Ospedale SS Giovanni e Paolo, Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital Project, plan of third floor (second scheme) 1964
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/case/book_venice_excerpt.htm
EXCERPT
From the Introduction, by Hashim Sarkis
Today mats are everywhere. We call them fields, grounds, carpets, matrices. Whether seen as counterpoint to the preoccupation with sculptural form or as what happens to architecture when it has to cover really large areas, no building type, it could be stated without exaggeration, captures the predicaments but also the imagination of contemporary architecture more fully. The mat answers the recurring calls for indeterminacy in size and shape, flexibility in use, and mixture in program. It expresses architecture's increasing encroachment on both city and landscape and as the open exchange between structure (building) and infrastructure (context) that this encroachment professes. In face of these challenges, and in every other design published in every other magazine, the mat claims to address a wide range of problems preoccupying contemporary architecture.
And yet mat building cannot be associated with a specific formal or stylistic tendency in contemporary architecture. In the words of the late English architect Alison Smithson, it is "still developing." Yet what she justified in the 1970s as a natural condition of the "first primitive state" of mats has become a defining feature. Mats are by definition still developing. Today we apply to this phenomenon attributes as diverse as Kazuyo Sejima's ethereality and Rafael Moneo's compactness. The mat is the image of the promised fluidity of the Foreign Office Architects' Yokohama Terminal. It also occupies the centerfold in Office of Metropolitan Architecture's books on the state of architecture today. To contain all these ideas in one building type would be to miss out on the broad range of real differences between these architects' positions vis-à-vis such fundamental issues as context, the relationship between form and program, and architectural language. The mat category, however, seems to be broad enough to allow for this wide range, even for contradiction. What further binds these contemporary architectures together is their conscious return to mat building as a historical possibility that was never fully explored.
The present fascination has no doubt been triggered by the changes in development culture, particularly by the ever-growing scale of institutions (such as hospitals and schools) and commercial facilities (such as airports and malls). Increasingly developers are also seeking architects to help give form to new programs that have yet to settle on a distinctive type: airport/park/shopping mall or housing/retail/institution. In response, perhaps evasively, architects are seeking ways in which a building could act as a flexible framework rather than a rigid container to these shapeless functions. Avoiding what Stan Allen here refers to as "overall geometric form," today's architects proceed to define buildings that could "give space to the active unfolding of urban life without abrogating the architect's responsibility to provide some form of order." They turn back toward the mat. Allen promptly cautions that contemporary architecture needs to enlarge the scope of mat to include urbanism and landscape. Renaming the phenomenon "mat urbanism," he outlines the mat agenda of today as opening to urbanism and its large scale and multispeed movement and to landscape and its surface and temporal qualities. Mat buildings today aim for a much more aggressive exchange between structure and infrastructure than what was intended in the 1960s. This exchange was assumed to be definitional of the mat, but it did not challenge the permanence and autonomy of infrastructure in the way that contemporary architects are trying to do.
Smithson (2001: 91) described the mat process and defined mat-building as follows: “Mat- building can be said to epitomize the anonymous collective; where the functions come to enrich the fabric and the individual gains new freedoms of action through a new shuffled order, based on interconnection, close knit patterns of association and possibilities for growth, diminution and change.”
The emerging mat-building approach was evoked also in Le Corbusier’s unbuilt Venice Hospital project in 1964. With Berlin Free University in Berlin (1963-74), Candilis-Josic-Woods and Manfred Schieldhelm attempted to show the environmental responsiveness of mat-building in a university context. The guiding ideas of these two buildings reappear in today’s structural and infrastructural organizations. The contemporary significance of mat-building is explained by Hashim Sarkis (2001: 13)
Mat-building’s shallow but dense section activated by ramps and double- height voids unlike the high-rise buildings, mat-building’s low-rise character takes the advantage of an equally accessible circulation network. Ramps in mat-building are integrated with design. The use of mat-building gives also the possibility of flexible design features so that the buildings and urban fabrics can be structured in an inclusive way which can provide different choices of access for its users. It can organize activities in one or two storeys’ height so that it minimizes vertical movements and provides flexible movement patterns, flexible circulation networks and choices of access. Moreover, a simple designed circulation between the ramps can eliminate the confusion within the structure and enable easy use of the spaces. Mat-building can offer the possibility of using the spaces with low physical effort and travelling comfortably with the help of the ramps.
A delicate interplay of repetition and variation:
Mat-buildings take also the advantage of repetitive systems, which can allow spatial structures to expand and change to respond to the changing needs of a variety of users. An environment designed with the variation and repetition characteristics of mat-building allows more users to participate in and experience that environment. For Susan Goltsman (2001: 19.2), “social diversity is very much linked to physical diversity”. If the repetitive design elements are usable and safe for everyone and can be designed also in variation, then it can be stated that with the inclusive design approach in mat-buildings, hazards and errors are minimized
Mat-building can define an organized field where diverse functions of urban life are unified and their internal relationships become more important than the overall structure.
[Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a theory in the last ten years and is far from being a coherent doctrine. Charles Waldheim, James Corner, and Mohsen Mostafavi are among the instructors, practitioners, and theorists who have been most responsible for articulating the terms of landscape urbanism. Interestingly, an early and influential landscape urbanism project, Paris's Parc de la Villette, has been influential for both its actual built environment, designed by architect Bernard Tschumi, as well as the runner-up's (unbuilt) design, by Rem Koolhaas. Still, most of the important projects related to this theory have yet to be built, so design competitions have been an influential stage for the development of the theory.]
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