Expo 67, or the Architecture of Late Modernity Inderbir Singh Riar Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 2014 Inderbir Singh Riar All rights reserved Abstract Expo 67, or the Architecture of Late Modernity Inderbir Singh Riar The 1967 Universal and International Exhibition, the Montreal world’s fair commonly known as Expo 67, produced both continuations of and crises in the emancipatory project of modern architecture. Like many world’s fairs before it, Expo 67 was designed to mediate relations between peoples and things through its architecture. The origins of this work lay in the efforts of Daniel van Ginkel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, architects and town planners who, in remarkable reports, drawings, and architectural ideals advanced between 1962 and 1963, outlined the basis of a fundamentally new, though never fully realised, world’s fair in the late twentieth century. Party to the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne and its influential prewar edicts on functionalist town planning as well as to groups like Team 10 and their opposition to diagrammatic generalisations by an emphasis on the personal, the particular, and the precise, the van Ginkels also drew on contemporary theories and practices of North American urban renewal when first conceiving Expo 67 as an instrument for redeveloping downtown Montreal. The resulting work, Man and the City, which officially secured the world’s fair bid but remained unbuilt, carefully drew on the legacies of most great exhibitions, especially those of the nineteenth century, in order to conceive of sufficiently heroic structures making immanent novel forms of human interaction, social control, and the technical organisation of space. In 1967, this was to suggest a new world historical project – in a space existing for only six months but crowded with 50 million visitors – promoting senses of fraternal self-awareness through the unrelenting promise of progress. The resulting well-known Expo 67 theme, Man and His World, was a paean to contemporary humanism first used by the van Ginkels and their architect allies to reject the most enduring symbols of world exhibitions: the nation-state and its emblematic architecture. They imagined new kinds of architecture that could somehow engender new senses of political consciousness (inspired by, for example, UNESCO or the celebrated Family of Man photography exhibition of 1955) outside nationalist chauvinism. This was a vision of late modernity: a transitional form of political subjectivity still clinging to the shared passions of the citizen (thus for the polis) before being subsumed by mass culture – in other words, a moment during which nationalisms could still be channelled into alternative forms of political belonging free of narrow self-interest. The belief marked every aspect of the van Ginkels early plans and had half-lives in two consequential works: the theme pavilions Man the Producer and Habitat 67, which, with outward emphasis on the aesthetics and technics of innovative structures (and mass production), were seen as fulfilling the ambitions of the megastructural movement in the 1960s. As such, theses architectures of late modernity reflected a markedly modernist conviction of long duration: on the one hand, an abiding faith in technological salvation and, on the other hand, the sense of some liberative social mass giving rise to a new citizen of the world. At the very same moment, this universalism was fraught with ambiguity: on the one hand, any abiding faith in techno- scientific salvation was shaken in the aftermath of global war and the terror of nuclear holocaust; on the other hand, assumed geopolitical ideals were being upended, however temporarily, by, say, decolonisation and resulting alternative global alignments (with effects on the very layout of a postwar world’s fair). Expo 67, perhaps the most consequential twentieth-century world’s fair in terms of the utopian hopes of modern architecture, was prey to these and related desires to reinvigorate the modern project of uniting instrumental reason, mass edification, and popular spectacle in a genuinely new public realm. It would irrevocably shape the ways in which Canada, as a host nation purposely celebrating its centennial in the ambit of a world’s fair, confronted its collective sense of cultural representation and global belonging. Table of Contents List of Illustrations iii Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: City 23 City Origins City, Redux Chapter 2: Theme 64 A Theme Borrowings December January Chapter 3: Plan 115 Theme, Redux Islands Plans Images Plans, Redux Chapter 4: Tetrahedra 191 X’s and O’s A System Triangles Geodesics Tetrahedra “Dumb Authority” Rust Chapter 5: Housing