Two kinds of people go to Poissy, a small suburban town in the 5th ring of the Paris region: those who live there and those who go to see Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.

By our bewildered looks as we stumbled off the RER A, it was obvious we were part of the latter category. And not just any tourist will make the trip to Poissy to see this modernist house; it is hardly to be found in regular guidebooks. An apparently plain, white concrete summer home that even the neighbors rarely know about is highly spoken of in lecture halls on the other side of the Atlantic in big American universities. Architecture students gape at slides, hear the stories, write papers about it, and slowly come to either hate it or love it. Or outwardly criticize it and secretly admire it.

Our group was comprised of ardent lovers of Villa Savoye. I had planned the trip with my coworkers, Gary and Seung-Jin (Yale and GSD grad students respectively). Seung-Jin’s butt mate at Harvard, Carl, who was visiting from Rome, had also joined us. And just as we were about to leave Paris that morning we met up with another architect (Carl’s friend’s friend) Rene, a grad student at UVA, and her boyfriend, Ian, who will be starting law school soon. Ian was the only one unfamiliar with the villa but he was quick to convert.

Photo by Seung-Jin Ham

We decided to walk the 20-minute journey from the train station instead of taking the bus. I was the only one who spoke a little French and somehow I became the person leading the way, following the little map I had drawn in my Moleskine notebook, but Rene was there to my aid when we wandered just a little bit off course.

Photo by Seung-Jin Ham

I can honestly say about Savoye that it is a building that far surpassed all my expectations when I met it in person. I had read about Le Corbusier’s five points of a new architecture, about thickening of space and phenomenal transparency, I had written about the house’s Palladian proportions, and seen pictures of the interior ramps and the circular driveway, but seeing it all together was strangely enlightening. It was all one thing, there were no points, features or lists; there was just the Villa Savoye and the experience of being in the Villa Savoye. The sculptural quality of the spaces, the promenade through the house, the vistas opened up by the carving of windows and balconies, and the lightness of the architecture were all admirable and coherent. There was a reason and intent for every little detail. Every element had a certain abstraction to it: a folded up concrete slab could be an outdoor picnic table or a high stool, or a bar when you have a party. We all spoke about how amazing it would be to live in this house, a non-academic idea that rarely emerges in a building such as this. I had a vision of rebuilding the Villa Savoye, with wooden floors and modern concrete, on the shore somewhere, and living in it.

I have rambled like someone too overcome with emotion to make any sense. Yet that is how I felt. Later we had a small picnic outside the in the lawn and then took a nap in the warm summer sunshine. We set off in the late afternoon, and had late lunch in Poissy before returning to Paris.

Real innovative progress took place in the small industrial towns of Germany, spreading from there to the larger cities, and then to the rest of the world. Stuttgart is one such town.

I headed to Stuttgart right after Dessau. Situated on a big hill, Stuttgart is home to the Weissenhof Housing Estate, a model neighborhood where several modernist architects were invited to design workers’ homes in the new International Style in 1927 under the supervision of Mies van der Rohe. It is home also of the little-known but extremely important Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, a thriving force for Architecture and Industrial Design in Germany, as well as of the Porsche Museum which I had no idea existed.

I had spent a little more than 24 hours in Berlin. In those 24 hours I had visited and got to know my two main destinations in the city: the AEG Turbine Factory by Walter Gropius, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum. I had walked along the river, had a nice lunch, walked into the closing ceremony of a certain pride parade, saw much more of Berlin’s architecture at night, and ended up spending several hours of the night at a huge party called GMF which took place on three levels at the top of a Berlin skyscraper. I had had to take a cab home and had spent half the night at the bus stop right outside my hostel. I am glad it was Germany and not France or Italy. Finally I had passed out on my bed at 4am.

I was woken up at 10am because that was the check-out time at the hostel. I had missed my 7am train to Dessau and Stuttgart. I would have to renew all my reservations and contact my workplace to let them know I would be taking Monday off.

