"The outside Is the Result of an inside": Some Sources of One of Modernism's Most

Persistent Doctrines
Author(s): Thomas L. Schumacher
Source: Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 56, No. 1 (Sep., 2002), pp. 22-33
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools of
Architecture, Inc.
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 THOMAS L. CHUMACHER "The Outside Is the Result
University of Maryland

of an Inside"
Some Sources of One of Modernism's
Most Persistent Doctrines

One of the most pervasive doctrines of composition for modernism was the necessary corres
dence between the interior and the exterior as expressed in Le Corbusier's maxim, "The outs
result of an inside." Many Modern movement architects interpreted this maxim as requiring
"space" and "program" be expressed on the exterior of their buildings. Although Modern mo
architects and theorists themselves wrote little on this subject, a number of earlier writings,
some nineteenth- and twentieth-century books by traditionalists, reveal the academic roots
precepts. This paper traces the development of these ideas.

Introduction
"A building is like a soap bubble.... The
outside is the result of an inside."
Le Corbusier'
"Architecture has always been essentially an
abstract art.. ."
Henry-Russell Hitchcock2
Ask an architecture student today to account for
some variation in the fenestration of an otherwise
repetitive facade of even a Renaissance building,
and the answer will most likely be that the architect
was trying to project some aspect of interior space
onto the outside wall. The idea that interior-exterior
correspondences should be the standard expectation
of facade appearance is a widespread assumption in
contemporary architecture schools, and it is difficult
to contest as the only norm of architectural expres-
sion.
In much of the architecture of the Modern
activity purpose of a building, is distinguishable
from function as the fulfillment of environmental
and comfort requirements (with which I am not
concerned in the present essay), which in turn
should be distinguished from functions (plural), that than the U.S. Supreme Court, where the portico
is, the specific programmed elements of the
building, the rooms and spaces of the interior.
The Importance of the Program
The exterior of a courthouse may telegraph a
number of different messages, ranging from the
idea that the building is a courthouse and not a
post office, to the indication of an important
chamber, to the fact that the building is a public
institution, to the importance of the building in its
community, and so forth. The means by which and
the degree to which each of these attributes can be
articulated vary enormously from place to place and
time to time. Courthouse may be plainly indicated
by an inscription over the door, a sign out front, or
"courtroom." Simply because Le Corbusier's High
Court in Chandigarh, India, parades all its court-
rooms on its front facade doesn't necessarily make
this building any more expressive of "courthouse"
stands for the institution (and the chamber) as an
architectural synecdoche. However it is accom-
plished, the signal of activity function is assumed by
contemporary architects to be the preferred initial
reading upon encountering a building.
These modern assumptions about what a
courthouse or any other building should announce
to the casual observer were not always the norm.
Among the romantics of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, the idea that a building
might be Hungarian, French, or English was far
more important than whether it was a library, a
town hall, or a mansion. Goethe, for example, glori-
fied the "German-ness" of German architecture,
arguing,

movement, two important assumptions were tacitly by the Corinthian portico flashed behind a TV news- And now I should not be angry ... when the
made about the inside and the outside. One was caster to indicate the United States Supreme Court. German art scholar, upon the hearsay of
that a building's social program ought to be read An important courtroom may be placed on the jealous neighbors, does not appreciate his
quite literally on the outside of the building, facade as a volume or it may be displayed via superiority, belittles your work with the misun-
without the aid of inscription. The other assumption enlarged windows or even via a blank windowless derstood word "Gothic," when he should thank
was that the interior spaces and volumes ought to wall. The same Corinthian portico we see behind God to be able to proclaim aloud that that is
be read as well. These ideas are interconnected and the newsreader may denote the existence of the German Architecture, our architecture, when
often become conflated in practice. Function, taken chamber. That is, if the portico successfully the Italian can boast of none of his own, much
here to mean the institutional identification or social projects "courthouse" then it must also project less the Frenchman.3

