PROMETHEAN MODESTY
second part of a public lecture given on October 21, 2020, at the UCLA department of Architecture and Urban Design.
three urban projects
Before reappraising the modern project, we need some sense of where we are now. Following its rejection of the modern urban project, postmodernism did not so much change urbanism as it ignored it. What passes for urban design today is mostly the design of large architectural projects that get to the size of ten or twenty traditional city blocks. Here, the scale of the superblock must be distinguished from the scale of urbanism. Superblocks, such as airports, distribution centers or subdivisions, usually scale under 50 traditional city blocks, while urbanism scales at 100 or 200 or 1000 blocks. While super blocks are often described as urban, the only urban scale work that has been done since the demise of modern urbanism has been predicated on the redeployment of traditional urban forms. Because the specifications of the contemporary technosphere are largely unrelated to the specifications of traditional urbanism, neo-traditionalism lacks the design tools required to structure freeways and feeder roads, airports, parking garages or commercial floor plates the size of football fields. That does not mean that some very capable architects have not tried. I would like to examine three projects by notable architects in order to briefly review the state of design at the urban scale.
The first project is by OMA called Waterfront City. It is an unbuilt project designed in 2007 for a site in Dubai. The second project is by the Renzo Piano Workshop. It is called the “Daimlerplatz,” for the notorious German carmaker and it was built in Berlin in 2000. And the third project is by Foster and Partners and is known as Masdar City, which was started in 2007 and has since been abandoned. They’re all well-known projects that were designed by celebrated architects, and while they are all three quite different, they share an identical disposition to the urban past. Simply put, each project is a masterplanned simulation of traditional towns and cities. The urban forms that they reproduced were designed by different architects and constructed by different builders for different owners over multiple generations. Never conceived as a whole, these traditional forms represent an aggregate of people and decisions that played out in concrete form over relatively long periods of time. Like a still life, each of these projects extracted a tableau of discrete buildings that were once animated by ongoing process of urban construction dating across various places and times. Conceived as a masterplan, they capture and freeze that ongoing process into a picture of yesterday for a privileged few.
As opposed to the quotidian worlds that they simulated, each of these contemporary projects was the product of a high-end boutique economy. Each project used its economic surplus to emulate an anthropomorphically scaled urban fabric. Each project celebrates the postmodern split between architecture and urbanism. And each example simulates a grid-based urban typology nearly 70 years after its demise. The projects are summarized in three brief statements put out by their respective offices. Keep in mind that these offices are some of the most technologically advanced design operations on the planet. Each make a point of being innovators on the cutting edge of building technology. More often than not, this technology becomes the basis of their architectural expression. It is not a stretch to say that Foster and Piano are technologically Baroque in their expression of advanced structural and mechanical techniques, making their dependence on traditional urban forms all the more bizarre.
Taking each project on turn, the following is OMA’s description of Waterfront City in Dubai.
“The development consists of an artificial Island linked to four distinct neighborhoods … The Island, measuring 1,310 m × 1,310 m, is divided into 25 traditional city blocks that permit a rational, repeatable, and exponential urbanism redolent of Manhattan…. Located in the north of Waterfront City, Madinat Al Soor is primarily a residential neighborhood, employing the vernacular qualities of historic Arab settlements… The dense building clusters, irregular streets, and pedestrian paths connect a patchwork of delights in this town…”
Next is a description of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, the unrealized zero carbon city, designed by Norman Foster.
“Inspired by the architecture and urban planning of traditional Arab cities, Masdar City incorporates narrow streets; the shading of windows, exterior walls and walkways; thick-walled buildings; courtyards and wind towers…”
Foster is, of course, a disciple of Buckminster Fuller who made a film about his mentor entitled, “How much does your building weigh, Mr. Foster?” The question refers to Fuller’s brilliant polemical challenge to traditional building techniques. (Anticipating the technosphere, the suggestion of weighing the building indicates a sea change in our perception of a building’s material and technique.) Regarding Foster, the question of the title is apt. Were he still with us, Fuller might ask the same of Foster’s thick-walled buildings and wind towers.
Finally, the Renzo Piano Workshop describes their project built in the core of postwar Berlin,
“ …with its surface area of 600,000 square meters, the scheme has the dimensions of a small town. And like a village, it is designed around a “piazza”, the focal point of the project.”
The three projects combined reproduce a village, a souk, and an early twentieth century metropolis on a man-made island. They each create traditional corridor streets made of thick-walled buildings with courtyards and wind towers. In light of these traditional references, one might simply ask happened to the progressive ethos of the modern legacy they claim? What kind of surrealist stunt would stylistically celebrate the cutting edge of architectural technique while simultaneously producing studied simulations of old. Even the mannered eclecticism of high postmodernism would not be so bold as to juxtapose such incongruent references. And at least such flights of complexity and contradiction were done with a clear and explicit intention.