I arrived in Stuttgart at 11:30pm on the ICE train, which is Germany’s TGV and is much more impressive and comfortable than the TGV. I took a taxi to my hostel, and it pulled up on a mountain street overlooking the town below, with just a small entrance on the cliff. The rest of the building was on lower levels on the slope below.

I’ll go directly now to the three things I wanted to write about in Stuttgart. The first is the tram system. It was extremely impressive how these trams glided smoothly up sloping streets, through tunnels, on regular streets alongside cars, and down steep slopes. The map and guide was crystal clear and intuitive and it must have been the easiest train system to use that I have ever encountered.

The second is the Weissenhof Housing Estate. The Germans are not ashamed of Modernism like the French or Americans. The housing project was well maintained. The most remarkable thing was that these houses – most of them small and not luxurious – were occupied by real people living there. Each house had a small sign outside it, explaining the concept and displaying the plans. People parked their cars, got out with their groceries and walked into their home, even as others took pictures of the neighborhood.

Mies van der Rohe’s building was highly reminiscent of some of the dilapidated architecture I had seen in Clichy-sous-Bois. It made me realize that renovation and maintenance plays a very important role in the perception of architecture and, more importantly, that the same forms may have different symbolic value in different places.

Chair on display at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste

After walking around the Weissenhof Estate, I stumbled upon the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart. I reminded me of Harvard GSD and the Indus Valley School in Karachi and other places that seem to exude a spirit of creative energy. It is the Bauhaus of the 21st century. I was so excited to walk around inside that, for a moment, I seriously considered trying to learn German and applying here for grad school. Earlier that morning, I had met three German students from various parts of the country who had come to take an admissions test for the Industrial Design program at this school. They had had to send their portfolios earlier on for a preliminary selection process. They were super-impressed that I was a Pakistani studying architecture in the US here just to visit a housing project that they didn’t even know about.

Visiting the Dessau Bauhaus building was like going on a pilgrimage.

The Bauhaus is omnipresent even in today’s world. When it was forced to shut down by the Nazis and many of the architects emigrated from Germany, the movement found a new home in America and the influence of the philosophy reached New York and Harvard and the rest of the world.

The building itself is remarkable in its functional organization. It is a building I have written a 15-page paper about in Professor Esther da Costa Meyer’s class and made a 20-minute presentation on in Professor Spyros Papapetros’ graduate seminar at Princeton. So instead of describing it I will note here some impressions.


Because I had missed the first train out of Berlin, I had only two hours in Dessau, before my next connection to Stuttgart. The trains in Germany are very punctual. I took a cab to the Bauhaus (That’s all I had to say, obviously: “Bauhaus” – and we were off!).

As the cab pulled up, I noticed there was renovation going on in some parts of the exterior. They were replacing the worn flooring tiles with new ones of excellent quality. The Germans are great at recognizing the worth of their Modern Architecture, and maintaining and preserving it.

To the pilgrim that I was, the building seemed to glow in the warm sun, like a shining beacon ushering in a new dawn for architecture. I walked around the Bauhaus, stored my bags and jacket in a Bauhaus locker, had a sandwich in the Bauhaus café, used a Bauhaus bathroom, and looked at the exhibition inside the building.

The building and spaces were very impressive but it seemed like none of the pictures I would take would be as good as the ones in the library at Princeton. So much of the architecture we know about is only experienced through mediated images. Going to the Bauhaus, then, revealed some very interesting aspects that I had not known before, but was also a little disenchanting at the same time.

I could see very well the much-acclaimed literal transparency of the building, and the Panopticon-like arrangement which allowed the shrewd Gropius to oversee, from his office in the center, all that went on. But I also got a chance to read in the building Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzy’s idea of phenomenal transparency -- something that hasn't been written about this building but that I have wondered about. Because of the geometrical arrangement of spaces, “...there is a continuous dialectic between fact and implication. The reality of deep space is constantly opposed to the inference of shallow space; and by means of the resultant tension, reading after reading is enforced.” This can be seen in the following image where the reflection of the building in the window, the objects and people inside the building, and the awareness of the planes behind allow for a reading of the building on several different receding and advancing planes.

