ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT URBANISM
Albert Pope, 20210720
I. (An Object of Reform)
Grotesque as it is, we must come to terms with our world. Until about fifty years ago, the way in which architecture came to terms with the world was through its integration with an urban idea. What happened fifty years ago was the demolition of the notorious, 3,000 unit, low-income housing project, Pruit Igoe (1956–1972). More significant than the demolition of 33 eleven-story housing blocks in St.Louis was the demolition of modernism’s urban ambitions. This far more consequential event was largely due to the efforts of a single polemicist.
Not five years after the implosions of Pruit Igoe began, the British architectural historian Charles Jenks used the event to launch his screed against modern urbanism in the form of a book called The Language of Postmodern Architecture. In its opening lines, the book famously proclaimed its intent: “Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 PM.” The circumstances of the actual demolition of the project were complex, involving altruism, greed and incompetence on an epic scale. The circumstances of Jenks’s demolition were much simpler. In his telling, the hubristic ethos of modern urbanism was solely responsible for nothing short of a crime against humanity.
It is fortunate that we do not entertain this kind of polemical distortion today, but at the time, Jenks’s unbridled, take-no-prisoners critique of modernism was devastating. In his condemnation, Jenks’s verdict was wrong while being right. Modern architecture survived the traumatic episode after all, but modern urbanism did not. In 1977, modernism was still understood to be inseparable from its urbanism. At that time, to condemn modern urbanism was to simultaneously condemn modern architecture, thus Jenks’s proclamation of modern architecture’s demise was not totally incorrect. In the end, the effect of his polemic was not the elimination of modern architecture and urbanism, but the unprecedented separation of the two — a modern architecture without a modern urbanism. Modernism would thus be saved, but only at the terrible cost of abandoning its urban ambitions.
Jenks’s polemic against modern urbanism still resonates today. We know this because we have yet to find a replacement for it. Instead of healing the divide and generating an urbanism commensurate to the aspirational architecture that we produce, we have defaulted to a mode of practice which fully accepts the city that exists. And while we have consistently placed our buildings in a “critical” relationship to that unreformed (and seemingly unreformable) city, our relationship to it is now one step removed. In the absence of a replacement, the most that design can do is be critical of the city rather than actively participating in its reform.
It is as arm-chair critics, then, that we have failed to come terms with the enormous environmental problems that the world presents to design today. This failure is all the more acute given the fact that most of these problems stem from our collective rather than our individual environmental impact. It stands to reason that design solutions to our collective impact exist at an urban rather than an architectural scale. These limitations of scale directly translate into a limitation of design’s participation in any viable solutions .
II. (Contraction and Expansion)
Instead of generating an urbanism that is commensurate with the world to which we aspire, we now accept contemporary urbanism as the inevitable setting for our projects, and herein lies the problem. Apart from the increasingly small fraction of the built environment that we inherit from our pre-modern ancestors, the urbanism that exists is broadly inadequate; it is hardly urbanism at all. Indeed, by spoken agreement, it is sub-urban. To say the very least, its inadequacies make it difficult to move past the critical stance and embrace the contemporary city as a credible object of urban reform.
Amongst these inadequacies none is more egregious than the Balkanization of the city into a series discontinuous urban enclaves. In the place of an open and extensive grid of public streets, modernism proposed a city made up of exclusive, discontinuous, cul-de-sac islands. To briefly explain, prior to the 1950’s, the Central Business District (CBD) contained all of a city’s office buildings on the (numbered) streets of its downtown urban core. Today, office buildings are far more likely to be built in exclusive sub-urban office parks with guarded entrance gates, surrounding fences and reserved parking. The retail that once filled the ground floors of the Central Business District has also been relocated to isolated shopping districts, shopping centers and shopping malls surrounded by convenient parking. Residential neighborhoods that once filled the blocks and streets extending from the CBD have been transformed into gated subdivisions containing nothing but single-family houses, isolating intimate domestic spaces in homogeneous tracts of residential development.