23 SCHUMACHER Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 23-33 ? 2002 ACSA, Inc.

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 Sir John Summerson claimed that interest in
program was the single common denominator of
theoretical assumptions within the Modern move-
ment in architecture. In a seminal article in the RIBA
Journal in the late 1950s, he summarized that,
"the source of unity in Modern Architecture is in the
social sphere, in other words in the architect's
program."4 Summerson further argued,
From the antique (a world of form) to the
program (a local fragment of social pattern);
this suggests a swing in the architect's psycho-
logical orientation almost too violent to be
credible. Yet in theory at least, it has come
about; and how it has come about could very
well be demonstrated historically. First the
rationalist attack on the authority of the
antique; then the displacement of the classical
antique by the mediaeval; then the introduc-
tion into mediaevalist authority of purely social
factors (Ruskin); then the evaluation of purely
vernacular architectures because of their social
realism (Morris); and finally the concentration
of interest on the social factors themselves and
the conception of the architect's program as
the source of unity - the source not precisely
of forms but of adumbrations of forms of
undeniable validity. The program as the source
of unity is, so far as I can see, the one new
principle involved in modern architecture.5
The route to an architecture that seeks to
express program function (and interior volume) was
a slow one throughout the nineteenth century,
culminating in such canonical International Style
buildings as Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau. Reyner
Banham characterized buildings like the Bauhaus as
typical of the design process that was common to
most avant-garde architects in the 1920s. Banham
traced the origins of this idea specifically to the
unacknowledged influence of the great academician
Julien Guadet's theories on modernist architects,
adding, that "it may be taken as a general charac-
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teristic of the progressive architecture of the early
twentieth century that it was conceived in terms of
a separate and defined volume for each separate
and defined function, and composed in such a way
that this separation and definition was made plain."6
Robert Venturi has also argued that, in much
of twentieth-century architecture, "program func-
tions are exaggeratedly articulated into wings or
segregated separate pavilions."7 The gradual substi-
tution of such programmatic expression for tectonic
expression has many determinants during this
period, one of them being the architect's gradual
estrangement from the engineer and the artist,
starting in the middle of the eighteenth century."
Partially removed from the technical expertise of
the engineer and the aestheticism of the painter
and sculptor, the late-eighteenth-century architect
was drawn toward the social sciences, to the idea
that architecture could be the independent variable
upon which behavior depended. Myths about the
origins of architecture began to change. Architec-
ture was now seen as emanating from a social, not
a constructive, source.
We can see the increasing importance of the
social realm in a cursory comparison of two decisive
theorists: Marc-Antoine Laugier, writing in 1753,9
and Gottfried Semper, writing one hundred years
later.10 Laugier conceived an almost wholly
constructive rationale for the origins of architecture.
He assumed that the programmatic need for shelter
was important, but generalized. For him, the manip-
ulation of the primary elements to make that
shelter-that is, the column and the architrave-
is the initial act of man behaving like an architect.
Semper wrote his treatise after the intervention
of the seminal social ideas of the Enlightenment
and their application to architecture by Ledoux,
Fourier, Bentham, and others. Semper was also
strongly influenced by the work of biologist Georges
Cuvier, whose scientific innovation "was to shift
emphasis from description by the identifiable
members of an organism, and classification by
description, to classification by the function per-
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formed."" This led to a classification of buildings by
social, not formal or constructive, criteria. Semper
divided architecture into four independent elements:
the hearth, the platform, the roof (including the
vertical structure), and the enclosure ("infill"). He
wrote,
The first sign of human settlement . . . is
today, as when the first men lost paradise, the
setting up of the fireplace and the lighting of
the reviving, warming, and food-preparing
flame. Around the hearth the first groups
assembled; around it the first alliance formed;
around it the first rude religious concepts were
put into the customs of a cult. Throughout all
phases of society the hearth formed that
sacred focus around which the whole took
order and shape.12
The hearth is the first and most elemental of
Semper's forms. He continues, "it is the first and
most important, the moral element of architecture
[his italics]."" As Rosemarie Bletter explained, "the
fire [is] an element without spatial dimension but
one that bestows social significance on the site."14
In this regard, Semper was following Vitruvius, who
averred, "the beginning of association among
human beings, their meeting and living together...
came into being because of the discovery of
fire."15
Further, Semper's "roof, with its supporting
member is read as a continuous unit," 6 thereby
amalgamating two of the most discrete elements
of all previous systems (including Laugier's): the
column and the architrave. He also made a clear
separation of structure and enclosure, arguing that
the earliest of human habitations were frame
constructions with woven carpets as vertical spatial
separators. "Only the potter's art," Semper argued,
"can with some justification perhaps claim to be as
ancient as the craft of carpet weaving [his italics]."17
Semper conceived the facade as, "a partition wall
made with hands, the first vertical division of space
"The Outside Is the Result of an Inside" 24
invented by man."18 Wall as divider precedes wall as reflected in similar shape; different functions in one's attention from true architectural values: the

