infrastructure has been
Lafayette Park (Detroit, 1956), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre in existence for nearly a decade,2 the reconstruction of a unified
City (1932), Lucio Costa’s Brasilia (1960) and Le Corbusier’s project continues to face powerful obstacles, in many ways
Chandigarh (1953) – to name but four of the more prominent similar to psychological blocks, which hinder our attempts to
examples – mark the broader tendency to integrate both building even articulate a unified project.3 Postmodern urbanism has built
and infrastructure into matters of architectural concern. Such powerful preconceptions into our habits of mind that must be
integration set the agenda for three generations of architects, from described and eliminated before the construction of a unified
the early Modernists of the 1920s to the Megastructuralists of the project again becomes possible.
1960s. What unifies these phases of the modern project is that there In order to describe these habits of mind, one only need
is no arbitrary separation between the design of the overall layout of turn to one of postmodern urbanism’s most pervasive and most
urban infrastructure and that of the specific buildings placed within celebrated manifestations: the ‘historical collage’. In the historical
and upon it. collage, the opposition between building and infrastructure is
This unity of urbanism and architecture would be reversed in manifest in the opposition between a contemporary or hyper-
the 1970s. Given that it was one of the primary accomplishments of modern work of architecture that is set into a historical, if
Modernism, the unified project was a primary target of postmodern not ancient, urban infrastructure. The best way to approach
theory and practice. All that Modernism did to break down the this dichotomous urbanism is to construct a simple thought
division between building and infrastructure, Postmodernism experiment involving a juxtaposition between historical
polemically reversed. Insomuch as Postmodernism was largely an infrastructure and modern architecture, and between modern
academic invention, at least in the US, it is not surprising that infrastructure and historical architecture.
it resulted in a vigorous call for disciplinary boundaries and a The first step of the experiment is to recall the famous
return to the restricted scope of the ‘monument and the tomb’.1 In Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) church of San Carlo alle
Postmodernism, the link between the design of the overall layout of Quattro Fontane (1646), on its existing Baroque street, the Via
the city and that of the buildings placed within it was again broken. del Quirinale in Rome (a historical architecture on a historical
In the new dispensation, urbanism simply became any urban context infrastructure). Now imagine a dramatic rupture between

The unity of architecture Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Centre

Pompidou, Paris, 1977

and urbanism was,

More than any other single building, the Centre
Pompidou established the temporal collage of
postmodern urbanism.
of course, one of the
hallmarks of Modernism.
Indeed, it was under the
flag of such unity that
the Modernists’ battle
against the academy
was largely fought and
provisionally won.

83
building and infrastructure that would place this canonical work forward position of that same strip environment described above (a
of the Baroque period into the parking lot of a contemporary modern architecture on a modern infrastructure). Strangely enough,
strip shopping centre (a historical architecture on a modern the relocation of the MAXXI in suburban sprawl is no more
infrastructure). Imagine the small chapel moved to the very front satisfying than the relocation of the Baroque chapel, but this time
of the parking lot surrounded by modest signs and low shrubbery it is not a disjunction between architecture and urbanism that is to
and well exposed to the public right of way. blame, but rather the absence of a disjunction. The building simply
Continuing on we can now invert this scenario and imagine disappears in the heady context of megalopolitan sprawl.
a second disruption between building and infrastructure where To sort out the logical contradictions, the four possible
a stridently modern architecture – for example, Zaha Hadid’s relationships between building and infrastructure can be set up on a
MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Arts (2009) simplified Greimas Square, where oppositions are mapped onto two
in Rome – is placed on a Baroque street pattern (a modern axes and resulting quadrants are occupied by four urban scenarios.
architecture on a historical infrastructure). This rupture is not What the forced, symmetrical logic of the diagram reveals is that we
hard to imagine because that is exactly where the building is not only fail to bridge the gap between architectural form and urban
situated – the centre axis of a ceremonial ‘trident’ (Il Tridente), infrastructure, we actually celebrate it in the form of a temporal ‘rift’
the Via Guido Reni, modelled after the Via del Corso of Pope or historical collage between the modern and the ancient.4 Situated
Sixtus V (1520–90). in the southwest quadrant of our thought experiment, this historical
It is interesting to note that the first disjunction (San Carlo disjunction thrives on the juxtaposition of new (hyper-modern)
on the strip) is disturbing, if not heretical, while the second architecture built upon an outmoded urban infrastructure.
disjunction (MAXXI on the Via Guido Reni) is not disturbing Examples of this disjunction are legion and can be found in
in the least, but is instead a setting for one of the most celebrated some of the most admired buildings of the past three decades
buildings of the past decade. Given the logical symmetry of the beginning with the mother of all historical collages, the Centre
situation, the contrast of reactions is striking, if only because our Pompidou (1977) by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, which
ready acceptance of the disjunction in Rome is evidence enough revived the entire Beaubourg district of Paris, turning it into the
that the postmodern divide between building and infrastructure most popular tourist destination in Europe. Its most infamous
remains firmly in place. successor is, of course, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao (1997)
The power of this disjunction, whether heretical or in Spain. The Guggenheim Bilbao is situated in the extension of
celebrated, can be seen in the final stage of the experiment. As Bilbao designed by Alzola, Achúcarro and Hoffmeyer Architects
in the San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane on the Via del Quirinale, in 1876. The museum terminates the Calle de Iparraguirre that
we must again imagine no disjunction between a building and frames the project within the street walls of the historical past. Like
infrastructure. Here, the MAXXI museum is moved to the the conventional plaza that foregrounds the Centre Pompidou, this