The contraction of open, mixed-use continuities into closed, isolated, single-use enclaves does not, however, tell the whole story. While contracting inward, our cities simultaneously expanded outward with explosive growth. The expansive infrastructures of freeways, airports and seaports produced conurbations that spanned delta’s and coastlines in a non-stop urbanism that stretches out for hundreds of miles. In the Megalopolis, contemporary urbanism expanded through physical and electronic infrastructure — to urban, regional, continental or global scales — as it simultaneously contracted at the local scale. In other words, the closed enclave became an increment of explosive urban growth. (The behavior of conurbation within a megalopolis is different from the behavior of a discrete city or a town.) It is as if the Balkanization of the city were the necessary prerequisite of this unprecedented urban expansion.
Yet, even the most progressive among us would pause before exchanging active, mixed-use public streets for freeways, airports and fiber optics. In light of this reluctance, it is difficult to move past our critical stance and accept the closed, sub-urban enclave as the site of genuine urban reforms. It often seems impossible to build a progressive urbanism on top of this undernourished, sub-urban logic. Such misgivings, however, do not alter the fact that this logic of closed, isolated, single-use enclaves constitutes upwards of 75% of the built environment today. Given the necessity of reform (as opposed to tabula rasa redevelopment) there is simply is no other place to start. In order to start, however, it is necessary to find an upside to this urbanism of contraction and expansion.
III. (A Derangement of Scale)
In The Second Body, the British writer Daisy Hildyard writes that climate change brings about a “derangement of scale — a sense of confusion that is caused by the huge gap between the immensity of the human’s global existence and the smallness of your own private everyday life.” She argues that this derangement disrupts our understanding of the built environment “in that our tiny homes and even tinier bodies are bearing down on distant, huge, unknown things, and vice versa.” With climate change, the smallest half-conscious actions “such as turning on the kettle, or turning down the thermostat, are transformed…into momentous political decisions which have global impact.”
Hildyard argues that this drastically increasing global impact effectively gives us a second, incorporated body that is global in scope and far more destructive than the first. In order to reconcile our relationship to others and to the natural world, this second body must ultimately be integrated into the self. “I want to incorporate the second body with the first. Because the body exists at different scales, I need to close in on it, starting from its most expansive expression. I want to start by talking about the whole world.” At this point in time, we remain comfortably seated in our first body and are apparently in no mood to make concessions to the massive, aggregate impacts caused by our second body. Because it is causing catastrophic damage to the future, it is necessary to confront our quiescence, expand our purview, integrate this second body, and begin to account for the damage that we do. Anything that falls short of this simultaneous contraction and expansion will fall short of any solution to our planetary crises.
As local continuities are transformed and the subsequent discontinuities are linked together at the scale of a seaboard, a delta or a continent, local street life is traded in for continuities at far larger scales. Carbon emissions are caused by basic human activities, yet they cannot be understood, let alone addressed, at the scale of a Brooklyn neighborhood. It is far easier to stay within the confines of these familiar surroundings largely because a good-faith recognition of our second body profoundly limits our choices. (While our first body would like to fly to another continent to visit family, the second calculates that the emissions involved in the flight are prohibitive.) “Any body which is global cannot accommodate an individual, who moves in her own individual way, who makes individual choices and has individual thoughts — this global body, which is entirely without boundaries, doesn’t understand that individuals exist at all.”
IV. (The Cost of Modesty)
In recent years, the global body’s threat to the individual agency has become both politically and culturally paralyzing. This paralysis has been noted by a group of academics and environmentalists loosely grouped around the banner of “Accelerationism.” Critical of the modest ambitions of the political left, Accelerationists want to understand and embrace the large dimension of our technological capacities in order to turn them to our political and cultural advantage. With regards to the built environment, they are critical of the “festishization of local spaces,” and its accompanying “folk-political thinking.” Acceleration argues against the debilitating limitations placed on the scope and ambition of progressive politics and, by extension, progressive design.
The obstacles to acceleration are, however, formidable. Ever since the 1960s, the “small is beautiful” ethos has gripped the design disciplines. The post modern polemic against the hubris of modern urbanism assured that its modesty would win the day and that architecture would restrict itself to small, single-block projects built on premodern blocks and streets. Added to its modest scale, contextual responses have tended to fetishize local spaces. The inability of urban theory to revive a viable urban project that can see beyond the limits of a local horizon, has only made these limitations worse.