support in Semper's system. Although this is not to different shapes."21 relations of wall to window, solid to void, volume to
say that Semper was unconcerned with structure space, block to block."24
and construction, the ideas limned above are a Abstraction and Volumetric This premium on abstraction, confirmed by
precursor to the separation of structure and enclo- Expression Hitchcock's statement that covers this essay, was
sure that became the plan libre of Le Corbusier and The New Architecture has ... made "front" wedded to the idea that the inside should be
Mies, wherein the facade surface was not its own and "back," "right" and "left," and possibly projected to the outside. H.R. Hitchcock and Philip
structure. And, without that structural and construc- also "above" and "below" equal in value. Johnson portrayed this shift in expressive possibili-
tive essence, walls could become, in the words of Theo van Doesburg22 ties as the difference between the expression of
Van Doesburg, "colour planes [which] form an mass and the expression of volume.25
organic part of the new architecture."19 In other The programmatic message that a building projects Le Corbusier's "soap bubble" metaphor gave
words, for Van Doesburg and his generation, the to the outside world is one issue. Another important architects the paradigm. Since the 1920s, many
planes are abstract. issue is what the building projects of its internal avant-garde architects have taken this prescription
Semper's destruction of one of architecture's spaces. Along with program having been conceived rather literally, and they could assume it to be oper-
most lasting structural conventions -that is, the as an independent variable in the design equation, ative for repetitive as well as hierarchical buildings;
clear distinction of vertical from horizontal members so "space" and "volume" have been "liberated" a repetitive facade must necessarily project a repeti-
(column and architrave) - is an important step on from structure and construction. This independence tive interior, otherwise "something is being hidden."
the road to abstraction. Further, his insistence on has changed the way in which architects approach And, although an adherence to the rigors of
the anthropological setting as the architectural plan organization (so-called free plan), the making construction exigencies and budgets often may
prime determinant indicates that architects could of rooms (so-called free-flowing space), the expres- conflict with an equally rigorous display of internal
now see "program" alongside "structure" as a sion of purpose (program function versus national volume or function (as when a neutral curtain-wall
significant generator of architectural form and and regional traits), and the design of the exterior facade of repetitive structure covers a spatially hier-
surface. surface (so-called free-facade). archical interior), some modern architects have
Directives regarding the connection of activity In the 1920s, with the advent of the Interna- succeeded in expressing both gradation and concat-
program and facade appear in the literature at least tional Style, the abstract white stucco and glass enation. Louis I. Kahn's Exeter Library is a building
as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. facade emerged, profoundly influenced by modern that, through its massing and fenestration, reveals
Richard Etlin has uncovered how, according to the painting. Peter Collins traced the influence of its importance without literally telegraphing its great
French Conseil des Batiments Civil (1805), "each painting and abstraction on the architects of the internal space. The building's rigorous repetition of
building had to announce on its exterior the char- early twentieth century. He argued that Gropius's structural bays preserves the traditional conventions
acter [corresponding to] its function."20 I have students at the Bauhaus, "were initiated into the of masonry construction without resembling a banal
added Semper to Summerson's example of Ruskin study of architecture by manipulating abstract office building.
as the agent of the "social program" determinant, shapes without any reference to building functions Architects may disagree on "which what" of
which by the early twentieth century was to begin or the ultimate strength of materials, but solely with the inside should appear on the exterior surface,
to have a profound effect on architects' attitudes a view to achieving ornamental appeal in terms of yet, among even the moderates among International
about form making. 'significant form.""23 This abstraction appeared in Style modernists, few would have allowed that the
That such ideas have been codified into the the architecture of Adolf Loos around 1910, and outside surface ought to determine interior distribu-
literature of late-twentieth-century theory is was then further developed by Le Corbusier, the tion. It's one thing to not project all the innards
attested by Rudolf Arnheim's argument in his influ- Bauhaus, the Dutch, and the Russians in the 1910s onto the outer wall; it's quite another for the
ential book, The Dynamics of Architectural Form: and 1920s. Writing just after World War II, Nikolas outside wall to dictate, or even precede, the interior.
"The simple principle to which all this comes down Pevsner observed the new abstraction in Gropius The Place Vendome and Haussmann's boulevards in
is that in a well-designed building there is a struc- and Meyer's Faguswerke factory and the Werkbund Paris, where the facades were built before the
tural correspondence between visual properties and Administration, both built just before World War I: buildings, are often the object of modern architects'
functional characteristics. Similar function should be "No moldings, no frills, were permitted to distract indignation and disdain, as if it were patently

25 SCHUMACHER

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 K ": "i: ~?1r.1. Peruzzi,
',h Palazzo Massimo, 1525, plan at upper floor (from
Letarouilly).

"I -p.