SANAA, New Museum, New York, 2007

The abstract stacking of six boxes sheathed Contemplating the recent
popularity of the historical
in an expanded aluminium rain-screen
creates a striking scalar and material
contrast to the architecture of the pre-1811
gridiron of the Bowery. The building’s axial
relation to Prince Street completes the
collage, one begins to imagine
traditional scenario of a monument that is
axially framed by street walls.
that the split between building
and infrastructure is desirable,
apparently outstripping any
advantages that might be
gained by a unified project.

84
historic framing of the museum plays a large role in the building’s historical city centre would be work on the city that has been
success. under construction for the past half-century and that continues
Owed largely to these two paradigms, the framing of to be built today. This work requires an entirely different
hypermodern buildings in pre-modern fabrics has become the orientation to the city than the collage strategy adopted by
defining motif of much recent architecture: Rafael Moneo’s Gehry at Bilbao. Beyond the divided city, then, consider an
Kursaal Congress Palace and Auditorium (1999) in San Sebastián, altogether other kind of architectural intervention designed for
Spain; Steven Holl’s Kiasma Museum (1998) in Helsinki; Toyo Bilbao by Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods:
Ito’s Mediatheque (2001) in Sendai, Japan; REX/OMA’s Wyly the 1962 Aslia Valley Competition for the extension of the city,
Theatre (2008) in Dallas, Texas; OMA’s Casa da Música (2005) in a welfare state project that is a world apart from the historical
Porto, Portugal; Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum (2006) disjunction of Postmodernism.
in Colorado; SANAA’s New Museum in New York (2007); and, The competition was the first ‘stem’ proposal by Candilis-
of course, Hadid’s MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Josic-Woods that was subsequently realised in the notorious
Arts (2009) in Rome. Based on this list alone, our appreciation of extension of Toulouse-Le Mirail. The project was an attempt
the disjunction between building and infrastructure is indisputable, by the architects to take contemporary urban infrastructure
and while these projects might not fully account for the split, they as a starting point. The ‘stem’ was not merely a reference to
certainly stand as a striking symptom of it. natural form; it was an overt attempt to sublimate the notorious
Contemplating the recent popularity of the historical collage, ‘street hierarchy’ imposed by traffic engineers on cities all over
one begins to imagine that the split between building and the world, including Bilbao. The sublimation drew a simple
infrastructure is desirable, apparently outstripping any advantages analogy between overlapping hierarchical spine forms common
that might be gained by a unified project. At this juncture, it might to postwar urban development and the branching networks
be argued that the advantages of a unified project of architecture and of plant structures. The subject of the competition was thus
urbanism should be relinquished if only to achieve the extraordinary the contemporary (1962) street infrastructure of Bilbao,
buildings cited above. The critique of historic disjunction is not a which would serve as the starting point for the design of new
call to end the makeover of our flagging urban cores via the Bilbao buildings. In other words, the point of departure is not a 19th-
Effect. Developing the tourist economy in second-tier cities has century plan of blocks and streets; it is, instead, infrastructures
long proven to be a good business strategy. The rehabilitation of that were then (as now) being actively produced.
outmoded urban infrastructure through monumental construction is Moreover, the stem concept of the Aslia Valley
an important job that contemporary architecture can do, but it is by Competition did not occur in a vacuum. The discourse
no means the only job that a contemporary architecture can do. surrounding the spine-based urbanism was prevalent in the
One job that is perhaps more important than work on the 1950s and 1960s. From Ludwig Hilberseimer to Team 10 and

Alzola, Achúcarro and Hoffmeyer Albert Pope, ZRO Zone Research,

Architects, Extension of Bilbao, Bilbao, Redevelopment of the Fifth Ward, Houston,
Spain, 1876 Texas, 2007
below: This very beautiful grid plan right top and bottom: Illustration showing
extended the medieval core of Bilbao in the a table of spine variants that is intended to
manner of the majority of European cities expand the number of available forms in
in the 19th century, including Barcelona between the typological brackets of the spine
and Berlin. The arrow indicates the position and the grid. The spine variants are determined
of the museum terminating the Calle de by a simple translate/copy algorithm deployed in
Iparraguirre. the x and y axis. Each spine variant negotiates
between the figural condition imposed by the
spine and the field condition imposed by the
grid.

