David Leatherbarrow – författare

Three Cultural Ecologies reverses common conceptions of modern architecture. It reveals how selected works of two modern architects, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, embraced environmental and cultural conditions as reciprocal and complementary. A basic premise of this book’s arguments is that cultural patterns cannot be adequately conceptualized in the terms that typically define ecology today. Instead, studies based on the natural sciences must be complemented by descriptions and interpretations of historical narratives, cultural norms, and individual expressions. Previously unpublished images and new interpretations will allow readers to rediscover works they thought they knew; Villa Savoye, Taliesin, La Tourette, and Ocatilla; as well as projects that are less well known: by Wright, the House on the Mesa and the City Residential Plan, and by Le Corbusier, the Immeuble-villas and Ilôt Insalubre projects. More broadly, this study of cultural ecology at three scales – domestic, monastic, and urban – reconsiders the history of modern architecture. The conditions brought about by societal and technological modernization and confronted by modern architecture have not disappeared in our time, but have intensified, making the task of imagining how some measure of equilibrium between culture and ecology might be achieved even more pressing.

Three Cultural Ecologies reverses common conceptions of modern architecture. It reveals how selected works of two modern architects, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, embraced environmental and cultural conditions as reciprocal and complementary. A basic premise of this book’s arguments is that cultural patterns cannot be adequately conceptualized in the terms that typically define ecology today. Instead, studies based on the natural sciences must be complemented by descriptions and interpretations of historical narratives, cultural norms, and individual expressions. Previously unpublished images and new interpretations will allow readers to rediscover works they thought they knew; Villa Savoye, Taliesin, La Tourette, and Ocatilla; as well as projects that are less well known: by Wright, the House on the Mesa and the City Residential Plan, and by Le Corbusier, the Immeuble-villas and Ilôt Insalubre projects. More broadly, this study of cultural ecology at three scales – domestic, monastic, and urban – reconsiders the history of modern architecture. The conditions brought about by societal and technological modernization and confronted by modern architecture have not disappeared in our time, but have intensified, making the task of imagining how some measure of equilibrium between culture and ecology might be achieved even more pressing.

Existing histories of modern architecture typically give their highest praise to private houses and their most severe condemnation to architect-authored urban plans, often neglecting the built works that are no smaller than a single building and possibly as large as an urban block, the middle or institutional scale, where culturally significant urban transformation actually takes place.

Urban architecture is a timely topic as today cities worldwide are suffering accelerated urbanisation, which is often dehumanising and destructive, especially to the unbuilt environment, airs, waters and soils. The middle or institutional scale is shown to activate and actualise latent potentials for cultural experience and environmental intelligence, allowing the city to surprise itself and delight in its discoveries.

In Projecting Urbanity, David Leatherbarrow, via author-architect texts by his former doctorate students, lays out the basis for a revision of modern architecture’s contribution to cities and their culture. Presenting a series of texts featuring buildings or their parts of various scales – from the construction detail, to the room or garden, to ensembles within a neighborhood – the contributors introduce concepts for contemporary and future urban architecture, together with richly indicative examples from the past several decades.

While architecture cannot “solve” today’s urban problems, it certainly has a role to play in their productive transformation, articulating opportunities for life and culture that are more humane, less wasteful, and more beautiful.