d i

"
, 1
?o"1_
-. b

obvious that such an act is immoral and

buildings inauthentic,
exuding the value of "truth"
nonhierarchical expounded
in terms of the spaces behind, not
despite the fact that these projects are brilliant
by Ruskin. In the late 1950s,unlike
Le a Corbusier wrote
modern office building. an
But repetitive
urban gestures. introduction to a photo essay onalso
facades the
show upCistercian
in buildings whose internal
In most premodern architecture, the more
Monastery of Le Thoronet inspatial
southern France.
hierarchies are more The
pronounced. The
book
important the building, the less was
the entitled
facade The Architecture
related Farnese and of Truth.
Massimo palaces in Rome (sixteenth
to the rooms it covered and the In more it related
addition to
to a penchant for
century)plain walls
are buildings and
whose facades rather deftly
the
the space it faced, be it street or use of the
square, same material
whether or on
hide the
what inside
a modern sensibility as on asthe
interprets spatial
not the facades were built first. Giulio
outside Carlo
(and Argan
presumably discrepancies
all the way between internal void and
through), the exterior
many
maintained that in the Renaissance,
modern asarchitects
in antiquity, wall.to
have come The appreciate
facade of the Palazzo Farnese
those veils the
the most important and grandest facades
historical displayed
examples where the double-volume
interior volume
grand Salone at therelates
upper left of
an architectural form that, "was not outside
to the that of the the facade.
wall, where the spaces For his are
Palazzo Massimo, Baldassare
solid volume whose facades suggested [the]
"projected" internal
onto the facade.Peruzzi
Venetian palaces
had to choose between have
centering the grand
structure, but a cubic void whose
oftenfacades are the examplesroom
been favorite for professors
on the of
facade or on the courtyard; the two
enclosing walls."26 Further, the greater
design. thefacade
This numbertype seems
do notto soHe perfectly
line up. opted for the courtyard (Figure 1 ),
of equal (and large) windows mirror
a Renaissance client
the parti, a relationship
with its central room,that wasthe
more immediate
portego, because it
could afford for his palazzo, typically
the happier he with
faced was. an open was loggia. Butviait
made perceptible the is unlikely
promenade of the
Irregularity, to quattrocento that projecting the
and cinquecento plan and
clients section
building. Also, some onto the
of the windows on the first
(whatever its origins), symbolized
facadethe unkempt
was an important intention of
attic floor light the patrons
and ventilate the upper reaches of
squalor of the Middle Ages. or architects of the late Middle Ages,
the grand salone, thelight
while others Renais-
smaller rooms
Further, when observing architecture of the
sance, or the above. Architects
baroque. If anything, and architecture
many of students
those who
past, the "orthodox modernist" (Robert
facades Venturi's
illustrate the struggle to
study the suppress
drawings such
of this masterpiece aonly
are the
term) takes great delight in discovering
reading.27 inside- persons who are ever aware of any inconsistency of
outside relationships that appear
The to prevision
repetition of similar bays is common in internal-external alignment. They are also the only
ancient, Renaissance,
modernism. Vernacular buildings, ancient andruins
Post-Renaissance public ones who care.
stripped of their revetments, buildings.
and doggedly plain
Some of those buildings are in fact deep, In these two palaces, the tension between the
buildings like Cistercian abbeys are
porch-like often
structures, cited
and some are alsoas
relatively inside and the outside poses a dilemma for the

