TONY GARNIER: CITE INDUSTRIELLE

This summer I started my trip around some main cities of France, my objective is to visit two of them every year. My first stop was Lyon. The city is only two hours from Paris and the reason of my choice has to do with its interesting heritage: the neighborhood of the United States designed by the architect Tony Garnier following the ideas of the Cité Industrielle.

After his studies in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Tony Garnier received the Prix of Rome in 1899, and went to Rome to study ancient architecture in Italy. However, he did not spend all the time analyzing Roman architecture and he focus his attention on the study of the modern city. He combined his time between the study of the city of Tusculum and the design of a utopian city, the Cité Industrielle (Industrial City). It would be an answer to the slum neighborhoods created as consequence of the Industrial Revolution. However, his proposal was not a nostalgic and picturesque vision of the city but a response to the opportunities of the industrial age. The Cite Industrielle was first published in 1917.

There are some main aspects that differentiated the Cité Industrielle from other utopian cities of the same period: social issues, site specificities, and realism in the design. The reasons behind these differences were the influences of the utopian schemas of the French Realism and French Regionalism (Wiebenson, 1960, p 17, 19) in Garnier’s work and philosophy.

In 1901, Travail, by Emile Zola, was published which influenced in Garnier’s design of the Industrial City. The novel is an optimistic vision of the relationship between the social progress, newly acquired, and the industrial development of the time. The result would be a “new society of production, work and cooperation” (Montaner, 1987, p 87). In his design, Garnier thought at every aspect of the social life of the modern city: it should have a socialist type of government (the parliament would substitute the church), there would not be police force or jail, unions would be allowed, and education would promote equality to both sexes. The city would be a place of freedom, a place where free discussions would be possible, and a place which would gather the ideal conditions for dignifying labor.

Tony Garnier created an idealistic context for his city based on the ideas of the French Regionalism movement. He included the major elements of the Regionalist theory in the design of his city such as for example: preserving the links with the territory and its geography, introducing local museums and historical monuments, a regional university, and a water power station to produce electricity from the nearby river… (Wiebenson, 1960, p 19).

Even although Garnier’s project is a Utopian Socialist city, he was concerned about giving a realism approach to his design. He gave the city a specific social and geographic context influenced, as mentioned before, by the French Regionalism and by Zola’s socialist ideas. He thought about every aspect of the city such as type of government, public facilities, and traffic hierarchy in order to give more credentials to his design. He also designed with great detail each building showing a great interest in the technical details.


United States neighborhood

The United Stated neighborhood, in Lyon, was an experimental neighborhood designed by Tony Garnier following his designs for the Industrial City. The project construction developed between 1920 and 1931. The neighborhood has 49 buildings projected as social housing with stores in the first floor, as well as streets, gardens and patios. In 1986, Grand Lyon Habitat started a project for the rehabilitation of the neighborhood, which also included the creation of an open-air museum exposing the heritage of the neighborhood and the goals behind its construction. This original museum is composed of 25 mural paintings located in the blind façade of each building. They explain Garnier’s Industrial City: 3 introduce the design of the city, 12 explain in details some of the elements composing the Cité Industrialle, 4 show the buildings that Garnier has built in Lyon, including this neighborhood, and 6 illustrate other Utopian cities. (“Dimension architectural & urbaine”, n.d.).

I selected some paintings that I consider the most representative in order to explain the city and its architecture. The structure of the paintings usually combines in the same wall different techniques of representation which superpose each other: highly detail floor plans, axonometries, renderings and texts.

The first three images show the plan and an axonometric drawing of the city. The design follows a classical vision of the city: hierarchy, symmetry, enclosed in a grid, and limited in size and population as Roman and Greek cities did. The city is surround by a vast rural landscape from where it obtains natural resources used in the industries. In addition, there is a strict zoning; the different functions of the city are separated from each other.

The next image presents the train station. The train was one of the symbols of the Industrial City and Garnier included it in his city to show a city where it was possible a dialogue between a manufacturing and a classical society. However, the city was not adapted to the car, which was taking importance as a mean of transportation at the beginning of the 20th century, and the textile and metallurgical industries still remained the main industries. In this sense, Garnier’s city is closer to the cities of the 19th century rather to those in between the 19th and 20th centuries (Montaner, 1987, p 90).

Garnier designed all kind of public equipments representative of the socialist city, such as hospitals, schools, and meeting rooms. Similar to the design of the city, the architecture of these buildings and of the housing still follows an old academic formalism: symmetry, repetition, hierarchy, order, prismatic forms, and no ornament. The housing prototypes of the United States neighborhood are a good example of it. The first three buildings respect the original design with only three floors, but the necessity of adding density changed the design. Two floors where added beside the opposition of Garnier, who did not want to add elevators.