If we are to imagine new models of urban density, models that respond to our enormous environmental challenges, we will need models that exceed the insulated, high-end simulations souks and villages or Las Vegas-like reproductions of downtown Manhattan. It is the isolated nature of these projects, and their studied exclusion of the greater urban contexts in which they sit, which disqualify them as useful points of departure for a new general model of urbanism. What is Waterfront City to the whole of Dubai, or Masdar City to the whole of Abu Dhabi or the Daimlerplatz’s village “piazza” to the six million inhabitants of greater Berlin? Regarding the greater urban context, these projects are silent, and in that silence, basic urban questions remain unanswered. If we are doomed to create enclaves, then what is the nature of the enclave, what are its rules and by what means does it exist amongst other enclaves? As lavish simulations, are these projects not willfully ignorant of the surrounding archipelago? And if all the city’s parts do add up to nothing, then how might the absence of the whole reflect on the part?
It is from this vantage that the comprehensive urban models projected by the first two generations of modernists provide more suitable points of departure for the comprehensive problems that we face today. In promethean fashion, these models took on the urban complex in its entirety, in a project of progressive urban reform.
the cautious Prometheus
Why look again at the discredited ambition of a comprehensive urban project? Why revive its failed tradition of experimentation? That question has hung in the air since 1972. For an answer, I will jump ahead a few decades to a sentiment more recently voiced by Bruno Latour.
…there is something deeply troubling in many ecological demands suddenly to restrict ourselves and to try to leave no more footprints on a planet we have nevertheless already modified through and through… it might not be the time to sound the retreat and to betray the progressivist ethos of modernism by suddenly becoming ascetics. If modernism was Promethean, the massive acceleration of a green economy and clean technologies (scientists) argue is needed would be Prometheus squared… And yet, it is still unquestionable that there is something deeply flawed in the hubristic tone of so much hype about technological solutions to ecological crises. Is there a way to explore a positive, energetic, innovative set of passions to repair and pursue the modernist experience at a more fundamental level? Can Prometheus be reconciled with the seemingly antithetical notions of care and caution?”
Latour’s plea for a modest Prometheus resonates in a world whose problems are so big that they have stripped the common imagination. (How can a society that is built upon maximizing individual agency hope to have a clue about its collective impact?) We return to the modern urban project with the conviction that it has not only anticipated our environmental problems but that its potentials have yet to be fully realized. A new round of experimentation in modern urbanism begins with a close reading of the specific problems that modern urbanism has addressed and the manner in which it addressed them. Setting polemics aside (for once), it is becoming clear that modern urbanism was not revolutionary, it instead took on the more modest goal of describing or “explicating” the difficult prospects a human existence in a technical age.
What might promethean modesty mean in a practical sense? There are many large yet modest projects to pick from amongst the early efforts of modern architecture that embraced technology at scale but nevertheless maintained their progressive commitments. The experiments in large-scale housing in Frankfurt, Vienna and Amsterdam, for example, might head the list. I would like to mention just one more. Lewis Mumford was no stranger to the promethean scale of modern society and the value of its technical capacity. Despite many efforts to paint him as a progenitor of the environmental movement, Mumford was no “small is beautiful” proponent but was instead a full-throated supporter of large-scale programs that employed the most advanced of technologies. His support of the signature program of the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, acknowledged the value of combining hydroelectric power generation with rural reconstruction, not simply as a practical solution but as a cultural project:
There is something in the mere cant of a dam, when seen from below, that makes one think of the Pyramids of Egypt. Both Pyramid and dam represent an architecture of power. But the difference is notable, too, and should make one prouder of being an American. The first grew out of slavery and celebrated death. Ours was produced by free labor to create energy and life for the people of the United States.”
Promethean modesty means that good solutions are not always small and local and that big solutions are not always bad. It is beyond dispute that the scope and complexity of the technosphere is the consequence of our embrace of technologies at scale. It’s growing deleterious effects on the hydrosphere, the biosphere and the atmosphere cannot be answered with modestly scaled superblocks that simulate the urbanism of the past. In a pragmatic sense, our environmental problems have grown to such an extent that the comprehensive scope of modern urbanism comes back full circle.
modern street infrastructure
The design of the contemporary city is not an exercise in free or arbitrary invention, nor is it a relativistic experiment where each historical urban form is available for urban redeployment. The contemporary city is not a “petrie dish.” Beyond such relativism, there are specific sets of urban forms that are not arbitrary because they grow out of today’s dominant mode of urbanization. Specifically, they are a set of urban forms born out of the mistakenly random organization of the Megalopolis. To be yet more precise, it can be said that the Megalopolis, like every city before it, possesses a historical will to form.