"The Outside Is the Result of an Inside" 26

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modernist architect. Confronted with a similar situa-
tion deriving from contemporary functional
distribution, the modernist would most often allow
the inside to determine the outside.
Such aesthetic predilections do not originate
with the International Style, however. Nineteenth-
century English architects and theorists began to
promote the idea that interior volume should make
its way out to the facade and the massing of a
building. George Hersey sketched this development
in his book, High Victorian Gothic, coining the
phrase, Automatic Functional Picturesque to
describe the theory of E.B. Lamb, who argued, "by
their size and importance, and the situation and
decoration of the windows and doors, the principal
rooms will sufficiently indicate their uses."28 Hersey
further expanded the idea by examining the work of
William White, noting White's, "emphasis on func-
tional expression through volumes rather than
facade details."29 But perhaps Hersey's most telling
example is that of G.E. Street, the famous Victorian
architect and theorist. Hersey quotes Street in this
regard twice, first in a diatribe against a particular
building in Oxford, where, "from the exterior it is
difficult if not impossible to obtain an idea of what
the interior arrangement is, or what may be the
object of the building."30 Later in his career, in his
Royal Academy lectures of 1881, Street amplified
this sentiment: "The construction of the exterior
should, as far as possible, show the arrangement of
the interior, and you ought at once to know some-
thing about the positions of the floors, the shape of
the roofs, and the sizes and uses of the principal
rooms, merely by examining the exterior of the
building."31
Coming from a Gothic Revival architect, this
sentiment sounds almost anachronistic to the
twenty-first-century observer, as it very closely
resembles the instruction given architecture
students by teachers steeped in the theories of
Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. However, although
contemporary academic design studios often follow
such prescriptions, few modernist masters wrote
27 SCHUMACHER
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about it. Van Doesburg seemed to have parroted Le
Corbusier's dictum verbatim in his lectures: "The
interior ought to determine the shape of the exte-
rior."32 Le Corbusier himself sent out conflicting
signals. In Towards a New Architecture, he first
states that "mass and surface are determined by the
plan. The plan is the generator."33 Later he argues
that "a mass is enveloped in its surface, a surface
which is divided up according to the directing and
generating lines of the mass; and this gives the
mass its individuality."34
Program and space have yet another dimension
in relation to facade design, and a comparison
between two projects by Le Corbusier may serve to
further elucidate the relationship of program as
interior volume to the exterior surface. In the Ozen-
fant Studio of 1923, the street facades display the
internal spaces fairly explicitly. The studio at the top
of the house is covered by a huge window wall, and
smaller-scaled ribbon windows cover the rooms
below. Le Corbusier could justify his giant window
as required to properly light a painting studio, but
the spatial expression is also purposeful.
On both the front and rear facades of Le
Corbusier's Villa Stein at Garches, no such tele-
graphing of internal volume occurs. The ribbon
windows that spread out across the front of the
piano nobile are the same as those of the less
important bedroom floor above; the kitchen on the
left receives the same window treatment as the
library in the center and the stair hall on the right.
The double height of the entry hall is unexpressed.
The facade of the Villa Stein at Garches is unmis-
takably telling us something very different about its
internal contents from the Ozenfant Studio; it refers
back, via its facade parti if not its style, to the
tradition of the piano nobile houses of the Italian
Renaissance and the French baroque. Colin Rowe
and Robert Slutzky, in their seminal essay, "Trans-
parency, Literal and Phenomenal," commented on
this condition at the Villa Stein at Garches.
Describing the space behind the rear facade (a
condition similar to that in the front), they write,
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"on first examination this space appears to be an
almost flat contradiction of the facade; particularly
on the principal floor, the volume revealed is almost
directly opposite to that which we might have antic-
ipated. Thus the glazing of the garden facade might
have suggested the presence of a single large room
behind it."35
Of course, it is the "second examination," as it
were, that led Rowe and Slutzky to their conclu-
sions. "First examination" is what critics would have
seen in the 1950s (when the article was written) -
that is, an interior projected onto the facade. In
other words, Rowe and Slutzky were tacitly criti-
cizing the assumption concerning inside-outside
relationships.
By contrast, the architects of the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries - like Peruzzi before
them - did not see fit to express what they would
have considered the banalities of individual rooms
on the exteriors of their buildings. Rather, they
resolved a regularized repetitive exterior to an inte-
rior of great variations in room size, scale, and
proportion. Post-Renaissance social life, both aristo-
cratic and bourgeois, was ever so much more
complex than that of the Renaissance, and room
shapes, sizes, and functions began to proliferate in
the seventeenth century.36 By the end of the seven-
teenth century, the arrangement of space for
increasingly specific uses (the art of distribution in
French) was beginning to catch up with composition
as a primary activity in the architectural design
process.37 We see this process in the theories and
practice of J.F. Blondel, an architect at the forefront
of the development of modern distribution and hier-
archy in the plan. To Blondel (see Figure 2), the
facade did not express this hierarchy directly or
volumetrically, but rather through scale and regu-
larity. As Richard Etlin has explained,
Blondel had to manipulate two distinct systems
of organization which had to be coordinated
together at the same time that each satisfied
different and sometimes opposing
2. J.F. Blondel, Country House, 1737-1738, project, plan and elevation
I t VA I ION It )IV 1. 1) 1 . M, U)RIN
(from Etlin, "Les Dedans").

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demands.... The difficulty resided in
combining a facade with regularly spaced
windows all the same size with correctly
proportioned rooms of different dimensions.38
The results of Blondel's design process are
anathema to a modernist sensibility. For instance,
the fact that the same-size windows often light and
ventilate both closets and public rooms is obviously
a condition that a twentieth-century functionalist
would not countenance.
As the variety of room and program types
proliferated in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, some architects sought to reconcile
regular exteriors, or at least exteriors not generated
by interior arrangement, with irregular interiors. For
picturesque buildings, however, there was no
perceived problem to be resolved because the same
romanticism that savored picturesque images of a
classical past also appreciated medieval asymmetry
and haphazardness, in which a combination of
rooms of wildly different contour could easily be
accommodated. But, although the picturesque tradi- inside-outside relationships in The Principles of
tion made it easier for individual rooms to assert
themselves, this did not mean that the various
bulges, wings, pavilions, and protuberances regularly
corresponded to the specific spaces behind. Some-
times they did, and sometimes they did not.
During the "heroic period" of the Modern
movement (1920-1940), however, it was the
academic writers who gave substance to these
ideas; the directive saturates the academic treatises
of the early twentieth century, books written to
promote neomedieval and Neo-Renaissance styles
and methods, not modernism.
Howard Robertson explained his theory of
Architectural Composition (1924):
The portion of the elevation corresponding
with some principal element of the plan will be
appropriately richer in treatment and in general

