According to 18th century French academic theory, the façade of a building should reflect its programme and purpose; a doctrine that was adopted in toto by the modern movement. But modernism went further. It repudiated the classical tradition according to which the façade represented the building "allegorically" by means of a conventional architectural language inscribed on the surface. The façade was thus deprived of its role as a signifier which located the building within a hierarchy of socio-political meaning. Instead, it was now seen as the logical result of the programme – not its representation. The façade ceased to be an allegory and became a symbol. The de-historicized external surface of the building, cleansed of any reference to stylistic convention, was now supposed to act both as an indissociable part of the whole building and as a symbol of the new technological age. Although we may now be sceptical about such a determinist way of looking at history, it would clearly be absurd to attempt to recover the lost allegorical system of the historical façade. This was not an individual phenomenon, but part of an entire episteme (to use a Foucauldian expression) that has now been replaced by something else, though it is difficult to describe what this "something" is. Even if we succeeded in lifting the curtain of history, we would find a void where there had once been a plenitude of meaning. But the absence of overt allegory in the façade does not necessarily imply the disappearance of the façade as a quasi-autonomous element capable of representing a building’s internal organization. We cannot ignore the fact that we still create façades which, in some sense, "speak" to us, although we do this in a seemingly ad hoc, uncoded way which differs greatly from pre-modernist practice. The history of the façade between 1910 and the 1960s exhibits two partly parallel and partly sequential tendencies. The first tendency is the impulse to destroy the façade as such. The building should not be considered as consisting of plan and elevation but as an organic whole in which the external surface of a building is a by-product of its internal organization. The building is thought of as transparent and fluid, and should not be divided into rigid compartments or bounded by solid walls. This fluidity also has an ethical component. It symbolizes a non-hierarchical democratic society. Spatial boundaries are symptoms of social oppression. This tendency has an “idealist” and a “materialist” side deriving on the one hand from Rousseau and German idealism and, on the other from Marxism. In terms of architectural history, this ideology belongs to the first pre-war phase of modernism. It is represented by Expressionism and Futurism, but continues with De Stijl, Constructivism and the avant-garde magazine “ABC. Beiträge zum Bauen” after WWI, still with contradictory idealist and materialist connotations. The second tendency is less philosophically radical. It sees the façade in evolutionary, technical, and aesthetic (rather than ethical) terms. This view was shared by the Esprit Nouveau and Neue Sachlichkeit movements of the mid 1920s. The façade is not abolished but continued "by other means". Since the late 1960s the façade has entered a new and complex phase. On the one hand, there has been an increase in the number of isolated corporate office towers and cultural/recreational buildings which, taking advantage of new technologies, create plastic effects that completely ignore their contexts and correspond to the prevailing capitalist ideology of individualism and spectacle. They imply a future urbanism that is different both from the traditional city or the utopian cities of the 1920s and their critics of the 1950s. On the other hand, the majority of modern buildings usually conform the framework of the existing city of streets lined with buildings, whose rate of change is extremely slow and which will remain more or less the same for several generations. For these buildings the 'façade' remains a meaningful concept only to the extent that the new and the old co-exist in tension. It is probable that such types of building and their façades will continue to derive their meaning from the dialectic between the new and the conventional, and that the city's vitality will depend on this. A façade can be defined as the skin or outer membrane of a building as it faces an observer. This skin, like the skin of an animal, is involved in the complex process of maintaining homeostasis. But in the case of human societies, the closed circle of homeostasis is opened up by a psychological surplus, an unfulfilled yearning. The façade of a building thus never functions at a purely biological level. It is related, on the one hand, to the building's interior, which it protects and, on the other, to the external public realm with which it communicates. The surface of the building has a kind of double existence intervening between two incommensurate worlds: the private "secret" world inside and public, social world outside. It is a boundary which not merely registers the pressure of the interior, but resists it, transforming its energy into something else. The façade is