The AEG Turbine Factory, designed by Peter Behrens in 1910, is a major crossroads in the history of architecture.

The roots of Modernism can be traced to Peter Behrens and the German Werkbund. From 1907 to 1912, Peter Behrens' students and assistants included Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Adolf Meyer, Jean Kramer and Walter Gropius. All of these people were highly influential in charting the course of architectural history in the twentieth century.

In his capacity as "artistic consultant" for AEG, Behrens designed the company's corporate identity: everything from graphic design to product and industrial design, to architecture. One of the most historically significant of these works is the AEG High Tension Factory in Berlin.



The building combined, for the first time, elements and forms of classical architecture with the modern aesthetic of industrial design, articulated by the overt use of modern materials such as glass and steel alongside the more traditional masonry. What made the project truly remarkable was that this was a factory building that combined the grandeur of a classic temple with the functionality and good working conditions made possible by the newest developments in construction. In doing so, it created a whole new aesthetic form, paving the way for later modernist architectural innovation.

While I was in Berlin I visited the factory building because it is one of the six destinations on my project proposal for the Shellmann Prize, a fellowship that allows me to follow the path of Le Corbusier's travels through Europe almost a century ago.

Berlin: the setting of immense upheaval and reform in the last century, home to giants such as Peter Behrens and Mies van der Rohe, the last stronghold of the movement that was the Bauhaus, a city bold in its embrace and expression of modernity, the very streets of which exude an understated but distinct elegance in their simplicity.

Berlin might not be as “Beaux Arts” pretty as Paris, but there is bold and utilitarian experimentation in its architecture. It is not a city shaped by a tentative curator whose main concern is to preserve precious relics, but by craftsmen who are unafraid to design contemporary architecture in the spirit of the contemporary age.

On Friday, I took the night train to Berlin.

Adolf Loos would have highly approved of the Berlin street facades

If I had spoken a single word of German, perhaps I would have felt even more at home there. At the end of three days, I had learnt only one word: Hauptbahnhof (meaning Central Station). The reasons for this ineptitude on my part tell something about Germany. First, most German people I encountered were extremely respectful and I did not at all feel estranged. Second, most German people I met spoke at least a little bit of English. My three-day trip went by in a flash and I simply did not get a chance to buy a dictionary and begin my first German lesson. And lastly, everything in Germany is extremely intuitive and organized.

The process of “getting to know” a city is fascinating. You start by walking around and getting a sense of its identity, or DNA. This identity may be discerned in the smallest of things, like sidewalks, trash cans, the shoes people wear, the street signs, etc. In the Berlin streets, for example, the grass is untrimmed. The layers of the building facades and the visual imagery, or graphic design, tell the story of the city’s past, convey its present spirit, and hint at its future.

The night train to Berlin

The train stopped at Metz at what must have been 2am. It reminded me of my friend Stephanie who lives in Metz and who had invited me to visit her. I was sitting in the bar cart because I couldn’t bear the couchette anymore. It had been a shock to walk into the tiny compartment with six “beds,” three stacked on each side of a very narrow passage in which two people could barely fit. I had one of the lowest bunks and its ceiling was so low I couldn’t even sit up and read. So after a small conversation with the two American girls from Seattle and the German man above me (the last two were a French couple who went to sleep immediately – they must do this a lot), and after shifting restlessly in my bed for two hours, I left with my copy of Les Miserables to find food and a chair in which I could sit upright and read.

The blue sign glimmered in the night: Metz. People got out to smoke and breathe the Metz air.

To be continued (maybe).

The Altes Museum, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1825

Detail of the Altes Museum, revealing intervention at entrance

The Berlin Hauptbahnhof

Cities are like oil paintings.