"The Outside Is the Result of an Inside" 28

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 accentuation. More simply and monotonously
treated portions will correspond with internal
corridors and connecting links of the plan, and
minor emphasis will convey the presence of
secondary, but nevertheless important, plan
elements.39
Two years later, Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis
maintained that "the plan determines many of the
elements essential to the composition which cannot
be fixed by the elevations or facades, and to which
the latter must conform."40
Other examples proliferate. Arthur Stratton, in
Elements of Form & Design in Classic Architecture
(1925) had a similar opinion: "In all good design the
plan finds expression externally, and features subor-
dinate to the general outline of a building are in
direct relation to the plan."41 As practical applica-
tions within neoclassic and Neo-Gothic practice,
however, the most important feature of plan-
elevation correspondence concerned the massing of
dominant and subordinate elements, which were
only remotely related to interior spaces. The almost
axiomatic centrality of major rooms roughly corre-
sponded to the almost axiomatic centrality of the
elevations and masses.
Some of the academic theorists of the early
twentieth century exhibited remarkable balance
regarding the relationship of the interior and the
exterior. Realizing that only certain aspects of inte-
rior organization and structure would necessarily
make themselves felt on the facade, Robertson
made a case for accommodation (but hardly a
compromise):
[S]ince we are dealing with solids, the internal
forms, of which the elevations are merely the
envelope, are bound to find some expression
on the exterior. An analogy is that between the
covering of the body and its internal structure
and organs, which, while not expressed in
detail on the exterior, dictate nevertheless the
general contours of the human form.42
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Robertson had a caveat, however. He held that
too close an inside-outside correspondence might
wreck an otherwise good facade: "Expression of
plan in elevation may be carried to absurd lengths.
It is a common failing, for instance, to stress unduly
the height of a hall which is an important plan
element, in order to make its location more
evident.... The mere presence of importance of
bulk and position cannot always be directly indi-
cated in facade."43
A.E. Richardson and Hector Corfiato - two
rather late apologists for classical architecture
(1 940s) - contended, "as external statements of
interior arrangements alone are insufficient to
provide aesthetic effects, it is obvious that other
aids are required."44
By the mid-twentieth century, the idea that
the internal spaces of buildings ought to provide
the norm of external expression - and that any vari-
ation from this norm is understandable and
justifiable only as an ironic deviation from the
norm - was tacitly accepted by modern architects.45
The pervasiveness of the doctrine is apparent in the
argument set forth in a polemical text of the early
1980s: The Decorated Diagram, by Klaus Herdeg.46
Herdeg faults Gropius's followers at Harvard for not
following the Bauhaus principles closely enough and
introduces his case with a comparison of Le Corbu-
sier's Errazuris House in Chile (1930) (Figure 3) and
Marcel Breuer's "Exhibition House" at the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, of 1949 (Figure 4).
Herdeg praises Le Corbusier's house and criticizes
Breuer's, and his primary gambit of criticism is that,
although both houses have "butterfly" roofs, the
roof covering Le Corbusier's house displays a tighter
relationship to the interior spaces than does
Breuer's. "In the Errazuris house ... the V-shaped
roof interlocks with and thus enhances the meaning
of several other aspects of the house."47 In con-
trast, the valley of the butterfly roof in Breuer's
house, "instead of being placed in a spatially and
symbolically meaningful position ... happens to
coincide with the wall between the bathroom and
utility room."48 Herdeg presses his case with words
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
like "direct conflict" and "discrepancy."49 He
continues:
In the bulletin which the museum published on
the occasion of the house's exhibition we are
told that the double-story package of the
garage and "parents' apartment" is design to
be added at a later stage .... Yet however
plausible this design decision may be from a
diagrammatic and practical viewpoint, it
becomes utterly implausible when the form of
the volume of the house is considered. Surely
one would expect an addition to be joined
where the two roof slopes meet, rather than
made into an arbitrary extension of one of the
other of the butterfly wings.
Although Herdeg is not describing specifically
a facade issue, the inside-outside correspondence is
there, nonetheless. Buildings like the MOMA Exhibi-
tion House, Herdeg avers, "devalue what were the
once rigorous standards of architecture."50 Herdeg
finishes off his argument with another example from
Le Corbusier: the Besnos House, Vaucresson (1922).
Here, Herdeg explains away the lack of correspon-
dence between space and facade by explaining that
Le Corbusier was being ironic: "[the] outside having
little correspondence with what lies behind it in
total opposition to the modern movement belief
that the exterior of a building should reflect its
interior."51 Again, Herdeg compares Le Corbusier to
more-recent architects, this time Ulrich Franzen and
Philip Johnson, concluding that their "false-fronts"
on Fifth Avenue in New York are to be abjured
because they lack the sophisticated irony displayed
at Vaucresson.52
Space, Independent of Matter
As American architectural education evolved from
Ecole des Beaux-Arts style to "Bauhaus" style, it
retained more than just the French teaching vocab-
ulary. The traditional concept of inside-outside
correspondence finds its latter-day paradigm in the
Bauhaus-inspired student projects of the post-
3. Le Corbusier, Errazuris house, Chile, 1930, section (Le Corbusier, Oeuvre compl&te, 7929-34).
4. Marcel Breuer, MoMa House, 1949, New York (from Herdeg, The Decoroted Diagram).