the result of an act of violence. Like boundary walls in general, the façade was treated by the radical modernists with suspicion and by the idealists and moderates with ambivalence. With them, the destruction of boundaries is invariably accompanied by the erection of new ones, as in Van Doesburg's "Counter Constructions” and Mies' Brick Country House show. Le Corbusier was the only modern master, however, for whom the façade became the subject of continuous and systematic research, as the following projects illustrate: The garden façade of the house at Garches consists of a frontalized plane independent of the structural frame. A deep, double-height volume is gouged out of this plane at one end, completely destroying the classical balance otherwise suggested by of the façade as a whole. This feature was an adaptation of the roof garden in the Pavilion de L'Esprit Nouveau of 1925 in which a space ("garden") associated with the outside has migrated to the inside. This does not so much destroy the boundary of the dwelling as make it ambiguous. For Le Corbusier, the façade was a manifesto. The façade is treated differently in the Armée de Salut (in its original form). The dormitory block is a thin bar with a fully glazed curtain wall, the façade facing the street. This fully glazed surface acted phenomenally as an opaque plane – a ground against which was displayed the sequence of platonic volumes constituting the system of entry, "a sort of hors d'oeuvre" as Le Corbusier described it.( Oeuvre Complète, 1929-34, p.98)) In his later work, Le Corbusier supplemented the transparent curtain wall with the brise-soleil. Though the ostensible reason for this was to reduce solar heat gain, it also provided the façade with an element that could be manipulated to give it back some of the plastic interest and representational potential it had lost with the removal of the classical orders. This can be seen, for example, in the Obus E office tower planned for Algiers and the Secretariat building at Chandigarh. It was Le Corbusier's answer to Auguste Perret. Perret adhered to the French academic theory that the structure should be legible on the façade. In Le Corbusier's system this was impossible since the façade was independent of the structure ("Free façade" - one of the 5 points of a new architecture). In inventing the brise-soleil, he discovered a new plastic and linguistic element which compensated for the loss of structural expression. This is never mentioned by Le Corbusier as far as I know, and of course as a hypothesis it is refutable. (See Colquhoun, Modern Architecture, Oxford U. Press.) In the work of the Italian modernists between 1940 and 1955, we find further interesting explorations of the façade, starting with a late work by Giuseppe Terragni. In Terragni's Casa Giuliani Frigerio in Como, the façade consists of two layers: a wall surface floating in front of a partly revealed structural frame. The presence of the whole frame is implied by a part of it. This rhetorical device (“pars pro toto” = part for whole) is made possible by the structural independence of wall and structure permitted by reinforced concrete. There are many other examples of interesting façades in Italy in the following years, though few of them were directly indebted to Terragni. Among them may be mentioned buildings by Luigi Moretti (the Gira Sole apartment building in Rome), Franco Albini (INA headquarters in Parma), Giovanni Michelucci (Cassa di Risparmio in Pistola), Vittorio Gandolfi (apartment building in Milan) and lgnazio Gardella (apartment building for the employees of Borsalino in Alessandria). All these examples are located on urban sites. But even in popular Zeilenbau-type housing blocks with their deliberately sober and standardized appearance, we can find interesting and inventive façade variants - for example those by Gian Carlo De Carlo (casa per lavoratori in Sesto S. Giovanni), Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini (casa popolare al nido, Ivrea), and Ciro Cieconcelli and Maurizio Sacripanti (Quartiere Q.T. 8 at the 8th Triennale in Milan). In a short article it is impossible to do justice to the continuous series of revisions of the façade that have marked production since the late 1960s including that associated with the work of Aldo Rossi and his followers. More recently there has been a partial return to a more "abstract" modernist tradition. Among such works may be mentioned the work of Juan Navarro Baldeweg (conference and exhibition centre in Salamanca), David Chipperfield (house in Corrubedo), Tony Fretton (house in Chelsea, London), and Eric Parry (office building in Finsbury Square, London). These projects are all located on urban sites, with which there is clearly an attempt to establish some kind of dialogue. They are all concerned with the façade as an opaque surface and with its rhythm and modelage. While they appear essentially 'modernist', they occasionally make oblique reference, in very educed and generalized terms, to vernacular or classical forms. What is remarkable is the extent to which this "licence" is combined with an almost polemical minimalism and lack of rhetorical excess.

Aus der Ausgabe 12-2005