They are built over time by the addition of countless layers. There may or may not be a grid, but there is movement and there are centers of focus. Older layers lay the foundation for new developments, yet at times they are scraped off in bold and calculated artistic gestures. The artist sets parameters but also lets the painting take its own course. Sometimes there is too much going on and so panels are added on the sides to expand the canvas. At other times the canvas is limited and additional elements have to be incorporated in the already highly complex fabric.

The Centre Pompidou in an aerial map of Paris. Photo by Pierre Metivier.

The Centre Pompidou is like a splash of color that has recently been added to one such old and precious painting, the city of Paris. Some Parisians find the high-tech/modern/postmodern style of the building jarring and contradictory to what Paris is all about. Yet for me the building is a natural part of the city and visiting it is always an uplifting experience.

In a city with so much historic grandeur, the idea of architectural change is met with horror. All the architecture that Paris needs already exists here, and its value will rise as the years go by. But more and more, the architecture ceases to be architecture and becomes art instead.

The Centre Pompidou. Photograph by Serge Melki.

Henri Ven der Velde and the gesamtkunstwerk designers of early Modernism would argue that buildings are a part of the continuum of things that surround us and which we like to design. They are containers of the human body just like clothing, furniture, the room and the city are containers of the human body. Our clothes are an expression of who we are today and not 200 years ago and similarly our buildings must express the spirit of the contemporary age.

Even Victor Hugo writes about the “crisis of change” in a positive light: “Certain things have been unlearnt, and that is good, provided other things are learnt. There must be no void in the human heart. Edifices may be pulled down, but only on the condition that others are put in their place.” So there is no modernism or postmodernism anymore, there is only good architecture and bad architecture. And though it is all very subjective, I would agree with Robert Venturi’s idea that architecture needs to be designed with awareness of one’s own time and of all the periods of the human history. The symbolic is as important as the formal.

During lunch-break yesterday, I rushed to Les Halles for the legendary Paris sales and I was struck by the Pompidou Center which was visible through a slit in an alley on Rue du Temple. I took a picture and only later realized why the moment was so powerful. As I compared the tall structure of the Center Pompidou with the Paris street façade, I noticed a lot of parallels. The pediment, for example, is clearly echoed in the steel structure, and so is the rhythm of horizontals and verticals (Tuscan columns of the 21st century?). The building has proportions that are harmonious in the way classical architecture is. This observation allowed me to understand why the building is a perfectly natural part of Paris in a way that the Forum des Halles finds it hard to be.

In the 1850s, Baron Haussmann gave Paris the Kärcher treatment, carving wide boulevards through the fabric of the city, and creating diagonals that link key points of interest.

The facades along these boulevards were made available to developers who, according to strict guidelines, gave Paris its modern-day identity. I have always been amazed that people actually live in apartments behind these ornate windows in the city-center.

Photo from http://www.skyscrapercity.com

While the triangles created by Haussmann give Paris many Gridiron buildings, I have wondered how the architects at the time articulated spaces behind the street facades and in the center of these triangles. Working on a SoHo project in junior studio last semester I realized that even in the New York grid there are awkward alleys and hollow spaces that only Google Earth reveals. Vito Acconci has been very interested in these forgotten urban spaces.
I see from my office window what happens when the ornate facades are projected backward into the triangular space. Small courtyards with tall concrete walls and strange corners intersecting one another tell the story of an older, more congested Paris.

There is an obsession in France about the problem of housing the "working class," or poor people. This is strange to someone coming from America, where there is very little recognition of the existence of the homeless. What exists in America though is a heightened awareness of racial equality, so no one group is ever deliberately isolated. Whereas Americans discriminate against the poor people as a whole, the French, it seems, find people such as the pied noirs unbearable.

For decades, the French have experimented with logements sociale, in an effort to "integrate" the immigrants, or at least to lure them out of Paris. Here are two old cartoons I found at a stall along the Seine. They depict some radical modernist plans for France and Paris respectively.