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World War II era. These highly abstract projects are
sometimes referred to as the "exploded cube." The
exploded cube project is composed of consistently
structured elements, either with a limited envelope
or as a picturesque assembly, like drawers being
pushed and pulled in and out on the x, y, and z
axes of a kind of all-sided dresser. Students in
schools of architecture across the U.S. were given
exploded-cube projects in elementary design studio
courses. One of the rules of the game was to main-
tain volumetric correspondence between inside and
outside; no volume could be added or removed, a
kind of "conservation of space."
Only when "space" could be distinguished by
modern architects as independent of structure could
the exploded cube have been developed. "Space,"
in the general (singular) sense as a positive, inde-
pendent, and abstract essence is the final aspect of
this argument. Architects are often called molders of
space, but the term space was not always an essen-
tial word for architects. Peter Collins suggested that
"space," before the turn of the twentieth century,
was itself an idea subsumed within structure:
Whereas the Rationalists, such as Violet-le-
Duc, could conceive only of the structure of
churches as providing the archetype for a new
way of building, Wright took the space, and it
is this that distinguishes Wright from the other
great architects of his generation .... Hence-
forth, space was regarded as the twin partner
with structure in the creation of architectural
composition.53
Wright confirmed that to him space was some-
thing independent; writing many years later, he
argued for "the essential of the architectural change
from box to free plan and the new reality that is
space instead of matter."54 So strong is the modern
notion of the independence of "space" that some
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recent critics have interpreted an interest in abstract vertical support on the exterior. The free facade,
space to architects going back to the Renaissance.55 more inchoate and abstract, might seem to imply
For modern architects committed to the some other expressive intent. But Le Corbusier
expression of program function and volume, space described both elements in precisely the same
could now operate in the service of that function manner in the Oeuvre Complete: "The windows can
and seep to the outside of the building. Premodern ... run from edge to edge."56 For Le Corbusier, the
facade hierarchy had derived from ideas of perma- plasticity of the facade is a more general adumbra-
nence, the demands of masonry construction, and tion of the idea of the frame.
the spanning of great distances. Long spans meant Bruno Zevi insisted on a literal freedom for the
thick walls, buttresses, or side aisles. The exterior free facade and asked architects to abjure any
surfaces of masonry buildings, when they registered facade regularity (see Figure 5):
anything of the internal organization, registered the
struggle to create the clear span. There is no reason why every window in a
With the advent of the new materials and building should be just like the next one and
structural techniques all this changed. It was now not have a character of its own. Once you get
possible to span virtually any distance with a flat rid of the tyranny of classicism, windows will
ceiling and enclose the volume with thin be all the more effective if they are different
membranes. No longer did the articulated pieces of and can convey a host of messages. Classicism
construction have to intervene to give concrete breaks the facade into vertical and horizontal
form to the expressive intent; construction could be sections. But eliminating the juxtaposition and
abstracted. superimposition of modules will make the
facade whole again.57
Conclusion
Whereas for Rowe and Slutzky, and later Herdeg, Le Zevi made no pretense of a functionalist argu-
Corbusier represents the dissenting attitude ment. His interest in having all the windows
concerning inside-outside correlations, to most different was not that they might light and ventilate
modernists he is responsible for having created the
each room perfectly, but that they may convey
some message about the nature of modernism as
common wisdom that the norm of facade expression
compared to classicism. His windows are all different
should be internal volume. Perhaps that is because
he was one of the few architects to write about it. precisely because they couldn't be all different in a
Moreover, his distinction between free facade andclassical building. That so many architects have
ribbon window (two of his five points for the "newtaken Le Corbusier's metaphor literally is perhaps a
testament to the seductiveness of the inside-
architecture") would seem to support this interpre-
outside continuum, and the seductiveness of Van
tation. Both of these elements are made possible by
the separation of structure and enclosure, itself Doesburg's abstraction. It is a highly particularized
made possible by the reinforced concrete or steel yet omnipresent version of the idea that architec-
frame, and both inventions openly indicate the exis-
ture should be like the human body, as offered by a
tence of the frame behind, whatever surface is hung
recent magazine ad for a high-fiber cereal: "If you
on it. The ribbon window announces the existence take care of the inside, the inside takes care of the
of the structural frame by the visible absence of outside."
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
5. Bruno Zevi, facade and window studies (from The Language of Modern Architecture).