The rest of the world, however, is moving on. In Inventing the Future (2015), the prime theorists of Accelerationism confront the issue directly:
Under the sway of folk-political thinking, the most recent cycle of struggles — from anti-globalisation to anti-war to Occupy Wall Street — has involved the fetishisation of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularisms of all kinds. Rather than undertake the difficult labour of expanding and consolidating gains, this form of politics has focused on building bunkers to resist the encroachments of global neoliberalism. In so doing, it has become a politics of defence, incapable of articulating or building a new world. For any movement that struggles to escape neoliberalism and build something better, these folk-political approaches are insufficient. In their place, (accelerationism) sets out an alternative politics–one that seeks to take back control over our future and to foster the ambition for a world more modern than capitalism will allow. The utopian potentials inherent in twenty-first-century technology cannot remain bound to a parochial capitalist imagination; they must be liberated by an ambitious left alternative.
Seven decades ago, the discontinuous, spine-based suburb was made possible by cars, telephones and televisions that connected us to the greater world . Without electronic compensation, the sub-urb could never have taken hold and the higher level of integration that it provides could not have been achieved. (Absent the significant transformation to spine-based urbanism — allowing for both the contraction and expansion of the modern conurbation — the parochial worldview of our immediate ancestors would have never been overcome.) The airplanes, cars, and phones that we employ today find their counterpart in the physical world in vastly accelerated transportation and communication infrastructures. Airports and freeways and the digital networks that support them, have long since expanded our awareness while simultaneously tearing the continuous fabric of traditional urbanism apart. Yet, these accelerations, in both time and space, give us access a greater world, if not to our own second global body, and allow us to overcome the parochial imaginations that prevailed only a few generations ago.
Modernism once attempted to take control over the city’s future and to foster the ambition for a world more modern than the status quo (first body) would ever allow. In that effort, modern urbanism failed, and that failure was public and, for the profession, humiliating. In the backlash, modernism was fully discredited leading to an academic and professional crisis that we suffer from to this day. From the resolution of that crisis came the belief that the modern project could only be saved only at the cost of abandoning its urban ambitions. Modern architecture could only survive by abjuring its urban content and adopting a “critical” metalanguage at odds with its now unreformable urban host.
Since that moment, modernism committed itself to the small scale, to the immediate context, now brought forward as critical project . Far from critical, the limited scope of these projects have effectively disarmed the progressive agenda of design for decades.
This diminished ambition is represented nowhere more clearly than in the Ordos 100 exhibition of 2008, where an architecture without urbanism, or an architecture that relinquishes its urban design responsibility to civil engineers is on full display. The Garden City layout of 100 detached pavilions do not create a “neighborhood,” it creates a living exhibition. Any cumulative effects were systematically suppressed by engineering specifications that were as banal they were commonplace.
If Pruit-Igoe is the cause, then Ordos is the effect. As reflections of ourselves, these two pro mark extremes. The large-scale, collective ethos of Pruit Igoe was inaccurate. Its relative isolation from the context, its communal galleries, its enormous urban spaces all suggest a social identity that never matched reality. But if the low-scale, atomization of Ordos is its opposite, how accurate is that, and what are the chances it will remain so? For want of having a working urban agenda, Ordos inadvertently created a solipsistic urbanism with the concerns of each building never extending beyond its own property lines. To say the obvious, the atomized, parochial imagination of an architecture without urbanism will not begin to address the scale and magnitude of our environmental problems.
Instead of invading the space of global neoliberalism and aggressively reforming it, design’s greatest efforts have been spent creatively producing tiny, rarefied bunkers against it. In the end, these “critical” projects are only critical in the context of a disciplinary metalanguage that cannot compensate for worldly engagement. While the architectural outcome of the project has significant merit, the urban outcome of Ordos 100 is a clear consequence of an inability to do what Pruit Igoe also failed to do, which was to expand the scope of design prerogatives. We need to reengage with the urban dimension and continue the modern project by expanding our scope. And when we fail again, we should not retreat, we should try and inevitably fail again, and fail again and, with each attempt, fail better.
