Missing in Action_The Individual, Part I

Le Corbusier’s housing project in Le Pressac, France attempted to erase class segregation through a fundamental and ordered hegemony of form.

The fusion of social order with the order of individual lodging assigned to architecture the task of negotiating the complex relation between the public and the private. From the moment families began to identify themselves with their houses, the single-family house was burdened with the need to reinforce individual integrity while simultaneously demonstrating the individual’s relation to a larger social continuum. This conflict is reenacted with the design of every dwelling. No house can escape the fact that its sanctity as a private interior in which the most intimate aspects of life are defined will be compromised by the intrusion of public notions of order and reason. Even if physically and psychologically removed from other human beings and their shelters, the interiority of a private retreat inevitably reaches a point where it confronts the public realm. In multi-unit dwellings, townhouses, and other dwelling alternatives to the single-family house, the relation to the street embodies a certain confrontation or alternatively, a consensus on how the connected dwelling behaves in the context of the street, and/or the public realm. Generic spaces such as balconies, steps, patio gardens represent the contribution individual units make in the absence of front or back yards, garages, or the seeming individuality of the single family house.

The nature of this confrontation in the modern world would begin to crystallize when the design of a house was multiplied, conceptually, to produce the design of housing. The modern city is the spatial counterpart to this moment of crystallization, for the urban terrain is where the private order of the individual is most intensely juxtaposed with the social order of the public sphere. As urban populations escalated during the nineteenth century, this intensity burgeoned with two seemingly contradictory results. On the one hand, the “masses” were housed in residences that, with some variations in their urban configuration, were characterized above all by their large number of utterly undifferentiated units. Individuals were housed and thus valued on some level, but differences between individuals and the inequities they revealed were decisively repressed. At the same time, the more mobile classes moved out from urban centers in an effort to preserve the sanctity of their homes. The stylistic expression of this effort, significantly contemporaneous to the uniform dwelling, was historical eclecticism. This apparent celebration of difference and individuality through formal variety revealed only the underlying homogeneity of suburban exclusiveness and thus paralleled the repression of heterogeneity taking place in the city.

The inadequacy of nineteenth-century strategies encouraged the Modern Movement to further erase difference – difference between city and country, between classes, between house and housing. Le Corbusier’s 1929 Villa Savoye and housing project in Pessac of 1925, for example, are designed according to a fundamentally similar order despite their profoundly distinct contextual, economic, and social conditions. The International Style imposed an even more aggressive formal unity in an effort to dissolve the barriers separating public and private space.

More to come in Part II...