85
Christopher Alexander, modern designers and theorists were Dispensing with the superficial and largely unexamined
seeking to engage the infrastructural spine under the typifying organicism of the 1950s, the trees, leaves and stems can be
form of the ‘settlement unit’ (Hilberseimer), the stem (Candilis- replaced with more substantial attempts to sublimate the spine-
Josic-Woods, the Smithsons), the leaf and the tree (Van Eyck based urbanism of the megalopolis. In the 2007 project for the
and Alexander).5 And not only were they attempting to intervene redevelopment of the Fifth Ward in Houston, Texas by Zone
in the contemporary urban condition; they were attempting to Research, a series of algorithmic tables render the spine as an active
draw an architecture directly out of it. Under the unquestioned morphology capable of engaging the seemingly random structure
presumption of a unified architecture and urbanism, Candilis- of contemporary urban development. The table constitutes a ‘search
Josic-Woods’ module of mass housing directly engaged the space’8 that significantly broadens the range of formal alternatives
spine form of the infrastructure, extending the Modernist located between the outmoded grid structures of traditional
legacy of the unified project. In contrast to Gehry’s renovation urbanism and the largely reductive spine structure of contemporary
of Bilbao’s flagging urban core, Candilis-Josic-Woods’s Aslia urbanism. This morphology can be deployed as a substrate for
Valley Competition offered a different kind of architectural new construction as well as for redevelopment, as seen in the Fifth
intervention. It is by coincidence that, in Bilbao, the line between Ward project. Creating pockets of new density over the dilapidated,
a unified modern urbanism and a disjunctive postmodern 19th-century street grid, here the spine forms set the stage for an
urbanism is clearly drawn.6 architecture of redevelopment that would most certainly fail were
Spine-based urbanism has continued to be the predominant the infrastructure never upgraded. One of the many forms that
mode of urbanisation over the past half-century. While the this architecture of redevelopment could take is illustrated below,
urbanism of the block and the street has not been reproduced for opposite and on pp 80 –81. As a simple part-to-part arrangement
the past 50 years, spine-based urbanism has continued to claim (fore-, middle and rear-ground), the architecture engages the
an ever-growing proportion of the sum of the built environment. lateral axis of the spine form, deploying its hierarchy in sync with
By some estimates, this sum is now 80 per cent.7 While spine-based the secondary axis of the spine. This lock between the built form
urbanism has come to define our urban environment, our and the spine attempts to reconstruct the logic a unified project
fascination with the outmoded urbanism of the past has only abandoned almost three decades ago.
increased. It is as if we were standing stunned at the threshold, our We thus return to the original problem: the contemporary city is
backs to the future, contemplating our relationship to an urban divided against itself. While the divided city has been characterised
world that has been irretrievably lost. In this way the historical by a conceptual disjunction – new buildings in old districts and ‘old’
collages of the Pompidou, the Guggenheim Bilbao and the New buildings in new districts – the forced separation of building and
Museum reproduce a quintessential postmodern moment. Standing infrastructure indicates a much broader problem affecting not only
on the threshold, however, it is possible to simply turn around. historic urban cores, but also the megalopolitan environment that

Albert Pope, ZRO Zone Research, right: Spine variants selected from the variant tables shown
Redevelopment of the Fifth Ward, Houston in the figures on p 85, among others, are deployed in an
Texas, 2007 overall field of redevelopment. The plan recognises the new
Perspective view of the redevelopment scale of urban aggregation that has superseded the scale of
proposal that cuts across the two ends of the traditional urban block. The new units are single spine
spine 2.14. Density is structured in loose variants that are intended to aggregate into an emergent
aggregations of buildings. The two ends holistic urbanism. Such an aggregation is intended to
of the spines are sub-aggregations of the challenge the condition of ‘sprawl’ that typically grows to no
aggregate field shown right. cumulative effect. The grey zones are interconnected voids
that thread through the entire plan.