the World, 1 265 A Trip A Thesis Keywords Memoranda Man versus the City Urbanism i Chapter 6: Housing the World, 2 330 Boxes Economies Exhibiting Construction Critique Systems Conclusion: A Nation 407 Bibliography 472 Illustrations 498 ii List of Illustrations Fig. 0.1 The heroic architecture of Expo 67 498 Fig. 0.2 Crowds at Expo 67 499 Fig. 0.3 Montreal transformed in the 1960s 500 Fig. 0.4 John Andrews, Scarborough College, Toronto, 1965 501 Fig. 0.5 The Expo 67 islands under construction 502 Fig. 0.6 Man the Producer 503 Fig. 0.7 Habitat 67 503 Fig. 1.1 “Man in the City” presentation model, 1962 504 Fig. 1.2 Daniel van Ginkel, et al., “Scales of Association” diagram, January 1954 504 Fig. 1.3 CIAM, Otterlo, 1959 505 Fig. 1.4 Aldo van Eyck, “The Story of another Idea”, Forum 7 (1959) 506 Fig. 1.5 The van Ginkels at CIAM Otterlo, 1959 507 Fig. 1.6 Aldo van Eyck, Amsterdam Orphanage, 1959 508 Fig. 1.7 “The Elevated Sidewalk”, Scientific American (July 26, 1913) 509 Fig. 1.8 Van Ginkel Associates, Central Area Circulation study, 1962 510 Fig. 1.9 Louis Kahn, “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia” (1953) 511 and “Order in Architecture” (1957) Fig. 1.10 Daniel van Ginkel, “The City” (January-February 1962) 512 Fig. 1.11 Alison and Peter Smithson, Berlin-Haupstadt project, 1958 513 Fig. 1.12 Marcel Breuer, Berlin Potsdamer Platz project, 1929 514 Fig. 1.13 City of Montreal, Proposed Redevelopment of a Blighted Residential 515 iii Area and Construction of Low Rental Housing (1954) Fig. 1.14 Jean Drapeau’s early urban dreams: Cité-Famille (1957) 515 Fig. 2.1 The Family of Man exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York 516 Fig. 2.2 The Family of Man exhibition catalogue (1955) 517 Fig. 2.3 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (third edition, 1956) 518 Fig. 2.4 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, jacket design for Sigfried Giedion’s Building in 519 France, Building Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete (1928) Fig. 2.5 Louis Kahn, “Monumentality” (1949) 520 Fig. 2.6 Buckminster Fuller, geodesic dome for the United States Marine Corps 521 Fig. 2.7 Louis Kahn, Viaduct Architecture, 1962 522 Fig. 3.1 Expo 67 organisation flowchart, April 1963 523 Fig. 3.2 Le Corbusier, “The law of the meander”, Precisions (1930) 524 Fig. 3.3 Kenzo Tange, Tokyo Bay project, 1960 525 Fig. 3.4 Jean Drapeau presents his tower to the Montreal City Council, 1964 526 Fig. 3.5 The Expo islands, September 25, 1963 527 Fig. 3.6 Kenzo Tange, Tokyo Bay project, 1960; Moshe Safdie, Meadowvale 528 New Town, 1962 Fig. 3.7 Frédéric Le Play, “Colisée de Fer”, Paris Exposition Universelle, 1867 529 Fig. 3.8 Man in the Polar Regions, 1963 530 Fig. 3.9 Frobisher Bay New Town, 1959 531 Fig. 3.10 Team 10 Meeting in Royaumont, France, 1962 532 Fig. 3.11 Candilis-Josic-Woods, Bochum University completion, 1962 533 iv Fig. 3.12 “Precincts” on Expo 67 islands, summer 1963 534 Fig. 3.13 “Pont des Peuples”, late-summer 1963 534 Fig. 3.14 Moshe Safdie, “The Concept of Gnomic Growth”, 1963 535 Fig. 3.15 Moshe Safdie, Proposed City at Giza competition project, 1962 536 Fig. 3.16 Brian Richards, New Movement in Cities (1966) 537 Fig. 3.17 Robert Le Ricolais, “Tension-Net” bridges 538 Fig. 3.18 Yona Freidman, “Ten principles of mobile town planning” (1959) 539 Fig. 3.19 “The Residential Sector”, Harvard GSD design studio, fall 1957 540 Fig. 3.20 Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956) 541 Fig. 3.21 Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, “City Centre Pedestrian” (1966) and Gyorgy 542 Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956) Fig. 3.22 Konrad Wachsmann, Space Structure Study, mid-1950s 543 Fig. 3.23 Progressive Architecture, “Man and His Space Frame” (June 1967) 544 Fig. 3.24 Adèle Naudé, site studies on “subject precincts”, summer 1963 545 Fig. 3.25 The Expo 67 Minirail 546 Fig. 3.26 The Expo 67 master plan, December 5, 1963 547 Fig. 3.27 Progressive Architecture, “A Phantasmagoria of Expo 67” (June 1967) 548 Fig. 4.1 Adèle Naudé, theme pavilion studies, November 1963 549 Fig. 4.2 Yona Friedman, Ville spatial, 1965 550 Fig. 4.3 Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, 1851 550 Fig. 4.4 Man Polar Regions; Shadrach Woods’s “web” 551 Fig. 4.5 Man the Producer and Man the Explorer 551 v Fig. 4.6 Arcop, first sectional study on the theme pavilion, June 1964 552 Fig. 4.7 Arcop, theme pavilion steel structures studies, summer 1964 553 Fig. 4.8 Arcop, first hexagonal plans and sections, late 1964 554 Fig. 4.9 Jeffrey Lindsay, theme pavilion study models 555 Fig. 4.10 Buckminster Fuller and Jeffrey Lindsay at Black Mountain College, 1949 556 Fig. 4.11 Buckminster Fuller, studies on the close packing of spheres, 1948 556 Fig.