By studying the transformations of Chicago between 1910 and 1930 and the way in which its public councilors and its engineers were led, to compensate for the lack of space in the heart of the city, to imagine urban and architectural solutions which prefigure the urban planning of slabs And multifunctional architecture, the architect and historian Jean Castex gives us a kind of archeology of the contemporary city.
Thirty years after Rem Koolhaas, in Delirious New York, had seen in the Manhattan of the years 1920-1930 the retroactive and unknown manifesto of urban concentration, Jean Castex, architect and historian, invites us to reread the chicago of the interwar period as another source of our urban modernity. The fact deserves to be underlined: not only studies on Chicago and its architecture-numerous in the United States-remain relatively rare in France, but the period chosen by the author-the years 1920-1930-has long been abandoned by Historians of architecture and town planning of the capital of Middle West. The latter, like Carl Condit, have indeed preferred to explore either decades “ heroic »From the Chicago School to the end of XIXe century, in particular around the figure of Louis Sullivan, the boom that followed the Second World War with the influential and charismatic personality of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who came from 1938 to teach theIllinois Institute of Technology. Between these two culminating phases, the in-between wars has long appeared as a moment of reflux, itself darken by the image of gangsterism and prohibition. It was not until the post-modernism of the years 1970-1980 that in-depth studies on art deco architecture in the 1920s in Chicago were undertaken. However, it is precisely this period left a little in the shadow that Jean Castex studied both from the angle of urban planning and the architecture of singular buildings. His reading of the city of Chicago between 1910 and 1930, which draws in particular from a remarkable iconography, is part of the line of previous typo-morphological studies and, as such, owes a lot to the methods developed by the Italian school, And especially by Gianfranco Caniggia and her research on Florence.
The invention of the superimposed city
The central thesis of the book is that in Chicago, in a context marked by demographic, economic and industrial growth, the lack of building space in the city center-the famous Looplimited by Lake Michigan and the Chicago River – forces the city councilors and engineers to invent a model of bunk citymade of stages and networks stacking both underground and surface.
Jean Castex recalls the importance of the Chicago river in the structuring of the city. It is on its shores that the economic activity of the center has been concentrated for a long time. Taking advantage of this communication route therefore implies fitting out your edges by means of floors. The example of the creation at the northwest corner of the Wacker Drive Loop (1924-1926) is completely convincing here. Likewise, it is along its banks that real multifunctional city pieces are located on artificial floors like the Civic Opera (Samuel Insull, 1927-1929), the Daily News Building (Holabird & Root, 1928- 1929) or the very imposing Mart Marte (Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, 1928-1931). The storey bridges illustrate the same trend (Michigan Avenue bridge, 1919-1920).
All these fittings – which Jean Castex puts in parallel with the underground track projects of Eugène Hénard for Paris at the start of XXe A century-require real technical prowess on the part of engineers who, perhaps more than architects, are the real heroes of this period. Thus, as well as the need to build above the railways forced to use air rights (the famous “ Air Rights ») Giving the possibility, under certain conditions, to span the railways, the erection on artificial soils and on slabs of many skyscrapers and public buildings leads engineers to solve technical problems of very high complexity , such as the implementation of support points on several levels.
The beginnings of multifunctional architecture
This superimposed city model, Jean Castex does not only explore it as a city historian, but also as an architecture historian. In the analysis of buildings built at the time, the author was very little interested in stylistic, decoration or symbolism questions. On the contrary, it emphasizes the building as a resolution of technical problems. Its sources are mostly drawn from American magazines of engineers from the time: Western Architect, Journal of the Western Society of Engineers, Engineering News-Record. This abundant technical documentation constitutes an essential part of the rich iconography of the structure: stages plans, cuts on carrier structures, drawings of technical details, site photographs, etc. It gives the book an original dimension insofar as it stands out from a formal approach which is the prerogative of art historians and which has been able to dominate in the architectural history of Chicago. Here the meticulous and technical lighting makes it possible to analyze how empirical solutions have imposed themselves without a priori aesthetic.
Thus, on the architectural level, the regular frame of the postpoint system (post-And-beam) is interrupted when the programs require the construction of large spaces of the genus court, concert hall or financial transaction room. It is then that these vast spaces must be covered by means of large -range beams. This has the effect of questioning the principle of the architectural form determined by the structure or framework as it was implemented in the 1890s by the architects of the first school of Chicago. In fact, behind the apparently homogeneous facade of a skyscraper, the structure can change two or even three times. The author reflects the mutations in this structural system and the metamorphoses of its constructive logic. The famous Tour of the Chicago Tribune newspaper (Hood & Howells, 1923-1925) is thus the subject of a new analysis in terms of engineering and adaptation to a site on several levels.
The last pages entitled “ For a skyscraper story Open up interesting perspectives in this regard. Jean Castex indeed pleads for a questioning of an approach to the architecture of the towers in terms of constructive logic, that which in the line of Viollet-le-Duc insists on the continuity of the form and the structure. As the author’s analyzes show, this modernist reading is beaten by the constructions of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. The tubular achievements of the 1960s extend this story: a structure in a homogeneous tube like that of the John Hancock Center (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1969) in fact houses multiple functions. The book curiously ends with the evocation of the skyscraper from the Chinese television tower CCTV in Beijing by the agency Oma (Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond) to illustrate the differentiation of the envelope and content. The link is tenuous with Chicago, but the problem posed remains relevant.
The Modern City Factory
Last but not leastit is the actors of the development of the major modern city that is Chicago who attract the attention of the researcher in urban morphology. Jean Castex is first interested in the methods of making a real urban collective consciousness. Indeed, to respond to the chaotic development of the city center of Chicago, the famous Burnham plan was presented to citizens in 1906. More than the content of the plan, itself also strongly studied, the author insists on the means of real propaganda Used to publicize the project – including schoolchildren with the text of Walter Moody entitled Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago which was distributed to them – and convince the inhabitants. Spectacular images in the form of watercolor visions of Jules Guérin, brochures, books, films, etc., thus strongly contribute to spreading the idea of a mythical chicago inspired by certain characteristics of Haussmannian town planning-did not say about of Chicago that she had to be “ Paris by the Lake ” -“ Paris by the lake »» ?
From a methodological point of view, Jean Castex’s book deliberately leaves aside the social dimension of its object of study. The author explicitly admits: “ A vast field remains outside this study: social distress (P. 33). It can be regretted, however, that the author did not borrow some insights from the famous Chicago school in urban sociology and the writings of Robert E. Park. Likewise, writers belonging to the “ muckrakers Could have been asked and bear witness to the transformations of the modern city which are at the heart of the work. On the other hand, the dimension of economic order and real estate financial operations is present in the book. Here again, faithful to the methods of analysis of urban morphologies, the author highlights the political and economic actors who are at the origin of urban planning. In this area, Jean Castex relies a lot on the classic work of urban sociology of Homer Hoyt, 100 Years of Land Value in Chicago 1830-1933 published in 1933. “ City of the Big Shoulders As the poet Carl Sandburg called him, Chicago was shaped by very strong personalities who left their mark on the city and whose role is rightly underlined by the author: Daniel Burnham, architect and urban planner, Walter Dwight Moody, author of What of the City ?or Charles Wacker, president of the Chicago Plan Commission.
At a time when the current metropolitan is often thought of in terms of trafficking networks and management of flow systems, it is therefore understood that Chicago – laboratory of a surface town planning and the birthplace of a certain multifunctional architecture – may To appear if not as a model, at least as an anticipation of the problems of the contemporary city.