Many years ago, I wrote a book about the organizational logic of modern urbanism called Ladders. I’m not going to repeat its arguments here because I really don’t need to. Its idea is so simple that I don’t know how I managed to write a whole book about it. In fact, it is not only simple, it is ubiquitous in the world around us which is why we are largely unaware of its existence. The argument is this; in the middle of the twentieth century, the underlying organization of the city rapidly transitioned from a continuous, grid-based urbanism of blocks and streets to a discontinuous, spine-based urbanism of cul-de-sac development.
We think that urbanism is a grid-based because many of us still live on a grid, enjoying the anthropomorphic scale of blocks and streets. If your life plays out in the LA basin, for example, or in Brooklyn, you are surrounded by a grid-based urbanism and the grid underwrites your urban understanding. But, upon reflection, we are vaguely aware that the expansion of the continuous blocks and streets terminated, decades ago, by a new pattern urban organization that is based on cul-de-sacs or urban spines. The spine is referred to as a “ladder” in the title of the book and it argues that traditional, grid-based urbanism has been fully foreclosed by contemporary urban development and, despite where we live, we are all citizens of the urbanism that we actively produce.
The split between the two modes of organization is diagrammatically clear in Houston, where a freeway loop planned out in 1950 effectively separates the grid from the spine, like a tree ring. It’s a bit different Southern California where the grid is the organizing element of LA County while the spine is the organizing element of Orange County. As grid dwellers, you must have felt the strangeness of the environment when you get off the San Diego freeway in Irvine. There are no broad, commercial east/west Boulevards like Pico, Olympic, Wilshire, or Santa Monica that serve to structure your routine environment as they do in Los Angeles. Los Angeles’s grid is supplanted by Orange County’s traffic hierarchy with more primitive with freeways and commercial feeder roads replacing the boulevard and all other streets tracing single paths to exclusive destinations.
the 75% solution
The reality of the urban systems that we rely on today is that the continuous urban grid is in the minority. Grid-based environments account for no more that 25% of the built environment while the remaining 75% is spine-based. That’s a little difficult for you to see in Southern California because of the geographic and geological barriers, but for those of you who know Paris, the same split exists. Only 20% of the region’s population lives inside the postwar freeway boundary called the peripherique, while 80% live outside in the spine-based world of Les Grands Ensembles. In New York, the five boroughs are substantially grid-base while the bulk of BosWash that was built after 1950 is spine-based. The city limits of Chicago establish the same 25 to 75 splits as do the people living inside and outside the loop 610 in Houston.
The reason that I bring this up is twofold. The first is that the spine is the substrate of all modern urbanism — Radiant City and Garden City alike. The periphery of every city that has had economic growth over the past six decades are marked by the discontinuities of the spine. The second reason is that is the spine, being in the majority, can no longer be classified as a secondary, subclass urbanism. Today, the spine is not subordinate or subsidiary, it is the rule, the grid is the exception. If we wish to develop a program of urban reform, as opposed to create urban redoubts for the 1%, the underlying organization of contemporary urbanism is the place to start.
the Marquette Park proposal
Given its relevance to contemporary urbanism, it remains for us to understand the implications of this new mode of urban organization. As I cover in the book, this work was initially done by Ludwig Hilberseimer, an urban historian, teacher and designer who is largely known for his close and lifelong collaboration with Mies van Der Rohe. Beginning in 1927, Hilberseimer produced a series of urban studies which identified and explored a spine-based urbanism as the organizational basis of the contemporary city. He insisted that modern urbanism was not merely defined by the presence of modern buildings but must instead be defined by the organizational logic of its urban plan. In this insistence on the plan he anticipated many of the failures of inner city housing projects, especially those in his adopted city, Chicago. Adopting urban reforms based on modern architecture without the crucial underpinning of modern, spine-based planning would doom so many of these projects to failure from the start.
The quickest way to grasp Hilberseimer’s urbanism is through his most emblematic, spine-based project that was done in the early fifties as a thought experiment for the redevelopment of a single Chicago neighborhood. A three stage transformation of the Marquette Park district shows a transformation of the existing gridiron city into a neighborhood of cul-de-sac or spine-based development. The project is notable in that it marks the transformation of a discretely framed urban park into what Ludwig Hilberseimer regarded as a new continuous type of urban space.