86
has been produced for the past half-century. At this juncture, it Notes
1. The words of Philip Johnson might stand in the place of a postmodern manifesto: ‘Let
must be remembered that urban infrastructure does far more than Bucky Fuller put together the dymaxion dwellings of the people so long as we architects
deliver services; it effectively coordinates the many parts of a city can design their tombs and their monuments.’ Philip Johnson, ‘Where Are We At?’ in The
Writings of Philip Johnson, Oxford University Press (Cambridge),1979, p 103.
into a coherent entity. If building is oblivious to infrastructure, or 2. Albert Pope, Ladders, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 1997.
contradicts it merely for effect, there will be no accumulated value 3. The perceived futility of pursuing a unified project is clearly expressed by Aldo Rossi: ‘I
am thinking of a unity, or a system, made solely of reassembled fragments. Perhaps only
to the city as a whole. When buildings stand isolated, oblivious a great popular movement can give us the sense of an overall design; today we are forced
to any urban infrastructure that gathers them together, their to stop ourselves at certain things. I am convinced, however, that architecture as a totality,
as a comprehensive project, as an overall framework, is certainly more important and, in
impact is effectively limited to the farthest sight line measured the final analysis, more beautiful. But it happens that historical obstacles – in every way
in architectural feet instead of urban miles. To put it simply, if parallel to psychological blocks or symptoms – hinder every reconstruction.’ Aldo Rossi, A
Scientific Autobiography, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 1981, p 8.
buildings are not consonant with the cities they make, they can 4. On the ‘temporal rift’ in modern architecture, see Fredric Jameson, ‘The Cultural Logic
have no cumulative effect. This cumulative effect, or ‘holism’, of Late Capitalism’, in Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke
University Press (Durham, NC),1991.
constitutes the very definition of a city. In this regard it becomes 5. Christopher Alexander, ‘A City Is Not a Tree’ in Michel Feher and Sanford Kwinter
clear that what makes the historical collage possible is a city (eds), Zone 1/2, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987, p 128; Ludwig Hilberseimer, The
New City: Principles of Planning, P Theobald (Chicago, IL), 1944; Alison Smithson (ed),
divided, a city that does not add up to anything, a city that is not The Team 10 Primer, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA),1968; and Max Risselada and Dirk
a city. van den Heuvel (eds), Team 10 1953–1981: In Search of A Utopia of the Present, NAi
Publishers (Rotterdam), 2005.
The obvious antidote to this absence of cumulative effect is 6. It is important to resist voicing yet another hackneyed repudiation of Postmodernism
the unified project of modern urbanism that, for some 50 years, in order to restore a ‘legitimate’ (and unbroken) lineage of modern urbanism as
represented by Team 10. Upon reflection, it is apparent that Candilis-Josic-Woods’s
attempted to construct effective links between contemporary extension of Bilbao suffers from the same division of the world into the isolated quarters
architectural and urban forms. Departing from the traditional, of building and infrastructure as the collage urbanism of Postmodernism. If Gehry is
able to address only a viable Modernist architecture, Candilis-Josic-Woods are only able
outmoded infrastructure of the block and the street, Broadacre to address a viable modern infrastructure – at the expense of a viable architecture. If
City, Chandigarh and Lafayette Park all attempted such links. Gehry favours architecture over infrastructure, Candilis-Josic-Woods favour infrastructure
over architecture to the point that many would contend that the firm scarcely produces
The same can be said of the subsequent generation in the work architecture at all (at least not very good architecture). In others words, the architecture
of, for example, Team 10, who in many ways broke with modern of Candilis-Josic-Woods rarely transcends the diagrammatic logic of their infrastructural
proposals. They, like their successors, are trapped by the artificial division between
urbanism while maintaining its fundamental premise: the unity infrastructure and building.
of building and infrastructure. It is upon this substantial platform 7. The speed with which postwar urbanism has overwhelmed everything that came
before it is largely based on empirical evidence such as estimating the extent of city plans
of modern urbanism that the postmodern divide can finally be that are composed of prewar grids and postwar spines. Famously, James Kunstler placed
defeated and a unified project can be taken up anew. 2 the figure at 80 per cent in 1994. James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise
and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, Free Press (New York), 1994), ch 1.
8. On modern search spaces see Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Norton (New
York), 1996, p 65, and Daniel C Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Simon & Schuster
(New York), 1996, p 28.

Oblique view of the Fifth Ward redevelopment

proposal that shows an isolated view of spine
2.14 looking from east to west. The build-up of
the part-to-part relations of the three building
types develops along the axis perpendicular to
the viewing plane along the southern cluster
and parallel to the viewing plane along the
northern cluster.

Text © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images:

pp 80–1, 82(r), 85(r), 86–7 © Albert Pope;
p 82(l) © Purple Cloud; p 83 © Bede Irvine;
p 84 © John Hill;

87
Copyright of Architectural Design is the property of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and its content may not be copied
or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.