Core House. The Grain of Alternative Urbanization

Mies van der Rohe said cities were a “jungle” and that architecture grew “like a forest.” I conclude that, in the post-war USA, Mies van der Rohe performed deductive research on the urbanism of dots, an inclusive cityscape consisting of architecture, urban systems, and landscapes. The cure he searched for was for the problem that the urbanization process was inductive and that architecture served the market. I explain Mies’ notion of urbanization and notional changes in architectural typology by historical analysis; and changes in architecture by form analysis of its construction. I explain the transformation of the construction work values that his alternative urbanism entailed. He designed Farnsworth House (1951) as a radical glass house in a landscape. The Core House (1952), or 50x50 house, was a single-room prototype house, a glass house designed for any American middle-class family. Lafayette Park Detroit (1956) comprised conventional housing units on a borderless landscape. I hypothesize that these swings from radical to bizarre to conventional were a backcasting research process and that the Core House marked the infection point, and Mies plotted it as the cure for the problem. These houses were suspended between the city and the countryside, where “conventional” housing is located in nature according to a precisely prescribed harmonic relationship. The radical nature of the Core House with the nature introduces an “unconventional” idea of life. “Simple,” “container,” and “genuine building” were attributed to prime architecture. I argue that he generated the idea of alternative urbanism, which consisted of dots with a concentric territorial system on a borderless landscape. I deduce the lack of congruency between the form and the mode of family dwellings failed the Core House to get built. Yet, I conclude that it provided the knowledge that entailed success. I deduced Mies to realize that universal space could not be a dwelling; housing became the convention; it changed typology into a parametric transformation of a container; urbanism became spatial relationships between containers; and spaces in-between emerged as the novel domain of publicness.