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Notes 20. R. Etlin, Symbolic Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 43. Ibid, pp. 137-138.
1994), p. 49.
1. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural 44. A.E. Richardson and H.O. Corfiato, Design in Civil Architecture,
21. R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (Berkeley: Univer- vol. 7, Elevational Treatments (London: The English Universities Press,
Press, 1927), p. 167.
sity of California Press, 1977), p. 204. 1948), p. 18.
2. H.R. Hitchcock, Painting Towards Architecture (New York: Duell,
22. Van Doesburg, "Towards a Plastic Architecture," reprint, p. 187. 45. In the early 1980s, Beaux-Arts-trained architect Jean Paul Carlhian
Sloan and Pearce, 1948), p. 11.
3. J.W. Goethe, "Of German Architecture," from Goethe's Werke 23. P. Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, p. 274. expressed disdain for the U.S. Supreme Court building because the
24. Nikolaus Pevsner, Outline of European Architecture (London: courtroom wasn't displayed on the exterior. He proposed building a new
(Weimar, 1896, 1 Abth., xxxvii), pp. 127 ff.
Pelikan, 1958), p. 285. one. (Conversations with the author and other participants of a Char-
4. John Summerson, "A Case for the Theory of Modern Architecture,"
25. H.R. Hitchcock and P. Johnson, The International Style (New York:
RIBA Journal (June 1957): 309. rette for Urban Design in Washington, National Building Museum,
5. Ibid. Norton), pp. 40-49. 1981.)
26. G.C. Argan, The Renaissance City (New York: Braziller, 1969), p. 30.
6. R. Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: 46. Klaus Herdeg, The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and
27. See T Schumacher, "Palladio Variations," The Cornell Journal of
Praeger, 1960), p. 20. the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
Architecture, III (1987): pp. 12-29. See, also, C. Rowe and R. Slutzky, 1983).
7. R. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York:
"Transparency, Literal and Phenomenal," Perspecta 8 (1958): 45-54.
The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 31. 47. Ibid., p. 6.
28. George Hersey, High Victorian Gothic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
8. See P. Collins, Changing Ideals in Modem Architecture (Montreal: 48. Ibid., p. 10.
University Press, 1972), p. 38.
McGill-Queens University Press, 1978). 49. Ibid., p. 11. Surely, only one schooled in the precepts I am
29. Ibid, p. 40.
9. Marc-Antoine Laugier, trans., An Essay on Architecture [1753] (Los describing here would see this as a problem.
30. Ibid.
Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977). 50. Ibid., p. 12.
31. Ibid., p. 43.
10. G. Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten 51. Ibid., p. 18.
32. Van Doesburg, "The Will to Style: The Reconstruction of Life, Art,
(Frankfurt: Verlag fur Kunst on Wissenschaft, 1860). 52. Ibid., pp. 20-24.
and Technology" (Text of a lecture given at Jena, Weimar, and Berlin),
11. Joseph Rykwert, "Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Style," in D.
reprinted in H.L.C. Jaffe, de Stijl (New York: Abrams, 1970), p. 160. 53. Collins, Changing Ideals in Modem Architecture, p. 71.
Porphyrios, ed., Architectural Design Profile: On the Methodology of
33. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 28. 54. Wright, "Destruction of the Box," from an address to the Junior
Architectural History (London: Architectural Design, 1981), p. 12.
34. Ibid., p. 36. Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, 1952, reprinted in E.
12. G. Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture (Cambridge:
35. Rowe and Slutzky, "Transparency, Literal and Phenomenal." Kaufman and B. Raeburn, Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings
Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 102.
36. See Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth Century Roman Palaces: Use and (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 285.
13. Ibid.
the Art of the Plan (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990). 55. Arnaldo Bruschi, in his assessment of Bramante, claimed for the
14. Rosemarie Bletter, "Gottfried Semper," entry in the MacMillan Ency-
37. See Michael Dennis, Court and Garden (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Renaissance architect the capacity to conceive of "space in itself, in the
clopedia of Architects, vol. 4 (New York: MacMillan, 1982), p. 27. Press, 1986).
shape of a void thought of as having a three-dimensional quality of its
15. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, in I. Rowland and TN. Howe,
38. Richard Etlin, "Les Dedans: J.F Blondel and the System of the
own: emptiness not conditioned by the shape of the walls around it, but
eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 34. Home," Gazette des Beaux Arts (April, 1978): 140.
16. Ibid. on the contrary, conditioning them" (Bruschi, Bramante, London: Thames
39. Howard Robertson, The Principles of Architectural Composition
and Hudson, 1973), p. 74. It is difficult to say whether this is an instance
17. G. Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture, p. 103. (London: The Architectural Press, 1924), p. 133.
of a modern critic anachronistically ascribing a quality to a long-dead
18. G. Semper, "Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten 40. N.C. Curtis, Architectural Composition (Cleveland: J.H. Jansen,
oder pradtische Aesthetik," vol. 1, p. 7, quoted and translated in J. architect, or a case of an architect, Bramenti, who invented something
1926), p. 117.
Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: The neither he nor his contemporaries were able to put into words.
41. A. Stratton, Elements of Form and Design in Classic Architecture
MIT Press, 1981), p. 30. 56. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, 1910-29 (Zurich: Les Editions
(London: Studio Editions, 1925), p. 129.
19. Theo Van Doesburg, "Towards a Plastic Architecture," in de Stijl, VI, 42. Robertson, The Principles of Architectural Composition, p. 127. This d'Architecture, 1964), p. 128.

6/7, 78-83, reprinted in H.L.C. Jaffe, de Stijl (New York: Abrams, is the same publisher and the same year of the publication in English of 57. B. Zevi, The Modem Language of Architecture (Seattle: University

1971), p. 189. Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture. Washington Press, 1978), p. 8.

33 SCHUMACHER

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