Sert, Josep Lluís

Josep Lluís Sert (1902—1983) was born in Barcelona, Spain, the son of a successful textile manufacturer. Sert studied architecture there in the 1920s and, along with some of his classmates, became dissatisfied with then-mainstream classical design. Under his leadership they invited Le Corbusier to Barcelona, giving him an airplane tour of the city. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Sert and the influential Paris-based modernist architect.

Sert began designing apartment buildings and a jewelry store in Barcelona, and in 1931, around the same time as the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic, Sert and his Catalan associates began publishing an avant-garde journal, Actividades Contemporanea. They also participated in the first meeting of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM; International Congress of Modern Architecture) to take place outside of northern Europe, held in Barcelona in 1932. One outcome was the group's production of the Macià plan for Barcelona, developed with Le Corbusier. Along with the Amsterdam General Extension plan from the same time by CIAM President Cor van Eesteren, this plan was the first to use the CIAM four functions of dwelling, work, transportation, and recreation to reorganize a metropolitan environment to improve working-class living and health conditions. This plan had the official support of the Catalan government and generated considerable enthusiasm in Barcelona, where it remains an object of fascination. It called for the further extension of the city with new “redent” super-blocks similar to those of Le Corbusier's Radiant City (shown at the third meeting of CIAM in 1930 and published in 1935), new highways and rail infrastructure, the modernization of the port, and the construction of a new “leisure city” for workers south of the city along the coast. Only the Casa Bloc, a single housing block, was actually [Page 693]built from this plan, although Sert also designed a tuberculosis clinic in Barcelona and some schools for the Catalan government at this time as well.

In July 1936, Sert began living mostly in Paris, where he worked for the Spanish government's tourist board and continued his CIAM activities. He became friends with the Zagreb CIAM émigré Ernest Weissmann and with Le Corbusier's interior design associate Charlotte Perriand. The three worked on a planned “popular” publication of the results of the famous fourth CIAM meeting, held between Athens and Marseille in 1933, a version of which was later published by Sert as Can Our Cities Survive? (1942). At this time Sert was commissioned, along with Madrid architect Luis Lacasa, to design the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. This important work housed propaganda exhibits and artworks like Picasso's Guernica, and Alexander Calder's Fountain of Mercury. With the fall of the Spanish Republic, Sert and Moncha left Europe, sailing first to Havana, and from there arriving in New York in June 1939.

Once in the United States Sert practiced briefly with Weissmann, who had also emigrated to New York, and then in 1941 joined another émigré, Paul Lester Wiener, in founding the firm Town Planning Associates. Wiener had connections with the U.S. State Department and he and Sert began to be commissioned to plan new towns in Latin America; the commissions in Latin America formed the bulk of the firm's work until its dissolution in 1959. With the help of Harvard Chair of Architecture Walter Gropius, Sert lectured and taught on urbanism in American modernist design schools. In 1944 he signaled a new direction in his CIAM thinking with the essay “The Human Scale in City Planning,” in which he followed Lewis Mumford in emphasizing the cultural importance of pedestrian civic centers and calling for new cities to be built in the form of compact, walkable “neighborhood units.” These ideas were demonstrated in Sert and Wiener's Brazilian Motor City project of 1944, which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947. The firm was then commissioned by a democratically elected government in Peru for a plan for the new industrial port of Chimbote and a master plan for Lima, the latter designed with Ernesto Rogers, an important Italian CIAM member. After a military coup in Peru, Sert and Wiener began working extensively in Colombia, where they were commissioned for master plans for Tumaco, Medellín, Bogotá, and Cali. They established a local CIAM group and advocated, as they had in Peru, new urban planning legislation, much of which was then enacted. In 1949 Le Corbusier joined Sert, Wiener, and Colombian CIAM members in developing a master plan for Bogotá. Sert's Medellín (1948) and Bogotá (1949—1952) plans were significant in attempting to limit the physical spread of these rapidly growing industrial cities while accommodating much higher population densities and planning for efficient vehicular and pedestrian circulation. Unlike Le Corbusier's plans, such as that for the new Indian provincial capital of Chandigarh (1950—1960), which used some elements of the Bogotá plan, including the “7V” categorization of the highway routes, Sert's plans did not place the main emphasis on the monumental core but instead sought to increase pedestrian circulation throughout the city, retaining what are now usually called “urban” qualities, while still advocating the use of Corbusian modern architecture.

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