The final images of this set do not correspond to the mural paintings; but to pictures of the neighborhood. From them, we can observe the separation between pedestrian and car flows and the different materials used to differentiate them. Also, it is evident the organization of the housing buildings conforming a grid and without fences or any element that could show property divisions (Garnier’s Industrial City did not envisage private property), and finally, the prismatic architecture inherited of the modern rationalism.

Bibliography
Dimension architectural & urbaine (n.d). Retrieved from http://www.museeurbaintonygarnier.com/1_2.html

Montaner, Josep Maria (1987). Tony Garnier: La anticipacion de la ciudad industrial. Annals d’arqhitectura, N 4, pp 81-92

Wiebenson, Dora(1960). Utopian Aspects of Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle. The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 19 (No. 1), pp. 16-24

PARIS OF HAUSSMANN 1853-1870

The Industrial Revolution in the 19th century brought social and urban changes to France. The capital, Paris, was itself immersed in a great urban renovation as consequence of the changes in economic, social and cultural conditions of the time.

The fast economic growth of the city required new workers that came from the countryside in search of employment. The population of Paris increased in 3 million inhabitants from 1836 to 1904. However, the new inhabitants were poor and settled in cheap and unhealthy housing, this situation created new social problems in addition to the existing ones mostly caused by the lack of an adequate sewer system and hygiene in the city. Paris was a crowded and unhealthy city covered with mud. This difficult situation was smartly well represented in the literature of the time, Victor Hugo wrote “Les Miserables” in 1862 and Eugene Sue “Les Mysteres de Paris”. Both of them accurately portrayed the city in the middle of the traumatic political and social upheaval of the 19th century.

The political change came from Napoleon III when in 1852 and after a coup d’état he proclaimed the birth of the 2nd Empire. Due to the fact that the new regime needed to consolidate its power and ameliorate their image in France and in Europe, Napoleon decided to start an ambitious urban renewal project to make of Paris a true capital in keeping with his new imperial ambitions and in placing it as the model of the modern city in the world. The feasibility of the transformation was possible because being a dictatorial regime there was no opposition.

Napoleon commissioned to George Eugene Hausmmann, a civic planner, the management of the urban renewal project. Haussmann had the task to “modernize” Paris answering not only Napoleon’s imperial ambitions but taking in mind urban and traffic questions, hygiene issues, and the demands of the new healthy class, the bourgeoisies.

His plan for the new Paris followed the logic of axes with long and wide tree-lined avenues that connected key points of the city with the aim of improving urban circulation and as a mean of restructuring certain sections of the city, such as the Rue Rivoli or the place the Chatelet. As part of the traffic improvement, he was also conscious that the train stations where the new doors of cities and besides connecting them by long avenues he also created new corridors that linked them with downtown.

This rectilinear and controlled pattern on plan was pushed farther to the façade of the buildings by imposing uniform height and a design that accentuated the horizontal character of them. The new buildings along the streets came with shops, and new housing to satisfy the needs of the bourgeoisies. As consequence, Haussmann demolished the medieval lots and forced the working class to move to the periphery of the city to be able to accommodate the new buildings.

He also put a lot of emphasis in hygiene and sanitation, and his ideas were reflected in the project. The city had problems of hygiene, crime and diseases due to the narrow and dark streets, to the lack of paving and to the deficient sewer system. Haussmann’s project included the widening of streets, the displacement of prostitutes and street vendors from the main boulevards, the creation of a sewer system to avoid choleric water all over the narrow streets, a big improvement in water supply, and the paving of streets with the differentiation between sidewalks and roads among other projects.

It is important to mention the born of a new wealthy social class during the 19th century, the bourgeoisies. Soon, they increased their power and influence by replacing the old aristocracy, and as new riches, they started to demand new places where to live and socialize. Haussmann provided them with a great number of equipments and facilities as well as green areas where they could develop their leisure time. Some examples are the Opera, different theaters, and les grands magazines (shopping centers). The green areas were an important element in the renovation of Paris, some of them were renovated, like le Bois de Boulogne and Le Champs Elysees and other were created new, such as le Bois de Vincennes and le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. All of them, building and green areas, were representative elements of the new Paris and they occupied a preferred location inside the city by being the focal point of the main boulevards. They were one of the symbols of modernization of Paris.

Haussmann’s plan supposed a completely transformation of the city of Paris. It was the first time that there was a global vision for the city, until then, it was growing by developing small nodes, mostly housing with a square in the center, which were not connected among each other. However, most of the renovation did not occurred during Hausmann’s time, but after his destitution as planner and even after his death. The urban renewal project of Paris during the Second Empire supposed the transition from a medieval to a modern city, by answering the needs of traffic, hygiene and social life of its inhabitants. Paris became a model for future cities around the world, as for example Chicago during Daniel Burnham’s time, and New York during Moses.