For Hilberseimer and for every other proponent of modern urbanism, space was the overriding characteristic of modern urbanism, usurping the role that form had long played in the definition of traditional cities. For modern architects, introducing large amounts of space into city not only solved the grinding problems of urban congestion but, more importantly, allowed for the full-on entrance of nature into the city proper. Access to nature was conceived as an indispensable ontological predicate in the explication of a modern urbanism.The transformation of Marquette Park not only puts this characteristic space on display but it shows how it could be built out of traditional urban forms.
In a series of staged demolitions, the residential area of Marquette Park is reformed around a continuous open space that is linked to a larger, open space network. The destruction of the existing street network is shocking, reducing the number of intersections by approximately 75%. But that destruction was the price paid to produce a generous amount of open space that would run throughout the city. This open space would be used to offset the new levels of density proposed in the redevelopment process achieving a new model of urban density that combined density and open space in the same development process.
In sum, Hilberseimer’s plans were the first to show how spine-based urbanism produced the forms and spaces of modernism in a way that traditional grid-based urbanism did not. They not only established a new model of urban density, but in so doing they wholly reconfigured the relationship between natural and urban systems.
the Rock River Valley proposal
The illustrated “replanning” of Rockford, Illinois is one of Hilberseimer’s most important studies of the spine. It is also more of a thought experiment than it is a proposal, where he projected an alternative future evolution of the city. Rockford was founded on a small grid that aligned to the shallows of the Rock River. It subsequently grew out as a typical gridiron plan that was oriented on north, south, east and west axes. This orientation was indifferent to the immediate context, a fact that is brought home by the frequent flooding that plagues the city to this day. His proposed, four-stage transformations turned the entire city into a spine base formation that would not be out of place on the exurban peripheries of Houston or Chicago or of San Francisco today. Yet, what he was after existed in none of these peripheries. Regarding the phases, Hilberseimer was using spine-based urbanism to explicate a complete reconciliation between urban and natural systems.
Hilberseimer was an environmentalist avant la lettre. His transformation Rockford acknowledged the geology and the biology of the Rock River. What that meant was that if you’re going to the trouble of putting a city on a river, it should probably be, like the river, linear. This transformation of Rockford from a centric to a linear system drove his reconciliation between the urban and the natural worlds. According to Hilberseimer, Rockford would be reformed to fit into its context ecologically, like an organism amongst other organisms, integrated into the larger lithosphere, biosphere and atmosphere. In the greater context of the Rock River Valley, Hilberseimer’s transformation first cleared out the river’s floodplain and then began to open up Rockford’s seamless grid of blocks and streets to the greater context. The resulting spines were oriented to the greater topographic scale of the river valley and to the immediate topography of the river bottom. So fixed to the topography and exposed to the hydrological and biological unity of the riverine ecosystem, a New Rockford traded its abstract gridiron plan for a plan that was integrated into the whole of the environmental context.
Because it was new at the time, spine-based development meant something different to Hilberseimer than it does to us today. After decades of spine-based development, it is hard for us to think of spines as anything but the sadly isolated cul-de-sac, the poorly conceived underpinning of postwar urban sprawl.
I think it’s important to look back to the origin of spine-based urbanism. Hilberseimer started drawing spines in 1927, and in the European context, its potential role in the unity of natural and urban systems was a revelation. Today, there are bad spines and there are good spines, just like they’re bad grids, and they’re good grids. And if we have an ounce of objectivity, we will recognize that the spine has a chance of producing an outcome where the formal and spatial qualities of the spine can equal or exceed the qualities of forms and spaces that come from the traditional grid.
Is it possible to conceive of the city as an organism, as an integral part of a non-human whole? Ecology is simply defined as the analysis of interactions between organisms and between organisms and their environment. In the new Rock River settlement, Ludwig Hilberseimer reorganized the urban infrastructure of the city of Rockford in an attempt to merge and thus balance its urban and natural systems. Different from the metropolitan context of Marquette Park, the Rockford settlement reorganizes a medium-sized regional center around the area’s natural systems. As with the linear schemes of Soria y Matta, Milutin or Leonidov, Hilberseimer’s version of Rockford exploits the anamorphic relation between a linear organization urban infrastructure and the linear flow of the water and the geology that the flow cut over the geological ages. In the proposal, the city is recast as an organism amongst others capable of achieving homeostasis by engaging the natural systems in which it is embedded. Said with other words, the technosphere is reconciled to the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere and the atmosphere, all on which its survival depends.
end of part 2… link to part 3:
