The Art of Classic Planning: Building Beautiful and Enduring Communities 9780674272897

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THE ART OF

CLASSIC PLANNING BUILDING BEAUTIFUL AND ENDURING COMMUNITIES

THE ART OF

CLASSIC PLANNING BUILDING BEAUTIFUL AND ENDURING COMMUNITIES

NIR HAIM BURAS

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2019

Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Design and typesetting by 2k/denmark a/s Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Buras, Nir Haim, 1952– author. Title: The art of classic planning : building beautiful and enduring   communities / Nir H. Buras. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard   University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019008309 | ISBN 9780674919242 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: City planning. | Civic improvement. | Architecture,   Modern—20th century. Classification: LCC NA9031 .B875 2019 | DDC 724/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008309 The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

This book is dedicated to my mother, Netty, a devoted daughter, wife, mother, microbiologist, immunologist, and virologist, from whom I learned about life, and who declared on her deathbed, “Everything is good”; and to my father, Nathan, a surveyor, cartographer, water resources engineer, and operations research mathematician, who taught me geometry on the living room floor when I was seven, took me around the world when I was ten, paved a life path with milestones that I have tried to follow, and declared on his deathbed, “It is time for a new beginning.” To Morgan and Noa, my guiding lights; to Luanne, who made it all possible; to my classical mentor Seth Weine; to Léon Krier for his inspiration; to Prince Charles, for heroically insisting on beauty in a world increasingly denying it; and to the reader, who may actually need this book.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Glossary x Preface: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Sense of Place xiii Introduction: Creating a Legacy of Beauty 1

PART I: HOW DID WE GET HERE?

PART II: CLASSIC PLANNING FUNDAMENTALS

CHAPTER 1 : The Romantic Modernist Gutting of Cities  Camillo Sitte and Medieval Cities as Archetype Glass Architecture and Workers’ Housing Le Corbusier, CIAM, Brasília, and Pruitt-Igoe Raymond Unwin, Hegemann and Peets, and Pierre Lavedan The English Park as Paradigm for the Car Suburb

CHAPTER 4 : Classic Planning Was Always There63 Out of Africa 65 The Origin of Cities 66 Classic Plans 70 “Organic” Fabric 82 Grand Manner Plans 88 International Haussmannization 99 Bigness without Beauty: Sublime Urbanism 102 Utopian Impositions on the Landscape 105

7 9 12 18 21 27

CHAPTER 2 : Modernist Critique of Modernist Planning32 Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford 32 Kevin Lynch and Gordon Cullen 34 La Tendenza, Bacon, and Rowe 37 Pattern Language and Space Syntax 40 Postmodernism42 Segregating Pedestrians to Make “People-Friendly Cities” 45 Alien Bigness and Strangeness 47 New Urbanism 52 CHAPTER 3 : What Now?55

CHAPTER 5 : Learning from What We Have112 L’Enfant’s Plan for Washington, DC 112 Making a City Beautiful 118 The McMillan Plan 125 Paris on the Anacostia 133 CHAPTER 6 : Urban Form and Your Experience144 The People’s Choice 144 Community Aspiration and Urban Reason-for-Being 146 Urban Happiness 147 Beauty and Holism 148 Perception and Beauty 151 Perception Is Fractal 153 Fractal Is Classical 154 Phenomenological Confirmation 158 Fractal Is Classic Urban 160 The Beauty Scale 161 Asset Allocation, Durability, and Time 165 The Purpose of Urbanism 169

PART III: CLASSIC PLANNING APPLIED CHAPTER 7 : Classic Planning Knowledge Base  Architectural Literacy A “Cloud” of Ideas Archetypes and Building Blocks Precedents: Imitation, Invention, and Judgment

173 173 182 188 190

CHAPTER 8 : Classic Planning Tools201 Sun, Wind, and Water 201 Classic Traffic Planning 206 Classic Streets 209 Psychological and Behavioral Models 211 Toward Intuitive Driving 216 Applying Precedents in Parking 220 Transport227 CHAPTER 9 : Designing a City241 Grid Plans 241 Law of the Indies 246 Blocks and Alleys 250 Streets254 Arcaded Streets 260 Street Trees 262 Urban Landscaping 265 Plazas274 Boulevards and Avenues 287

CHAPTER 10 : Building a City299 Buildings299 General Fabric Buildings 311 Density314 Tall Buildings 316 Stations and Terminals 319 Airports326 Markets330 Durable Infrastructure 335 Building Community Infrastructure 339 Disaster Resilience 342 The Skyline 348 CHAPTER 11 : A Plan Is a Legacy, Not a Solution355 Metropolitan Planning 355 Country358 Urban Homeostasis 364 Cities of Refuge 365 Classic-Plan Code 370 Long-Term Plans 378 A City of Makers 382 EPILOGUE393 The High-Tech City 394 The Feral City 397 Muddling Through 399 Learning from Isfahan, Rome, and Angkor Wat to Understand Detroit 400

Notes407 Credits455 Index461

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

On this book-as-journey, I learned something vital from everyone I encountered, and it started long before the actual writing began. The teachings of my many notable mentors and guides continue. I am grateful to the late Charles Moore, Yaacov Rechter, Gilbert Herbert, and Bill Mitchell; the venerable Kenneth Frampton and Alvin Holm; Andres Duany, Anne Fairfax, Calder Loth, Christine Franck, Daniel Lee, Don Hawkins, George Stiny, Liz Plater-Zyberk, Richard Sammons, Salme and Arie Rahamimoff, Shamay Assif, Steve Bass, and Terry Knight. I learned no less from my colleagues, clients, and those I hoped would be clients. Thanks to David Meinhardt, Dhiru Thadani, Doug Tilden, Elayne Barten, Erran Carmel, Howard Spunt, Jeff Epperson, Jim Kunstler, Jose Bustamante, Julio Cesar Perez Hernandez, Karen Becker, Mark Addison, Michael Allen, Michael Curtis, Morris Newman, Nasir Shir, Paul Murad, Robert Crockett, Ron Goldman, Rosendo Gutierrez, Steve Semes, Taylor Van Horne, Timothy Brittain-Catlin, the esteemed Tom Luebke, and, last but not least, Vin Veroneau. Some directly concrete contributions that the effort received were by those who devoted time and thought to parts or all of the book: Athena Lakri, Bill Westfall, Dick Barringer, Eliza Hall, Gerald Frug, Hillel Schocken, Lawrence Susskind, Michael Mehaffy, Patrick Webb, Richard Taylor, and Samir Younes. Many of the drawings and renderings in it could not have been executed without the skills of Ming Hu, Greg Holeyman, Felix Serrano, Aron Beninghove, and Erik Bootsma.

I learned much from my special friends and hosts worldwide. They include but are not limited to Raquel, Israel, and the late Sami Fridman; Skip and Amelia Fink; David Lloyd, Adriana Murray, and Eulalia de Lucia; Hugo Postle, Gabriel Piedrehita, Paul Batlan, and their families; Su Bloomberg and her late mother; Jacques Dilouya; and the beloved Vincent Smith from Georgetown Park. I am particularly grateful for the generous longtime friendship of Miriam Maiman, Meir Bregman, Israel Feig, and their families; Frank and Laor Phifer; the extended Sassoon family; Dick and Cori Lowe; and my “team” in Tucson—the late Simi Ramat, Diana Simpson, and Meinarda Cruz, “Yaya.” Most notably, the weekly camaraderie of George Lloyd, Kevin Gough, Ken Rosen, Tim Wells, and Tony Muench made much of the journey as pleasant and meaningful as it has been. Without supercomputers, the scientific knowledge necessary to substantiate certain points in the book would most likely have taken many more decades to arrive at. Without the internet, writing it may have taken ten to twenty times as long. But more than anything or anyone contributing to making this book a reality were Kim Coventry of the Driehaus Foundation, who believed in me more than I knew to believe in myself, and the brilliant Jeff Dean and his team at Harvard U ­ niversity Press—Emeralde Jensen-Roberts, Tim Jones, Lisa ­Roberts, Stephanie Vyce, Christine Thorsteinsson, Kerry Higgins Wendt, Ann Twombly, and the team at ­ 2k/denmark—who put this book in your hands.  

GLOSSARY

settlement

A settled place of abode (Webster 1913); any place where people establish a community (Oxford English Dictionary [OED]).

officers such as a mayor and councilmembers. In Great Britain, a city is typically created by charter and usually contains a cathedral (Webster 1828). In North America, it is a municipal center incorporated by a province or state (OED).

hamlet

A small collection of houses in the country (Noah Webster 1828); a settlement generally smaller than a village and, in Britain, without a church (OED).

collective body

The terms settlement, hamlet, village, town, and city may also refer to their collective body of citizens or inhabitants.

village

A small assemblage of houses and associated buildings established in one place, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, inhabited chiefly by farmers and other rural people. In England, a village is distinguished from a town by the want of a market, but in the United States, any small assemblage of houses in the country is a village (Webster 1828); more recently, a small municipality with limited corporate powers. Village also describes a self-contained district or community within a city or town regarded as having features characteristic of village life (OED).

classic, classical, Classical classic

Commonly and conventionally refers to the best or most representative examples of things judged over time as outstanding of their kind, of the highest quality, remarkably and instructively typical, and not greatly subject to changes in fashion: e.g., a classic novel, a classic car, a classic navy blazer; Hamlet as the classic example of a tragedy (OED).

town

classical

Generally, any indefinite collection of houses larger than a village and smaller than a city. Originally, a town was a fortified collection of houses enclosed with walls, hedges, or pickets. In England, town came to mean any number of houses with a regular market that were not incorporated as a city or the see of a bishop (Webster 1828). More recently, a town is considered a densely populated built-up area with a name, defined boundaries, and a local government, especially as contrasted with the country or suburbs (OED).

A holistic method of designing the built environment for human use and a pleasing experience by means of traditional architectural styles that emerged worldwide from the same principles and for the same purposes. Classical

A historical period(s) and the Greek and Roman architectural styles, the Classical Orders. classic planning and urbanism

city

In a general sense, a large town with many houses and inhabitants. More specifically, it is a collective body of inhabitants, incorporated and governed by particular

Prior to the appearance of professional urban planning and urban design, cities, towns, and their parts were composed through classic planning and urbanism. Classic plans and their parts are still used in planning

GLOSSARY

and urbanism to explain and exemplify fundamental concepts such as the block, the street, the plaza, and the neighborhood.

city’s patron deity. A polis also had gymnasia, theaters, and sometimes walls to protect from invaders. Polises often minted coins and established colonies.

classicist

urbs

One who applies the classic method.

In Latin, urbs (plural urbes) was the physical (walled) city and came to refer specifically to Rome and its inhabitants. From it derived such words as urban and urbane.

Romantic

Relating to the Romantic Era, an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that occurred in Europe from the latter eighteenth century until World War I. modern, Modernism, Modernist

The term modern pertains to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past (OED). Modernism pertains to the ideology of the so-called Modernist style. polis, urbs, civis, municipium, civitas polis

Polis (πόλις) literally means “city” in Greek. It can also mean citizenship and a body of citizens. Many modern European languages contain derivatives of the word polis, such as the English policy, polity, police, and politics, a usage indicative of the influence of the Greek world view. -polis

Numerous words end in -polis: A metropolis is the mother city of a colony, the see of a metropolitan archbishop, and, more commonly today, a major urban population center. A megalopolis merges in a conurbation of several cities and their suburbs. A cosmopolis is a large urban center with a population from many different cultural backgrounds. Technopolis may refer to a city with technological industry. An acropolis (high city) is the upper part of a polis, often a citadel and/or the site of a major temple or temples. A necropolis (city of the dead) is a cemetery. The basic urban design indicators of a polis include its acropolis and its agora, the social hub and marketplace on and around a large, centrally located open space. A polis typically had temples, altars, and sacred precincts, one or more of which were dedicated to the

civis, civitas

A Latin resident was a civis. The plural, cives, was a public entity: the social body of citizens, synonymously a res publica, bound together in a contract allocating to them the responsibilities and rights of citizenship. The Latin term civitas (plural civitates or civitatium) abstractly means the condition or privileges of a (Roman) citizen, citizenship, and the freedom of a city. Concretely, it refers to the citizens united in a community, the body politic, or the state consisting of one or more cities and their territories. Urbanistically, civitas refers to the city itself, typically a regional market town with a basilica and a forum administered by a town council. Its purpose was primarily economic, to produce raw materials and collect taxes. New Romanized urban settlements were considered civitates. Some civitates groups survived beyond the fall of the Roman Empire, particularly in Britain and northern Spain. The words city, citizen, citizenship, civic, civil, civilian, and civilization derive from this common root. municipium

In Latin, a nonsovereign community, free town, or city whose citizens had the privileges of Roman citizens but were governed by their own laws. The term originates in (1) munus- (plural munia), meaning civic service, work, duty, obligation, or task, which included paying for public spectacles or gladiatorial entertainment and other gifts undertaken by duty holders or town citizens for the community’s benefit as regulated by custom or law; and (2) -cipere, from capere, to assume, take, grasp. Thus, municipalis pertains to a free city in which citizens with privileges hold civic offices. From municipium came the words municipality, a self-governing town or district, and municipal.

xi

xii

GLOSSARY

Hippodamian grid

The Hippodamian grid, or the orthogonal urban grid, is named for the first recorded Western town planner, Hippodamus of Miletus (498–408 BC), a Greek philosopher, architect, urban planner, physician, mathematician, and meteorologist whom Aristotle identified as “the father of

city planning.” But like so many things Greek, the Hippodamian grid had Egyptian antecedents. Hippodamus laid out the port of Athens, Piraeus, in 451 BCE and Rhodes in 408 BCE. Hippodamian principles were employed in many cities, including Halicarnassus, Alexandria, Antioch, and—notably—cities in the Americas.

The Hippodamian plan of Miletus (c. 479–408 BCE) includes the civic functions of the agora, theater, stoa, gymnasium, and boule (council).

PREFACE FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED AND THE SENSE OF PLACE No two places on Earth are the same. Each has its unique, prevailing atmosphere, its distinctive character, its spirit of place, its genius loci. The perception of the genius loci, which fully engages the intellectual, emotional, and sensual in a single moment, is what John Dewey (1859–1952) defined in Art as Experience (1934) as a peak experience. This universal character of the impression of place and space is governed first by what is perceived and then subjectively processed by the individual’s thinking, judgment, associations, and understanding.1 The genius loci—natural, modified, or built—is the framework upon which a city or town aligns. For example, the main street of Tepoztlan, Mexico, is aligned on a small Aztec pyramid tucked high in the mountain above it, while the great pyramids of Teotihuacan are aligned on high mountains on the distant horizon. A sense of place can create a feeling of home in people’s hearts: a good, comfortable experience of familiarity, representing their specific place on the planet. Early urban inhabitants chose a patron goddess, god, saint, or nymph as a cultural shorthand for all or part of a location’s sense of place, giving rise to the term genius loci, spirit of place. Sense of place is the singularly most important thing for a planner to keep in mind. Sensitivity to it is the first and ultimate responsibility of planners and architects.2 Being the only design discipline to install living things, landscape architecture is arguably the most elevated field of design. The master landscape architect is a rarer commodity than the master architect, engineer, planner, or designer. Among landscape architects, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) stands out for directly influencing the look of an entire continent—North America.3 Accompanying his father on annual tours in search of the picturesque, Olmsted, by age sixteen, had been up the Hudson River, to the Adirondacks, and to Niagara Falls. He read the late eighteenth-century English landscape architects, travelers, and theorists, notably

Uvedale Price’s An Essay on the Picturesque (1794), Humphry Repton’s Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1795) and The Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803), and William Gilpin’s Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views (Related Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty) (1790). He so treasured these books that he ensured his apprentices read them, “as a student of Law would read Blackstone.”4 Olmsted understood how a mind perceiving beautiful cues from a landscape affected a person. Whether or not the viewer was aware of its workings, he thought, a landscape relaxed faculties made tense by psychological strain and an abrasive built environment. He knew that if the experience was “good,” it was because of a perception of holism, of nature, of the divine. As if painting a tableau, Olmsted enhanced the sense of space through sequential views. He composed broad spaces of glistening greensward punctuated by groves of trees, producing narratives and unfolding stories. He used indistinct boundaries to suggest infinity, nature, abundance, and freedom. He planted more lushly than nature itself. Although Olmsted’s method was straightforward, mystery has been attached to it. Olmsted manipulated foregrounds, midgrounds, and backgrounds to deepen perspective; he formed ground cover, shrubs, and trees into garden “rooms.” He devised effects of shadow and light to enhance the feeling of nature and its mystery. He amplified the genius loci of each part of the parks he worked on, sensitively providing visual cues to engender experiences of the sublime and the beautiful. Olmsted believed that the urban artist’s goal was to make his hand invisible, and concealing artifice was the art Olmsted practiced. For the landscape experience to ring organic and true, Olmsted subtly shaped his work to appear so natural that one would think of it as having always been there. He liberated users to get lost in his spaces, while endowing them with the confidence that they were on a safe path of delight. He simultaneously

PREFACE

xiv

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED AND THE SENSE OF PLACE

ensured the design’s timelessness and perpetuated its intent by means of durable construction. The result was a man-made nature that uniquely combines richness and wildness in a unified composition.5 Olmsted considered it a scientific fact that the occasional change of air and contemplation of natural scenes supported mental vigor and physical health. Believing that aesthetic sensibility was a way to channel American society toward a more civilized, healthful state, Olmsted’s vision of a city contained parks, and he treated parkways and boulevards connecting to and through suburbs as their extensions.6 Beginning in 1857 with the design for Central Park in New York City, Frederick Law Olmsted, his sons, and his successor firms created a legacy of some of the world’s most important parks: Prospect Park in Brooklyn; Boston’s Emerald Necklace; Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina; Mount Royal in Montreal; and the grounds of the US Capitol and White House, as well as Washington Park, Jackson Park, and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. He also played

an influential role in the creation of the National Park Service. Olmsted’s parks reflected humanistic, social, and artistic values that are endowed with and express the common good. Critical of designs which focused on displays of novelty, fashion, or virtuoso inclinations, Olmsted silently championed through his parks the discourse of Price, Repton, and Gilpin on ideas of the sublime and the beautiful that shaped the Romantic and Modernist worlds. Through urban landscapes that harmonize with and augment their sense of place, his work conveys nineteenth-century Romantic sensibilities in an Enlightenment framework. It reflects a vision of communities and society in which a commitment to the experience of beauty is key. Olmsted’s attitude and legacy reflect the most important things to bring to the design of cities and places: to balance our aesthetic experience of the sublime and the beautiful and to constantly work from the spirit and ambiance of places—their genius loci—because no two places on Earth are the same.

INTRODUCTION CREATING A LEGACY OF BEAUTY The Art of Classic Planning is a critique of contemporary planning and a path forward for homeostatic urban sustainability. Classic planning is how we built cities until roughly a hundred years ago, before urban planning was canonized as a modern professional discipline. The method has existed since the first purposely built cities appeared five thousand years ago, around 3000 BCE. Surprisingly, those cities were large, with populations of eighty thousand inhabitants, complete with street grids and sewers—and they were planned. For millennia, cities thrived and failed. Some disappeared and others survived. And just as the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution pushed cities past their natural balances, Modernism took hold of planning. As James Stevens Curl documented, this was not an inevitable, seamless evolutionary step, but rather a sort of disruption. At great cost, Modernism created cityscapes of little coherence, removed from community aspirations and alien to established contexts. Although well-intentioned, this laid the foundation for today’s urban problems and consistently forced crises on cities. Modernism’s mottos—“functionalism,” “innovation,” “creativity,” and “to be of our time”—have turned out to be somewhat questionable.7 Yet, paradoxically, planners teach urbanism based on classic examples of plazas, streets, and Grand Manner and City Beautiful plans like those of Sixtus V in Rome, L’Enfant in Washington, Haussmann in Paris, and Burnham in Chicago. The authors of the British government’s recent Future of Cities project almost verbatim identified the characteristics of classic planning as those best suited for successful urban form and infrastructure. But as a matter of habit, we disallow what has worked well before. Most consider classic planning outdated, if they recognize it at all. As specialists, planners also seem to discount that consumers of cities are their peers, equally capable of understanding and judging what makes their cities good places in which to live.8

The reader knows from quotidian urban life the pain, inconvenience, and cost of this. Nearly everyone intuitively recognizes that something, some quality of older places, is much more beautiful and enduring than what we are building today. Annually, one in seven of the world’s population engages in tourism, and many of them seek places where they can experience that quality. While modern-day planners assure us that we will never build that way again, we swarm through Venice, Agra, Rome, Paris, Athens, and Florence as if in desperation that this is our last chance to experience it. Nonprofessional readers may have already intuited that cities must stay in touch with their natural and man-made genius loci. They may have observed that there is no good urbanism without good architecture, and they may already concur that traditional and classical buildings make the best streets and places. Upon further contemplation, they may have determined that urban experience cannot be abstracted into two-dimensional diagrams—that beauty and “building it right” are essential to urban durability, and that trees are essential to ecological and human well-being. Meanwhile, intelligent professionals who disallow directly applying the best lessons and treasures of the past tell us straightfaced that to create an authentic urban experience with that “something” is fake. Perhaps surprisingly, this book rises not from nostalgia or political ideology, as some design purists will no doubt assert. Its call for pluralism in design originates in the nexus of common urban experience, basic philosophy, and hard science. Research shows that, from the first cities until the late nineteenth century, the beauty and socializing power of cities were the fruit of conscious intent and civilizing vision predicated on evolutionary adaptations hardwired in humans. People seem to have built cities in service to the ideals that bound them into communities, noting what in them endured and what was ephemeral.9

INTRODUCTION

2

CREATING A LEGACY OF BEAUTY

Then, in the late Victorian era, cities started to fail from overcrowding and infrastructural stress. At first motivated by the era’s Romantic sensibilities, then rapidly subsumed by the problem-solving project of technocracy, planning has arguably left cities with more problems and in worse shape than they had been a hundred years ago. We know that the functional, disposable urbanism we are building today is ephemeral. We sense that what worked last week will not work next month. But there is no need to repeat the litany of negatives that describe contemporary development. We may ignore critiques of latter-day planning, but as the author James Howard Kunstler says, after a century of this type of planning, “we have absolutely no faith in our ability to create urban environments at all.” While historic preservation mummifies old buildings because we choose not to build their equals, architects discredit themselves by copying the work of “starchitects,” and urbanists and preservationists defend the fundamentalism of a 1913 manifesto entitled “Ornament and Crime.” Anyone who attends a planning commission hearing witnesses how the public loathes the cold, inhumane buildings being produced. After the session, they can hear people in the corridors mourn the dereliction and dishonor of the public realm that today’s planning leaves in its wake.10 Independent of history and context, architects and planners are forced to reinvent the wheel. Solving problems that their predecessors created, they are often left holding the bag. At the heart of these failures lies the belief that ultimately, technological innovation will singlehandedly save the world. To be of our time, we mostly remove beauty from the urbanism we touch.11 In contrast, classic planning posits that beauty and durability result from building for qualities far beyond what functionalist thinking can conceive of, let alone build for. Based on research and experience, it concludes that the purpose of urbanism is not problem solving but creating a long-term legacy of beautiful places. Surprisingly, the tools necessary to accomplish this are strikingly simple and few. They are composed of elements which are easier to learn than the alphabet, such as walking as a measure of urban dimension, and millennia of accumulated intuitive experience. After all, cities

are so complex that their plans must be simple to work. Paradoxically, classic street planning relies on hardwired human behaviors and instincts that traffic engineers continually struggle against. The fact is that no other planning method offers an equally accessible framework for simultaneously handling urban space, environmental issues, economic viability, and planning politics—or addresses as simply the matters of density, codes, public works, and infrastructure. Virtually no other considers architecture the primary feature of urban experience. And no other is as pluralistic, showing us how to comprehend the vast spectrum of urban fabric without getting lost in the details or, worse, misplacing the thread of humanity. A good and just city needs constant maintenance and love. Its forms and contributions require the hope, desire, effort, dedication, and skill of citizens working together. To serve the community, The Art of Classic Planning uniquely reexamines a new-old urban design paradigm. It is founded upon cities experienced as backdrops for human activity and measured by the individual experience of beauty. Since the classics were published a century ago by Sitte, Unwin, and Hegemann and Peets, this is the first book that tries to capture the sense of organic urbanism in a practical whole. It was portended in 1987 by Léon Krier, then serving as the director of the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Architectural Institute. Professional futurist consensus suggests that the chances for Jetsons-like cities becoming ubiquitous are low, which indicates this book’s timeliness.12 As we muddle along, this book is intended to help lay leaders, involved citizenry, mayors, city councils, commissions, and developers to better understand their cities. It presents them with long-tested tools with which to overcome the challenges of twenty-first-century cities. Local, state, regional, and federal officials can find in it a guide to reducing risk and improving the outcomes from growing urbanization. The book is a resource for architects and urban planning professionals, teachers and students, engineers, specialists, and multidisciplinary teams. But most important, it is intended to be a handbook for citizens and citizen groups aspiring to make their communities enduring and beautiful.

INTRODUCTION

CREATING A LEGACY OF BEAUTY

The Art of Classic Planning is divided into three parts: “How We Got Here,” “The Principles of Classic Planning,” and “Classic Planning Applied.” Part I shows how the strange early paradigms of twentieth-century planning were compounded by subsequent mid- and late twentieth-century critiques. It explains the limitations and inevitable failure of functionalism, rationalism, brutalism, postmodernism, and the other specialty streams of the fragmented planning fields. Part II focuses on the fundamentals of classic planning and the reasons they work. It discusses the various types of urban fabric and demonstrates the classical process. It then turns to the reader’s experience of urban form to arrive at the book’s conceptual heart, revealing that beauty is both a measure and a goal in building cities. This part shows how to work creatively with precedents to help capture and amplify good urban qualities. It confirms why the planning of cities and towns that are highly enjoyable to experience comes not from the glamour of technology but from their raison d’être and the aspirations of their communities. It explains why resolving ephemeral functional needs is not a goal, but a product of doing the long-term right things. Part III of this book describes the tools of classic planning and their application. It suggests proven, traditional designs for buildings, blocks, streets, plazas, and parks; discusses the little-known Spanish Laws

of the Indies and broad-range metropolitan planning; and describes what to do with out-of-balance high-rise and low-rise sprawl. This part presents the classic plan zoning code and how to generate a consensual, “bottom-up–top-down” long-term plan. It culminates with a brief look at how evolutionary adaptations underpin civic patronage and skilled craftsmanship, which point to the notion of a city of makers, supported by a community aspiration to a sustaining legacy of beauty. But classic planning’s most radical proposal may be to disrupt continuous urban fabric with country, a strategy that may prove effective in addressing the explosive growth of megacities today.13 This book was written to validate readers’ intuitive sensibilities, encourage lay citizens engaging in the planning process, and help them apply again what has always worked. It humbly proposes a pluralistic antidote to the contemporary cycle of creative destruction and invites us to face our communal futures responsibly and with courage. If the purpose of urbanism is not mechanical problem solving but creating a legacy of beautiful places, the art of classic planning is more necessary than ever. In today’s fast-morphing world—an age of volatile urban growth—The Art of Classic Planning is a blueprint for an alternative to the techno-dystopias permeating discussions in art, the media, and society.

3

PART I

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Rampant urbanization is a defining process of our time, and the planning profession is uniquely poised to address it. But despite good intentions, it has gutted twentieth-century cities and is building unsustainable fabric in the twenty-first. How did we get from Sixtus V’s Rome, L’Enfant’s Washington, and Haussmann’s Paris to the dystopian wastelands of freeways, high-rises, and sprawl? While Part III of this book describes the classic planning toolkit and its applications, and Part II explains its fundamentals based on what we know from philosophy and science, this part of the book explains how we got here. Indeed, hundreds of books have been written about the contemporary urban predicament. But to understand what went wrong and how to fix it, we need to trace back to the notions that shape today’s planning and development discourse. This means first exposing the errors in thought committed by the pioneer planner Camillo Sitte. Less well-known than Sitte is the genuinely irrational German Expressionist “glass architecture” movement, which opportunistically if not cynically rebranded itself as New Rationalism after World War I. In the English-speaking world, Ebenezer Howard’s disciples interpreted his railbased garden cities into suburbs that fatally ignored the rise of the car. But perhaps most destructive of all was the

Frenchman Le Corbusier, who, through CIAM and Brutalism, wreaked the most havoc. The critique of Modernist planning in the 1960s was well-meaning but no less faulty. How Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Kevin Lynch, Gordon Cullen, Aldo Rossi, and Edmund Bacon interpreted the design and architecture of cities led to strange, reductivist “pattern languages,” “space syntaxes,” and “collage cities.” These methods did not resolve much, and the cartoonish postmodernism that followed mocks mostly its makers. The third generation of Modernist critique continues this trend. One end of the spectrum segregates pedestrians and over-encumbers streets by separating bicycles from motor vehicles. At the other end, alien parametricism and discomforting, overscale, “big and bad” urban fabric promise a systematically horrific world. Well-intentioned yet naïve “utopias” such as Arcosanti or EPCOT are literally “no places.” For its inauthenticity, New Urbanism—focused on the symptoms of suburbia and sprawl—may be no more than a planning aspirin. The nearly lone voice of reason in this wilderness is that of Léon Krier. His lucid criticism of the folly and inadequacy of planning has made clear the need to address these issues in an inclusive, cohesive, and comprehensible manner.

CHAPTER 1 THE ROMANTIC MODERNIST GUTTING OF CITIES

From antiquity through the Renaissance and up to the end of the Enlightenment, architecture had been intended to offer a pleasure-based aesthetic experience. But Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and others, in an extension of mid-eighteenth-century humanistic exploration, asked whether there was another type of aesthetic experience, different from beauty but equal in impact. With the opposite of pleasure being pain, they suggested that pain, fear, and terror could provoke types of aesthetic experience perhaps even more powerful than those associated with beauty and pleasure. They called this type of aesthetic experience the sublime, powerfully distinguishing it from the beautiful or pleasure-based aesthetic experience.1 In light of this, ugly is not the opposite of beautiful. It simply describes something with little beauty to it, at the low end of a beauty scale. Perhaps the most obvious example of the sublime aesthetic experience in contemporary life is the horror movie. People watching horror

movies have an intellectual, emotional, and sensual experience driven by fear, terror, and notions of pain. The suggestion that buildings could project the sublime or the beautiful—or both—prompted a broad exploration. Romantics assumed that, just as an emotion could be generated by a sculpture, music, or other artworks, a structure or urban space could also arouse an emotion. The resulting Romantic theories, ideas, and perceptions stand at the core of the architecture and urban design from the nineteenth century through our time.2 Most significantly, when Burke defined the sublime experience, he also defined it for architecture. Burke described sublime architecture as immensely large, of very simple geometry, infinitely repeated, and unornamented. The futurist and fantastic projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728–1799), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) illustrate such overscale, endlessly repetitive, and horrific buildings and spaces. Sublime architecture. (left) Project for the interior of the National Library, Étienne-Louis Boullée, c. 1787. (right) Piranesi, Carceri (Imaginary Prisons), Plate VII, The Drawbridge, c. 1754.

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Romantics who had read Hegel’s suggestion that history was an unfolding of the human spirit found in that progression something analogous to Darwinian evolution. Consequently, it was thought that if there was progress in history, there was also progress in culture— and if there was progress in culture, there could also be progress in the arts. Progress in the arts, they thought, was led by an avant-garde, which was in turn led by artistic geniuses or “starchitects.” Romantic rationalists also suggested that ornament could be dissociated from architectural fabric as easily as a dress could be removed from a mannequin. Meanwhile, Romantic fascination with the distant in time and place at first yielded Historicist and Orientalist styles. Then, in anticipation of the next step in evolution, it turned its attention to the future. Accompanying this was the faith that technology’s efficiency could solve the world’s ills. By taking one or more such intentions to its logical limit and building according to it, the Romantic sensibility formulated Modernist thinking regarding design, buildings, and cities.3 One popular trend underlying the practice of design was the Picturesque, meaning “after the manner of painters.” Originally referring to eighteenth-century landscape painters and theories of aesthetics, after the mid-nineteenth century, the Picturesque referred to the search for the “story-telling” aspects of design. Composition, massing, asymmetry, dynamics, movement, verticality, and so on were used to convey variety, irregularity, surprise, and novelty. The story-telling aspect of the Picturesque was useful in expressing the idea form-follows-function. By mixing styles and shapes of successive cultures and times, the built fabric was thought both to express an “organic” process of growth and change and to reflect the notion of time. To Enlightenment architects, traditional modes provided aesthetic systems that answered most needs, if the rules were followed. To them, the appropriate application of styles and forms should be easily “read” by the user-viewer. But the Romantic assumption that design could evoke emotion was expanded to include the belief that architectural form expressed and influenced moral behavior, political leanings, and ethical

standards. That led Romantics to conclude that styles contained intrinsic values.4 These Romantics correlated architectural styles with spirits of national origin or identity, political ideals, and chauvinistic values such as “True Christian Architecture,” “German Architecture,” or “Socialist Architecture.” Britons and Germans both adopted neomedievalism as a national style. Furthermore, for the Romantics, humanity’s place in nature was no longer as the crown of creation. The “organic” bond between humanity and nature, expected to be manifest in architecture and landscape design, took on new and different forms. Although they produced what may be the richest, most interesting of all architectural periods, Romantic architects and planners nonetheless failed to unite the intellectual and emotional dimensions of which they were conscious into a consistent theory. For the purpose of justifying and explaining the place of Modernism in architectural history, Nikolaus Pevsner, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Joseph Rykwert, and others wrote about this chain of events in design thinking. Peter Collins traced the origins of Romantic notions from the Enlightenment to our era in Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture (1965). Bertram Hume identified them in Form and Reform in Architecture (1954), as did Geoffrey Scott in The Architecture of Humanism (1914). They illuminated how we got here, why so many Victorian and Modernist buildings are malformed and ugly, and why the modern city is a failure. Collins, Hume, and Scott respectively termed these issues of interest to Romantics analogies, fallacies, and dreams. Because they are hard to peg as philosophy, theory, or fact, a perhaps more useful term is intentions.5 Driven by a fear of backwardness, Modernism—the latest Romantic style—is founded on synthetic images of futures. Its almost fundamentalist adherence to styles reflective of “our time” is based on a deep, quasi­ religious belief in the “spirit of the time,” the Zeitgeist. As Léon Krier wrote, “the ‘fear of backwardness’ holds control of a vast and worldwide fraternity . . . believing in the sanctity and exclusive legitimacy of Modernism, a theory that has been brain-dead for half a century, yet keeps dominating positions in academia and its dependent culture industry. . . . [This] atavistic belief in infinite

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progress, is now held alive by fear of regression. . . . The resulting technological and artistic amnesia is responsible for the cataclysmic worldwide degradation of the built environment.”6

CAMILLO SITTE AND MEDIEVAL CITIES AS ARCHETYPE The first to describe urban design as an artform, the “father of modern planning,” was the Austrian Camillo Sitte (1843–1903). He declared that the leading motif of urban planning was the urban room around the experiencing man. In testing this, his richly illustrated book Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 1889) drew on numerous examples of streets and public spaces from antiquity to more recent times. On the face of it, Sitte’s experiential approach was correct, but his method left a legacy of errors that still dominates planning and urban design.7 Sitte’s first mistake was that, while declaring that urban design was experiential, he suggested that the main purpose of streets was to carry traffic. He identified fifty-four individual possibilities of “conflict” at intersections. To reduce them, he proposed, seemingly reasonably, discontinuous streets with T-intersections and pinwheel-plan civic plazas. But by focusing on conflict, Sitte drew attention away from contact between people as the ultimate purpose of cities. Focusing on traffic, he unwittingly handed street design over to traffic engineers—and urban planners have since abdicated urban planning to them.8 Sitte’s second mistake was not truly his own, but that of his followers. Ostensibly, anyone can enjoy the beauty of old towns and cities, but Sitte was the first to try analyzing what made them beautiful. He believed that pleasing assemblages resulted from long-lost sensibilities, and he proposed formulations to fill in these missing intuitions.9 Although Sitte’s preferred examples of good urban spaces were the ancient Greek agora and Roman forums, he criticized “hygienic,” straight, fin-de-siècle boulevards and broad public squares. He judged grid plans,

such as Barcelona’s nineteenth-century Eixample district, as “lifeless.” Sitte elevated oddly shaped medieval plazas and “informal,” picturesque, curved, and irregular streets—both supposedly unique for their ever-changing vistas. And while he warned against copying ancient town plans and their irregularities, Sitte’s followers remembered him for promoting the “organic” qualities of kasbah-like medieval towns.10 Sitte’s third mistake was in his understanding of urban space through the concept of enclosure. He defined this as how medieval urban views were configured by the angles at which streets entered plazas, how linear Baroque streets terminated with monuments or buildings, and how plazas are surrounded by buildings. His latter-day followers apply this notion as a foremost urban design principle, but they consider only completely walled plazas to be urban “rooms.” Consequently, streets are not “defined spaces” for planners today.11 Unfortunately, this literal reading of enclosure counters the facts of our innate sense of space and place and how we orient ourselves both in nature and in the urban context. This is because our eye has a primary tendency to seek edges, not surfaces. Furthermore, the mind’s eye often completes lines so that they appear continuous, creating a mental edge. The reader knows from experience how cross-streets form implied edges to block-lengths of streets, thereby providing a sense of limit or enclosure. Our experience of a straight street is therefore a sequential progression of block-long rooms, each with its sense of place and its own character. Perhaps Sitte’s greatest error, however—his “original sin”—was ignoring the importance of architecture in urbanism. While castigating urban planners for neglecting the façades of the buildings that composed public spaces, Sitte focused mainly on the two-dimensional plan. He posited that the architectural shape or form of buildings was subordinate to the “inherent creative quality of urban space.” But crucially, the diagrammatic plans of plazas that he drew do not relate much of the real experience of those plazas. Silhouetting built areas in plans is a well-known graphic device. Perhaps the most famous example is the

9

PART I

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Twenty-Nine Plans, at Uniform Scale, from Camillo Sitte, in Hegemann & Peets’s American Vitruvius, 1922.

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Pianta Grande di Roma (surveyed from 1736, engraved 1748), by the Italian architect and surveyor Giambattista Nolli (1701–1756). In it, the buildings and private spaces are shaded while streets, squares, outdoor spaces, and publicly accessible interiors are left white. Although the Nolli map conveys much about the urban experience through its great detail, Sitte’s simplified diagrams do not. Notably, space—the void of a plaza or street—has no character itself. Its character is governed by the walls of a plaza or street, formed by the buildings along them and their architecture. Sitte erred gravely in not seeing that a diagram is not a plan and that a plan, a geometric abstraction, is not an urban experience. Despite good intentions, Sitte overlooked that the architecture of a street or space creates its individual experience. Disastrously, the idea that architecture is of no consequence in the urban plan became an article of faith. Coupled with the Modernist notion that the purpose of urban design is to express a planner’s creativity, the floodgates of impractical Modernist urbanism and personal aesthetics opened to inundate people’s urban experience. Sitte’s widely influential theories were adopted in whole or part by numerous practitioners in northern Europe, by Raymond Unwin and Hegemann and Peets in the English-speaking world, and, in Germany, by Theodor Fischer, the teacher of the first generation of

11

A detail from the 1784 Nolli map, showing the Pantheon (837), Piazza della Minerva (842), and the Insula Sapientiae (Island of Wisdom, also known as the Insula Dominicana), including the Church and Convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva (844).

Modernists: Paul Bonatz, Hugo Häring, Ernst May, Erich Mendelsohn, J. J. P. Oud, and Bruno Taut. But Romantic German Expressionist ideas also entered the Modernist mix. These originated in the Deutscher Werkbund, the German Arts and Crafts Alliance that morphed after World War I into the International Style Modernism of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the mythical “new objectivity.”12

The Nolli Map is composed of twelve copperplate engravings that together measure sixty-nine by eighty-two inches (176 x 208 cm). It was so accurate—by far the most accurate description of Rome produced until that time—that it showed the asymmetry of the Spanish Steps. Including almost eight square miles of the densely built city and nearly two thousand sites of cultural significance, as well as surrounding terrain, the map was used for Rome’s municipal planning and mapping until the 1970s.

Sitte’s plan of the Würzburg Residence conveys nothing of the sense of its space, all of which comes from the architecture. (left) Plan of the Würzburg Residence from Camillo Sitte’s City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 1889, in Figs. 48–70 (A-CC)—TwentyNine Plans, at Uniform Scale, from Camillo Sitte, in Hegemann & Peets’s American Vitruvius, 1922. (right) The Würzburg Residence.

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GLASS ARCHITECTURE AND WORKERS’ HOUSING In 1936, the German-British architecture writer Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) concocted Modernism’s history virtually out of whole cloth. Since then Modernism, from Le Corbusier to Zaha Hadid, has been hiding behind a tattered cloak of pseudorationalist functionalism. Moreover, the birth of Modernist planning was marked by a heritage of radical German utopian Expressionism, despite its official denunciation by historians when it became impractical. Early twentieth-century Expressionist visionaries may not have kept copies of Kant on their drawing boards, but they existed in a Romantic mist of ideas driven by a “tragic consciousness” of the sublime, the terror-based aesthetic experience. To paraphrase Kant, “The beautiful charms, the sublime moves.”13 Corresponding to Friedrich Nietzche’s (1844–1900) descriptions of the creative act, the solitary genius, the sacred nature of sensory perception, and the proph­ esy of the Neuer Mensch (New Man) in an early twentieth-century Dionysian age, German Expressionist architects and planners considered themselves an inspired community of the chosen in a tabula rasa world. Surrendering to an Expressionist cult of genius, they considered themselves the heirs of the medieval cathedral builders. These architects and planners, attributing to themselves the double role of leaders and German depictions of the sublime. (left) 1824, Caspar David Friedrich, Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice). (right) 1921, Walter Gropius’s Monument to the March Dead.

seers, took on the function of mediums who, “in a state of perfect submission,” comprehended the forces of life. They regarded themselves as the executive organ of the Volkswille (people’s will) and the Lebenswille (life-will).14 Their prophet was the novelist, playwright, poet, critic, draftsman, progenitor of Antirationalist Modernism, and would-be inventor of a perpetual motion machine, Paul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart (1863–1915). An eccentric alcoholic visionary who was supported mainly by his wife, Scheerbart had a prolific and diverse output that nonetheless gained little commercial or critical success. But from the late 1880s until his premature death in 1915, Scheerbart wrote on science, urban planning, space travel, military strategy, and gender politics, often in the course of a single text. Walter Gropius (1883–1969) read and admired Scheerbart, and Bruno Taut (1880–1938) anointed him “the only poet of architecture.”15 Scheerbart’s extreme utopianism held that technology could solve all the problems humankind causes. His most celebrated treatise, Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture), foretold of a sublime, technocratic civilization, a peaceful Paradise on Earth. This new world order would be borne by a proliferation of crystal cities, floating continents of colored glass, sapphire towers, emerald domes, diamond castles, and mountain-top glass buildings. “Colored glass ultimately destroys all hatred,” he declared when he proposed

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converting the Earth’s entire surface into a great work of colored-glass architecture.16 As World War I broke out, Taut and Scheerbart imagined a German society freed from past forms and traditions, living in sparkling glass cities, and surrounded by architecture that flooded every building with multicolored light. In spite of its sharp edges and merciless reflection, glass represented to him a brighter awareness, a new morality—the ultimate. The dogma emerged that a person who daily experiences the splendors of glass could do no wicked deeds.17 To this Taut added a cosmological perspective. Believing he was reconciling mind and matter in glass, he celebrated the material’s durability while ignoring its brittleness. At the 1914 Werkbund exhibition, the devoted disciple dedicated his Glass Pavilion to the “Glass Papa,” Scheerbart. He inscribed the base of its dome with Scheerbart’s aphorisms: “Coloured glass destroys hatred”; “Without a glass palace life is a burden”; “Building in brick only harms.” But Scheerbart suffered a nervous breakdown over the carnage of World War I, and in 1915, he starved to death in what was rumored to have been an antiwar protest.18

Immediately after World War I, German architects and urbanists found themselves without employers, commissions, or social standing. Many had fought in the war, and their traumatic experiences, combined with the political turmoil and social upheaval that followed, resulted in Romantic utopian outlooks and socialist agendas. With many seeing the erasure of the past as essential, historic amnesia became a dominant mode of their culture.19 Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, Mies van der Rohe, Erich Mendelsohn, and other Expressionists reviving Scheerbart’s ideas established in Berlin the Novembergruppe and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst in November 1918. Gropius issued the Bauhaus Manifesto and hired Expressionist artists to teach at the Bauhaus. In November 1919, Taut initiated with leading Expressionists a Scheerbart-inspired utopian correspondence, Die Gläserne Kette (The Glass Chain). He published books expressing his Scheerbartian views and sprinkled quotations from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–1885) in his magazine Frühlicht (Dawn’s Light). In these works, Zarathustra embodied Expressionist freedom from history, rejection of the bourgeois world, and strength of spirit in individualist isolation.20

13

Proto-Modernist German Expressionism, 1911-1921. (left) Bruno Taut’s pavilion for the German glass industry at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition. (middle) The Einsteinturm, 1921. From the monolithic plasticity of the Einsteinturm in Potsdam, Mendelsohn’s work in the 1920s and 1930s turned toward what Frampton refers to as “a concern for the intrinsic structural expressiveness of materials,” featuring progressively simpler geometries. (right) For expediency, the expressionist Gropius and Meyer Fagus office and factory building (1911–1913) used orthogonal glazing.

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Following a stream of utopianism going back to William Morris, the German Expressionists yearned to closely relate socialist politics to a “total art” of building. The role of the planner in their new world order was to make change manifest. He was to give it expressive form through the artistic struggle for the spatial freedom of a plan, through the liberation of structure from enclosure, and through the aesthetic qualities of new materials. Waving the banner of functionalism like a cross on a shield gave an ethical veneer to the crusade. Expressionist architecture thrived on the drawing board. It was characterized by unusual massing and glass, and sometimes inspired by biomorphic forms. A recurring poetic intention of Expressionist architects was the “expression of materials,” often resulting in building designs that appear monolithic. The major extant landmark of German Expressionism, Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam, exemplifies this: Einstein, “one stone,” “mono-lith.”21 However, Expressionist architecture was difficult to execute, and conventional methods of drawing were incapable of conveying its ideas. Plate glass failed to develop as a structural material, and materials of implied plasticity, such as reinforced concrete, were discovered to be not as plastic as desired. Technical difficulties prevented casting the Einstein Tower entirely of concrete, let alone in a single pour. Its concrete frame has brick infill and a stucco exterior. Then suddenly, in 1923, German government coffers opened for massive housing projects. Overnight, the Expressionists converted en masse to the Neue Sachlichkeit, the “new rationality.” In the shift from Expressionism to New Rationalism, Taut, Mendelsohn, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and others became the leaders of German Modernism. Although historians later sought to disconnect Expressionism from the International Style movement which followed, these architects retained much of the architectural content of Expressionism in the Neue Sachlichkeit. Intimately linked to their Expressionist forerunner, Modernist notions stayed close to the Romantic ideals of Ruskin and Semper, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Deutscher Werkbund. They echoed the Expressionist

insistence that only this way could the architect reform and remodel society, and they preached that only Modernist styles could produce harmony and happiness.22 With the advent of work, the organizations of Expressionist architects reformed as Der Ring, the Ring of Architects. Until the Nazi rise to power, Der Ring dominated German architecture. Its greatest expression was the extensive workers’ housing developments built in Berlin from 1923 to 1931. In a new and no less Romantic cult of prismatic geometry justified on the grounds of economics, “pure” stucco prisms replaced transparent, crystalline Expressionist shapes, and Expressionist infatuation with technology paved the way for the twentieth-century “machine aesthetic.” While Expressionist values were retained in Modernist detail design, surface modeling, and purely decorative elements, the Modernist credo falsely and paradoxically insisted that Neue Sachlichkeit had no design dogma or style. In fact, both Expressionism and Modernism pursued plasticity and dynamics. Both considered a building a complete artifact, a total work of art. In both “clarity of form” and compositional horizontality, verticality and angularity were sought. Both considered the volume of a building to be part of wider cosmic space, and both thought they were removing boundaries by introducing large glass planes. Picturesquely, both Expressionism and Modernism identified internal spaces and external shapes of buildings with organic and biological purposes. And both decisively separated buildings from urbanism. The ultimate aim of both the Expressionist and Modernist movements was a “man-made paradise.” But while the Expressionist architect sought “objective truth” in the soul of the people’s will, the Modernist sought to objectively express the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. The Expressionist artist-intellectual was replaced by the Modernist artist-technocrat, and a deterministic approach was adopted through the ideology of functionalism.23 From 1924 to 1931, the formerly visionary Expressionists focused on building Siedlungen (workers’ housing estates), setting standards that were copied worldwide.

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Considered a high point of Modernist architecture, it could be said that the German Siedlungen affected virtually every multifamily residential project built since World War II. In Berlin, 140,000 units were built. Six of the Berlin projects are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and four of those were by Bruno Taut. They brought huge, abstract block-buildings-in-a-park to the world, introduced Existenzminimum interior flat design, made a religion of technology, and exacerbated urban dependence on cars.24 Among the largest and most publicized workers’ housing projects of the 1920s and 1930s in Berlin are the very long blocks of flats, some with usable roofs, of Gross Siedlung Siemensstadt (1929–1931), which is also a UNESCO Site. These flats, characterized by sharp-edged “pure” prismatic shapes and by the stark contrasts between dark shadows and seemingly paper-thin white walls, were built from the landscaped master plan of the German Expressionist architect Hans Scharoun by seven members of the Ring, including Otto Bartning, Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, Rudolph Henning, and Fred Forbat. During the 1932 New

York Museum of Modern Art show, when Johnson and Hitchcock canonized the personal, German Modernist aesthetics of Taut, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, and others as the International Style, they became Modernism’s first starchitects.25 It is difficult to overemphasize the extent to which anything of the past, tradition, and history was taboo to these heroes. Wanting to be expressive of the Zeitgeist, they strove to achieve atemporality through “pure” cubist form. While eliminating ornament as “criminal,” they sought the technological expression of form-follows-function. Mendelsohn explained that an image of function was created by “functional dynamics,” the “expression in movement” of the forces inherent in building materials “in a free play between form and its postulates of purpose, material, and construction.” To Mendelsohn, a newspaper building, for example, would not reflect its cause—the creative, political, cultural, intellectual, and commercial spirit of the paper. Instead, it would distill the tempo of modern life by expressing a material effect—the mechanical press inside.26

15

1920s workers’ housing in Germany. (left) Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner, Gross Siedlung Hufeisen (Horseshoe), Berlin-Britz, 1925-1926, 1930. (right) Gross Siedlung Siemensstadt (19291931) apartment blocks.

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Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna, Ehn (1927).

Hufeisen Siedlung (Horseshoe Estate) in Berlin-Britz (1925–1926), one of the four Modernist Berlin World Heritage Sites that Taut designed, was named for its curved 350-meter-long central building surrounded by town houses. Composed of housing blocks around a pond, the central building contained convenience shopping, community facilities, a restaurant, and a café. To Taut, its “pure” shapes and dominant white surfaces symbolized a new social order. Simultaneously, its 1,285 flats and 679 terraced houses, each with a garden and a small terrace, demonstrate the period’s design styles, large-scale urban concepts, and a “rural urban” sensibility. The colossal Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna (1926–1930), by city planner Karl Ehn (1884–1957), was among the best-known worker housing projects, and considered

more progressive than other such projects in Germany or England. It was established with the goal of applying progressive urban planning to provide a high standard of living to the new cooperative egalitarian society. At 3,300 feet (1,000 m) long and with an area of nearly 1.7 million square feet (156,000 m²), Karl Marx-Hof held 1,382 apartments of 320–645 square feet (30–60 m²) each and was called the Ringstraße des Proletariats. It was designed for a population of about five thousand. Eighty percent of the site was left open for play areas and gardens. Amenities included laundries, baths, kindergartens, a library, clinics, and offices. During the 1934 February Uprising of the Austrian Civil War, socialist insurgents barricaded themselves inside the compound while the Austrian Army, police, and fascist paramilitary bombarded the worker families into submission.27

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Perhaps the high point of Der Ring was the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition of 1927, the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart. Advertised as a prototype of future workers’ housing and funded by the Socialist Weimar Republic as a showcase of International Style, its neat white prismatic buildings were designed by seventeen mostly German-speaking European architects. Comprising sixty dwellings, the twenty-one buildings consisted of terraced and detached houses and apartment buildings. They featured usable roofs, horizontal-band windows, open-plan interiors, and a level of prefabrication that enabled their construction in five months. Bruno Taut’s entry was the smallest, and it was expressionistically colorful. Ironically, the customized construction and

17

furnishings of these houses were far outside a normal worker’s budget. The Weißenhofsiedlung represented the triumph of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Romantic beliefs of the Ring members in the primacy of economics, function, and rationalization. Mies van der Rohe organized the exhibition, selected the participating architects, and oversaw construction. Ironically, although he made sure his Jewish nemesis Mendelsohn—at the time best known internationally as the leader of Modernism—was not included, the overall look is Mendelsohnian. Notably, the two prime sites and by far the largest budget went to a French-Swiss watchmaker, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, also known as Le Corbusier. The Weißenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart, 1927. (top left) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. (right) Le Corbusier. (bottom left) Hans Scharoun.

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LE CORBUSIER, CIAM, BRASÍLIA, AND PRUITT-IGOE Few architects ever worked as diligently to become the most well-known and influential architect and planner of their time as Le Corbusier. With his architectural career slow to take off in 1922, he experimented with everything he could think of. He soon focused on urbanism, having been notably influenced by the French planner Tony Garnier’s (1869–1948) utopian Cité Industrielle (1901) for thirty-five thousand inhabitants. Located between a river and a mountain to facilitate hydroelectric power, the Cité Industrielle had use-segregated industrial, civic, residential, health, and entertainment zones. As a socialist creation, it had no churches, government institutions, law courts, prisons, police stations, or army barracks.28 Le Corbusier’ first foray into urban planning was a utopian radial-plan city for three million inhabitants, which he named Ville contemporaine (Contemporary City). Hoping that politically minded French industrialists familiar with Ford’s assembly line efficiency strategies would invest in his scheme, Le Corbusier proposed that management would live and work in a central group of sixty-story glass-clad towers set in large parks, while the proletariat would live in lower, multistory stepped blocks on the periphery. Glorifying cars, he segregated pedestrian circulation from roadways and positioned a highway interchange, layered with bus and train depots and topped by an airfield, at the center of the city.29 But the industrialists ignored him, and in 1924 Le Corbusier turned to a model whereby workers’ syndicates owned and managed industries and housing was assigned according to family size, not economic position. Rejecting the radial plan for a linear one, Le Corbusier adopted the theories of Arturo Soria y Mata’s (1844– 1920) Ciudad Lineal. Composed along an “optimal line” such as a river, this linear city had parallel urban zones along its length. It had segregated zones for railways, production, business, science, education, residences, social institutions, and children’s spaces. It had green buffers and an agricultural zone with gardens and state-run farms. To control its growth linearly rather than through

radial sprawl, the linear city replaced the traditional idea of the city as a center. Christening his plan Ville radieuse (Radiant City), Le Corbusier modeled the zones on a Renaissance-style plan based on the abstract shape of the human body, with head, spine, arms, and legs. Named Plan Voisin for the industrialist financing his work, Le Corbusier re-­ exhibited the plan in 1925. It proposed to bulldoze central Paris north of the Seine and replace it with the sixty-story towers. Le Corbusier eventually published his urban planning ideas in La ville radieuse (1935), which maintained his idea of high-rise blocks. This time, however, he staggered and lifted them off the ground on pilotis (pillars or stilts) and added terraces and running tracks on their roofs.30 To propagate his ideas, Le Corbusier, the historian Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968), and twenty-eight other European architects convened the hugely influential Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM; International Congress of Modern Architecture) in 1928. With the firm objective of spreading Modernist principles, the list of CIAM attendees was a who’s who of first- and second-generation Modernists. Seeking to wield architecture and planning as economic and political tools, they Romantically asserted that a man-made paradise was being created by avant-garde planners. From the belief that society and architects must rationalize construction methods, embrace new technologies, and strive for greater efficiency through assembly-line industrialization of construction, CIAM relentlessly promoted the concept of the so-called functional city. It uncompromisingly guided urbanism away from traditional modes and ensured that the “chaotic” streets, shops, and houses of traditional urban fabric were abolished by collective and methodical policy. CIAM’s proponents believed that urban social problems could be resolved by strict segregation of uses, cars, and pedestrians and that the distribution of people in tall, widely spaced apartment blocks liberated the ground plane for large “green zones.” With strict zoning adopted as its core goal, CIAM’s dogma appears in the 1933 Athens Charter. It prescribed street widths to accommodate high-speed cars and the razing of historic monuments because their existence “degraded” the modern lifestyle.31

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Le Corbusier and CIAM’s brutal influence. (left) Le Corbusier, Unité d’habitation, Marseilles, 1952. (right) Boston City Hall.

(left) Esplanade, Brasília. (right) Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York.

Notably, CIAM never asked what the purpose of cities is. With its understanding of cities limited to so-called function, it made no mention of genius loci, of culture, or of community aspiration. It considered beautiful buildings to be “pompous relics” that “complicate traffic,” and it posited that using past building styles had “disastrous consequences.” CIAM proponents claimed everything that came before as useless. To them, the world was a tabula rasa, and they worked vigorously to eradicate anything traditional from the toolkit of architects. While elitist and authoritarian if not fascist in their pronouncements, they undertook Le Corbusier’s hypocritically self-aggrandizing style war. Modernists neatly forgot that the classical styles emerged under Greek democracy, that medieval cathedrals were built by free people, and that Renaissance masterpieces were created by well-paid craftsmen in a free-thinking milieu. They politicized their style war, claiming that using traditional styles was unethical because they emerged under authoritarian regimes.

The result was that, while the charter states that everything should relate to the human scale, Modernist design and planning produce exactly the opposite qualities in urban fabric and architecture. Considering traditional street patterns irrational, the charter promoted multilevel city-center freeways and interchanges. It elevated traffic engineers to the throne of urbanism and encouraged planners to forget how to make harmonious, livable environments. Inexplicably, the charter never mentioned public transportation. Education being what it is, few students are made to read the charter, let alone criticize it. University graduates consequently hold unexamined its core principles, which have taken a fundamentalist grip on the profession. The Athens Charter and its stylistic manifesto—a call to knock out all the charm from a town and make sure it never came back—are still at the heart of planning.32 By the mid-1950s, the official acceptance of Modernism was stronger than ever. To engage aesthetic and cultural elements in Modernist ideology, “sensitive”

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British planners, such as Alison and Peter Smithson, and culturally “aware” Dutch members, such as Aldo van Eyck and Jacob B. Bakema, invented Brutalism and Structuralism. Dysfunctional Brutalist concrete and brick buildings were erected everywhere, and the credo of industrializing construction produced mechanistic excesses like the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Arriving hand-in-glove with the destruction of Les Halles, it paved the way for the hostile urban landscapes its practitioners defend and the system failures typified in the buildings of I. M. Pei and others.33 For Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter culminated in the design and construction of a series of Unité d’habitation that embodied his previously developed ideas. The first, an eighteen-story-high north-south–oriented block set in a Marseilles park (1945–1952), had on levels seven and eight public “streets” with shops, offices, and a hotel. On the roof were a nursery school, a running track, and a pool. Even before its completion, it influenced CIAM members. From England to Japan, thousands of units in five-, ten-, twelve-, and twenty-story Unité-style blocks were set in parkland. They ignored local street patterns, featuring instead elevated-access “streets in the air” wide Pruitt-Igoe demolition, 1972.

enough for bicycles and milk vans. Some are now listed for their “special architectural interest.” In accordance with CIAM ideals for the functional city, Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center twin towers, built the Pruitt-Igoe housing scheme in St. Louis between 1954 and 1956—famous because living conditions in it began to decline right after its completion. The lack of maintenance and regular breakdown of elevators attracted muggers to stairwells and corridors, making the complex internationally infamous for its poverty, segregation, and crime. Brasília’s planner Lucio Costa was also faithful to CIAM’s ideas of zoning and green spaces. But even the city’s singular starchitect, Oscar Niemeyer, warned in 1958 that the sculptural utopian dream could not be fulfilled without society reorganizing to be able to live in it.34 At its inauguration, Brasília was branded an Orwellian, Kafkaesque nightmare. Copying its design, the complex of state office buildings at Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York (1959–1976), loom menacingly from their elevated stone podium, obliterating all vestiges of the existing site. Boston’s Government Center (1968) exemplifies the “charm” of Brutalist buildings worldwide.

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Niemeyer’s and other Modernists’ reason for their designs to this day is that you had “never seen anything like it before”—that they were unrecognizably foreign, perceptually alien.35 But while a notion like that may qualify as “art,” Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis exemplified the results of unethically victimizing unwitting communities with vast, untested schemes. When the first of the thirty-three buildings of this icon of urban renewal and planning failure was demolished on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m., Charles Jencks proclaimed it the Death of Modern Architecture. But as at the end of a horror film, the Modernist specter seems to repeatedly rise to life.36 Objecting to the increased use of English during CIAM meetings, Le Corbusier left the organization in 1955, and in 1959 it disbanded. Nonetheless, the application of its principles destroyed more good traditional urban fabric in Europe than World War II itself. It decimated the cities of the United States without the excuse of a single bomb. This prescription for a dysfunctional, car-dominated urban environment is at the base of contemporary planning and architecture. It kowtows to traffic planners and imposes strange forms regardless of long-term cost. It utterly denies authentic, durable, beautiful urbanism.37

RAYMOND UNWIN, HEGEMANN AND PEETS, AND PIERRE LAVEDAN Inspired by the ideas of the pioneer urban planning theorist Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928), the English initially took an approach that differed from CIAM’s. Howard criticized pre–World War I industrial cities for their poverty, overcrowding, low wages, dirty alleys, lack of drainage, poor ventilation, toxic dust, gasses, infectious disease, and lack of contact with nature. To reverse the large-scale migration of people to overpopulated cities from rural areas and small towns, Howard’s influential and only book, Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902; originally To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform, 1898), proposed networks of limited size, rail-based suburban towns: garden cities. They were to be surrounded by rural park and agricultural land unavailable to builders—that is, country.38

Rather than dormitory suburbs, garden cities were to be self-sufficient entities with populations of thirty-two thousand people on about six thousand acres. Within, they were to have open spaces, public parks, and 120-foot-wide boulevards connecting their centers. Because they were ringed by permanent countryside, when a garden city reached full population, another was to be developed away from it. Envisaged as hierarchical satellites of a central city of fifty thousand, in the ensuing decades, planned, self-contained garden cities consisting of residences and industry and surrounded by agriculture and parks were built worldwide. In 1903, the engineer Raymond Unwin (1863–1940) drew up master plans for the first two garden cities, Letchworth and Welwyn, located some forty miles from London. Both were based on rail connections, and both had extensive areas surrounding them devoted to agriculture.39 Unwin became a leading figure of the garden city movement, and in 1909 he collected the lessons he had learned into a treatise titled Town Planning in Practice. Treading the line between Romantic and Modernist, the book is a compendium of images, photographs, plans, drawings, and maps analyzing numerous towns in Europe and the United States. It contains garden city design theory, and it shows the application of Ebenezer Howard’s ideas along with those of Camillo Sitte and William Morris. To this day, neotraditionalist planners regard Town Planning in Practice as a bible.40 To Unwin, cities were built not only on economic impulse but, to quote Aristotle, for “the common life for the noble end.” Urban design and planning were for him civic arts expressing civic life, based on the identification of a town’s individuality and personality, and touched by both formal and informal beauty. He cited William Lethaby’s “Art is the well-doing of what needs doing.” Since, as Unwin held, “the human mind wants to make sense of its location and categorize it accurately,” he initiated his process of planning towns with their boundaries and approaches, clearly delineating town and country for their functional identities. He discussed how to design centers and roads, to size

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The inspiration for Unwin’s English towns is exemplified by Hitchin near Letchworth. (top left) Street view toward the church, Hitchin.

(right) Classic street, Hitchin. (middle left) Plaza with clock, Hitchin.

Lutyens’s sketch showing the arrangement of buildings on the Central Place of Hampstead Garden Suburb, in Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice.

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lots, to space buildings, and to ensure that the variety of buildings was dominated by the harmony of the whole. His hope was that “something of beauty may be restored to town life.”41 Unwin observed that in ancient times, when towns were laid out as a whole, the plans followed simple rectangular lines and worked from a location’s sense of place, an advanced English sensitivity. Appreciating the fact that reasonable towns had a maximum size, Unwin distinguished new towns and suburbs by means of country, warning that the attempt to combine the charm of both in suburbs would lead to the destruction of both. Significantly, Unwin wrote of the town planner as a visionary with the duty to study and interpret a town, its site, its people, and their requirements. Its streets, sites, buildings, and infrastructure were to mix artistic expression with practical needs. According to Unwin, the planner seeking to find artistic expression for a town did not impose a preconceived or personal aesthetic, as Le Corbusier and his followers did. Neither did Unwin abdicate urban design to a mythical Volkswille. But he did fashionably follow Sitte’s lead in looking to picturesque medieval cities for inspiration, and his work reflected the Romantic Arts and Crafts movement’s bias for neomedieval styles. Although inspired by local precedent—and indeed, the first garden cities are very English in character— they were neither an original nor a native type of urban fabric. The design and construction of Howard and Unwin’s garden cities were predated by company towns, model villages built for employees prior to World War I. These are exemplified by Bournville near Birmingham (Cadbury Chocolate Works, 1893) and Port Sunlight near Liverpool (Lever Brothers, 1899). From these model villages, which were infused with the architectural and landscape values of the Arts and Crafts movement, Howard and Unwin took their designs. Blocks of houses designed by different architects were individualized through their forms and detailing. Half-timbering, carved woodwork and masonry, ornamental plaster work, picturesque chimneys, and leaded glazing were adopted. Even the crescent with radiating streets, a motif Unwin used at Welwyn, originated in the space around the church in Port Sunlight. In fact,

Unwin’s impact was so strong that scarcely a New Urbanist plan lacks this icon.42 The problem is that garden cities are not cities, but suburbs, and Unwin, a civil engineer, realized he was building not cities but towns. Technically aware of traffic planning, he installed the United Kingdom’s first roundabout in Letchworth in 1909. But while Unwin used predominantly village architecture to create his towns, the main public spaces he designed in their fabric applied dimensions driven by an urban consciousness. Thus, garden city village centers, streets, and greenswards are too big for towns and may belong more in cities. Unwin was not a classic method architect and perhaps did not delve deeply enough into street proportions or the impact of architecture on urban experience. In Letchworth, the first garden city, the main commercial street, Station Road, is sixty feet wide (18.5 m), far too broad for the low heights of its buildings. The Howardsgate-Parkway complex, Welwyn’s main urban space, is two hundred feet wide (60 m), the same width as the classic plan Parque Central in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. But in the latter, the cornice is three tall classic stories high, while at Welwyn it is only two. Unwin failed to realize that Sittean enclosure occurs not only in plan but also in the height of the surrounding buildings and the degree of their cornices’ articulation. In contrast, the capable architects of Port Sunlight were versed in the classical method and, in general, nineteenth-century row houses were as well or better built than the garden city units. Originating in authentic classic planning, their designs have more coherence and beauty than Unwin’s. In accordance with their worst fears, Howard and Unwin’s attempt to combine the best of town and country living resulted in an oddly sparse and repetitive hybrid that lacks the scalar variety found in classic urban fabric and typifies Modernist town planning and sprawl suburbs alike. When, in 1919, Unwin was appointed chief architect to the Ministry of Health, a post that evolved into the chief technical officer for housing and town planning, he betrayed both Sitte and Howard. Unwin broke from the traditional garden city concept and proposed that new developments should be conjoined satellites rather than freestanding towns.43

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The Garden City concept: Port Sunlight, Letchworth, and Welwyn. The welcoming row of houses across from the train station, Port Sunlight, includes a corner pub.

(left) Port Sunlight includes allées of trees and richly landscaped linear parks. (right) Brick duplex, Letchworth.

(right) Station Road, Letchworth (left) Howardsgate, Welwyn, looking toward Coronation Fountain

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Although many of the main features of contemporary urbanism owe their origins to Letchworth Garden City, when Modernist architecture is applied to Unwin’s model, the effect is not charming. Unwin, a firm advocate for local styles, urged designers and public officials to work with the unique personality of a town or neighborhood, everything that International Style practitioners sought to replace. Ignoring the idea that the architecture of buildings creates the public space, they came to view Unwin’s text as irrelevant and outdated. But authors of form-based codes, who consider their work an extension of Unwin’s urban guidelines, are equally mistaken. Their method does not appear to replace even the watered-down authenticity from which Unwin worked. Furthermore, by recommending extensive analyses from a desire to formulate a “scientific” method, Unwin diluted his holistic approach and opened the door to the expensive and misguided planning offered today. In a way, Unwin foresaw this. Frequently in Town Planning in Practice, he warns against haphazard design, over-complicated plans, the unconsidered applicability of his ideas, and the limitations of use-based zoning. On the other side of the Atlantic, two planners had similar sensibilities to those of Unwin. One was the antifascist German-American city planner, architecture editor, and critic Werner Hegemann (1881–1936). The other was the Harvard-trained, American-German Milwaukee landscape architect Elbert Peets (1886–1968). Disciples of both Sitte and Howard, in 1922 they published a “thesaurus” of city planning, The American Vitruvius: An Architect’s Handbook of Civic Art.44 Among the earliest apologies for Camillo Sitte in the United States, The American Vitruvius discussed European plaza and court design as well as the revival of civic art in American towns, university campuses, world’s fairs, skyscrapers, park systems, and zoning. Commenting on numerous precedents that underpin the study of urban design to this day, they proposed that public areas needed to be artfully shaped into coherent fabric with unified city plans, urban landscaping, and architectural street design. In the manner of art historians, Hegemann and Peets identified geometric “rules” regarding the dimensions of plazas and the corresponding heights of structures,

dutifully enforcing the Sittean notion of enclosure. But despite twelve hundred drawings and images, the book fails to mention that architecture creates the experience of an urban space. Moreover, Hegemann and Peets favored curved roads, opposed the baroque planning of Washington, DC, and disapproved of large open spaces like the National Mall. They panned the Lincoln Memorial for “impersonal monumentality,” and they criticized Olmsted’s Central Park in New York for being too large. Meanwhile in Paris, Pierre Lavedan (1885–1982) paralleled Unwin’s and Hegemann and Peets’s efforts. In the richly illustrated and encyclopedic Histoire de l’urbanisme, he analytically documented the history and development of urbanism. The first part of the Histoire (1926) collected and classified city plans from antiquity to the Middle Ages. It distinguished between the “spontaneous” urbanism of kasbah-like plans and “planned” cities, particularly sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, which Lavedan considered more significant.45 Simultaneously, Lavedan published a secondary thesis, Qu’est-ce que l’urbanisme? (What Is Urbanism?), in which he identified the history of urban architecture as a unique part of the general history of art. In it, he defined urban planning as consisting of city layouts as well as sociological, economic, and geographic factors. Lavedan determined that radial plans were more progressive and grid plans “inferior,” supposedly corresponding to rudimentary or even primitive civilizations.46 The second volume of the Histoire (1941) covered from the Renaissance to modern times. It also advocated for radial plans, and the ubiquitous ring roads and beltways worldwide attest to its impact. In 1940, Lavedan was appointed director of the Paris Institute of Urban Planning, where he focused on training the future architectural elite in the skills of urban planning and historic preservation. Notably, Lavedan strongly objected to proposals by Le Corbusier.47 The third part of the Histoire (1952) covered the years from the reign of Napoleon to the Second World War. It critiqued the evils of nineteenth- and twentieth-century urbanism and became an urban planning textbook. But as classical forms became heretical under Modernism, Lavedan attempted to stay relevant. In a complete break

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Elbert Peets’s streets of houses in Greendale, Wisconsin, were an Americanized version of Unwin’s designs in Letchworth.

with his earlier approach, and toeing the Modernist line, Lavedan declared that past doctrines were immaterial, and he shifted his focus to conceptual planning alone. Now claiming that urbanism was unrelated to its architecture, Lavedan eliminated the planners’ role in shaping urban space, favoring bureaucratic control of the planning process and its professional executors. Ultimately, Lavedan’s life work represents conflicting twentieth-century tendencies. His rejection of the classical city may be said to have helped spawn the confusion and fragmentation of the planning field today.48 As for Hegemann, he wound up a tragic intermediary between architects on both sides of the Atlantic. Ostensibly, his Anglo-American values and German culture might have served him well for the decade he worked in Berlin as the editor of the international architectural journal Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst (Wasmuth’s Monthly Journal of Architecture and Urbanism). But Hegemann was absent from Europe during the inception of the Neue Sachlichkeit, and he was not part of that clique in Berlin or the CIAM clique in Paris. An unrepentant socialist, Hegemann fled Germany in 1933, and the ultimate effort to influence urbanism in the face of Modernist planning, The American Vitruvius, was soon marginalized. A bright point in his career is his proposed 1931 master plan for Buenos Aires, which

predates and is more comprehensive than Le Corbusier’s 1937 effort.49 But while the Nazi regime ironically adopted Hegemann’s ideas on civic art, Modernists, offended by his incisive, nonconformist critiques, accused Hegemann of fascism. Peets built Resettlement Administration projects during the Depression, including three greenbelt cities, in which he sensitively rendered both urban fabric and buildings. Providing work and affordable housing, the original greenbelt towns—Greendale, Wisconsin; Greenbelt, Maryland, near Washington, DC; and Greenhills, Ohio—served as innovative urban planning laboratories. Greendale, Wisconsin, included 572 living units with space for lawns and gardens, a village hall, a tavern, a movie theater, a fire station, a newspaper office, schools, a cooperative market, and several businesses. The central green space of the town terminates in a town hall based on the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, Virginia.50 But like Unwin, Hegemann and Peets failed to foresee the impact of cars on urban space. They could not foretell the appearance of complicit automobile-based plans such as Le Corbusier’s and, even more so, Norman Bel Geddes’s 1939 New York World’s Fair Futurama. In contrast, when the car became the primary mode of transportation after World War I, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870–1957), designed the first car-oriented suburb,

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Palos Verdes in Southern California, not based on garden city principles but following the experiential paradigm of the eighteenth-century English park.

THE ENGLISH PARK AS PARADIGM FOR THE CAR SUBURB Drawing inspiration from the pastoral landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, eighteenth-century English parks presented an idealized view of nature. They usually included a lake, sweeps of gently rolling lawns, groves of trees, and the picturesque architecture of classical temples, Gothic ruins, and bridges. They had been invented by the landscape designers William Kent (1685–1748) and Charles Bridgeman (1690–1738) for the large country estates of wealthy English merchants, classically educated patrons of the arts. Kent and Bridgeman echoed in their gardens the Roman ruins and Italian landscapes these clients had seen on their grand tours to Italy. Kent’s gardens complemented the Palladian architecture of the houses he built. Bridgeman, the royal gardener for Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark, provided botanical expertise.51 The most influential figure in later English landscape design, Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716–1783), began his career as a gardener to Bridgeman, then succeeded Kent in 1748. Seeking to create an ideal landscape out of the English countryside, Brown, who designed 170 gardens, replaced structures, alleys, and parterres close to houses with rolling lawns and expansive views of isolated stands of trees. To create the illusion that rivers flowed through his gardens, he created artificial lakes and transformed streams or springs with dams and canals. In these parks, monuments frame one another and enhance cross-views in the panorama.52 At Stowe, Buckinghamshire (1731–1748), William Kent remade the lake in a natural shape and created a circuit via which visitors could tour the picturesque landscape. Along the circuit, he included a Palladian bridge, a temple of Venus in the form of a Palladian villa, a temple of British worthies with statues of British heroes, and a temple of modern virtues, deliberately left in ruins and containing a headless statue of the owner’s political

rival, Robert Walpole. The garden attracted many European visitors, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau. At Stourhead in Wiltshire (1741–1780), one of the first picturesque parks emulating the paintings of Claude Lorrain, a stream on the estate was dammed to create a lake. Around it are landscapes and architectural constructions, notably three temples by Henry Flitcroft (1697– 1769) that echoed, with quotations from the Aeneid, the different stages of Aeneas’s journey as related by Virgil. At Chatsworth in Derbyshire (late 1750s–1765), Capability Brown integrated the garden and the park with grass lawns rolling up to the house, a natural-looking lake, picturesque tree planting, and carriage drives laid out to provide carefully planned views. In 1794, Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price criticized Brown’s designs as bland and unnatural, championing instead designs composed according to picturesque landscape painting theory, with a fore-, middle-, and background. Humphry Repton (1752–1818), the last great eighteenth-century English landscape designer, reintroduced the foreground terraces, balustrades, trellises, and flower gardens around houses, which became common practice in the nineteenth century. For the middle ground, he created parkland of a type similar to Brown’s. These “natural” character backgrounds in which Repton nestled tenants’ villages and drew long views greatly influenced Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., who passed that sensibility down to his sons and employees. Notably, the Olmsteds were aware of the work of Joseph Paxton (1803–1865), at Chatsworth and elsewhere, and the work of Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932), Sir Edwin Lutyens’s early mentor.53 When a consortium of east-coast investors led by Frank Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, sought in 1914 to subdivide and landscape twenty-five square miles on the Palos Verdes Peninsula near Los Angeles, California, they commissioned the Olmsted brothers. The land was originally the coastal homeland of the Tongva-Gabrieliño Indians. As an Alta California Mexican land grant, it had primarily been a cattle ranch. It served as a whaling station in the mid-nineteenth century, and after 1882, its Anglo owners leased it to Japanese farmers. The place reminded Vanderlip of his beloved Sorrentine Peninsula and Amalfi Drive in Italy.

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Inspiration from English parks. (top) Lake and Grand Bridge, Blenheim. (middle right) Palladian Bridge, Stowe, 1742. (bottom right) View of Chatsworth from the Cascade House, Thomas Archer, 1703. (left) Pantheon, Stourhead, Henry Flitcroft, 1753.

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(top left) Slope, maze, and background, Chatsworth, Denis Fisher, 1962. (top right) Steps at the base of the Cascade, 1740s, Chatsworth. (bottom right) Rock garden lake, Chatsworth, Joseph Paxton, c. 1823. (bottom left) Path, Munstead Wood, Gertrude Jekyll, c. 1900.

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Palos Verdes, California. (top) Lunada Bay Plaza advertisement, 1920s.

(left) The road development on Palos Verdes Peninsula in 1927. (right) Malaga Cove Plaza by Webber, Stanton and Spaulding, Architects.

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The Olmsteds had a lot of experience in California, including Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Riverside. The project stalled during World War I, and in 1921 Vanderlip enticed Edward Gardner Lewis, a flamboyant and controversial promoter and political activist, to take over the project. Lewis had previously founded two utopian colonies, and at Palos Verdes he built the sewers, water mains, roads, landscaping, parks, and a golf course. But, lacking the capital to purchase the development outright, Lewis went bankrupt, and the land reverted to Vanderlip. The Palos Verdes master plan included three village centers, a street system, zoning, lot sizes, and landscaping. It dedicated a quarter of the land to permanent undeveloped open space, giving the subdivision its unique rural characteristic as well as its scenic roadways, green hillsides, and stands of eucalyptus, pepper, and coral trees. It was a visionary plan. One thousand acres were set aside for the UCLA campus, and a monorail was proposed to connect it directly to downtown Los Angeles. Ultimately, the monorail never materialized, and the campus was located in Westwood.54 However, the English park concept guaranteed that the owners, driving along the streets to their “manors,” could experience the entire picturesque estate as their own. The business centers were cast as Mediterranean villages, and amenities included a country club, a yacht club, an artisan village, and an inn. To the developers and no doubt their clients, the Spanish revival architecture selected was no less significant than the subdivision plan. The suburban population in North America exploded at that time, and commuting by car dramatically accelerated. But as people increasingly lived away from cities and towns, the glorious English park car suburb notion morphed into monocultural tract housing. The houses were placed on larger lots with little sense of community and no common parks or village centers. Schools were marooned so remotely that children could not walk or bike to them. Federal Housing Authority loans, massive infrastructure investments, and zoning laws that segregated extensive, exclusively residential zones stimulated ever-degraded versions of the English park model.55

In the ensuing decades, returning veterans settled in suburbs in droves, while African Americans moved en masse to northern cities in search of jobs and education. Race riots in large cities further stimulated white suburban migration, followed by companies relocating their offices to the suburbs. In the growth of progressively lower-density suburbs, village centers turned inside-out to become car-dependent strip shopping malls. Some planners attempted to combine the best of both worlds in “new towns,” separated from cities by “green belts.” But the buildings they scattered in the green matrix did not result in good suburban villages.56 To Sitte, Unwin, Hegemann, and Peets, traditional architecture was implicit, and the International Style was not an option. Ebenezer Howard modeled his train-reliant analytic diagrams on the genuinely organic array of English countryside villages. But planners failed to see that his schemes were only diagrams, not actual plans. Olmsted’s harmonic dialogue between man and nature degraded into villageless subdivisions, while “market-driven efficiency”—read “greed”—resulted in the packing of small lots on cul-de-sacs. In the end, Scheerbart’s techno-utopianism justified Modernist CIAM devotees and industrialized housing developers in plopping down objects in landscapes, segregating pedestrians from cars, and making public transportation in the Unites States a welfare service for non–car owners. Techno-heroic faith in technology now drove planning, which assumed that plans were independent of architecture. More than any other document, The Athens Charter reduced the experience of the city to functional efficiency. It promoted zoning, which is both a cause and an effect of things wrong with cities today. Without common formal principles, planners designed arbitrary, inauthentic urbanisms and suburbs which lack community. Today, every place in America looks increasingly the same. The paradigms of Modernist urbanism—the Olmstedian car suburb, garden cities, Le Corbusier’s initiatives, and German workers’ housing—so failed that mid-twentieth-century criticism of them led to a broad discussion regarding the structure and shape of cities and what constituted a successful urban experience.

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By the 1960s, car suburbs and “urban renewal” had ravaged US and European cities. Many planners observed that Modernism’s clean lines and lack of human scale correlated with high crime rates and social problems in cities. Modernism, they realized, was failing to deliver on its promise. Since then, urban designers have repeatedly attempted to restore urban equilibrium by adding “patches” to flawed theoretic frameworks. But Modernist urban design and planning are analytical, not holistic. Abstractions such as “incrementalism,” “contextualism,” and “architectural integration” could address limited social, experiential, or formal problems of urbanism, but they failed to offer a genuinely comprehensive manner by which to understand cities. None truly improved cities’ long-term functionality, attractiveness, or sustainability. This chapter reviews the well-intentioned contributions of the midcentury figures Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and Kevin Lynch; the misunderstood townscapes of Gordon Cullen; the questionable values of Robert Venturi; and how Christopher Alexander tried to reinvent architecture and urbanism from scratch. It touches on Aldo Rossi’s and Edmund Bacon’s ideas of city design and discusses “space syntax,” “collage cities,” “postmodernism,” and proposals to segregate pedestrians and promote bicycles to make cities “people friendly.” It reveals the strange thinking behind “building too big,” addresses the alien notion of “parametricism,” and reports on New Urbanism. While reading this chapter, the reader might observe how fervently Modernism holds to its belief in the Zeitgeist and purposely charmless architecture. It shows how the planning profession continues to study traditional precedents as ideal models while it trains its devotees to be insensate to the experience, humanist values, and cultural content of those places.

JANE JACOBS AND LEWIS MUMFORD Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) understood that cities had organized complexity interrelated into an organic whole. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) has been cited in the last six decades as a planners’ touchstone. Its manifesto supports human-scaled neighborhoods, mixed uses, income diversity, access to public transit, and street life. Jacobs recognized that buildings are what make up cities, and she criticized sprawl. She identified the pseudoscience of planning as a “bog of intellectual misconceptions.” She knew that “big cities need real countryside close by,” and she saw in residents the best experts on their cities. Jacobs introduced terms like “social capital,” “mixed use,” “eyes on the street,” and the “ballet of the sidewalk.”1 Jacobs identified contemporary planning’s heavy-handedness and showed that its abstract jargon and plans could not fully explain how we experience cities. Based on anecdotal lessons from living in New York City’s Greenwich Village, The Death and Life of Great American Cities challenged planning, advocated the abolition of zoning laws, and promoted the restoration of free markets in contrast with single-use neighborhoods. Criticizing Le Corbusier’s utopia and observing Robert Moses’s dictatorial complex, Jacobs noticed that the comprehensive plans of midcentury urban planners and engineers could not have better destroyed urban fabric if they had intended to.2 While Jacobs’s perspective was stimulating and fresh, she did not understand in what manner planning was a holistic discipline. And although her ideas may be applicable to neighborhoods, they do not scale for cities or their infrastructure. She seemed to miss the essence of what cities are. Indeed, Jacobs did not teach that every place should look like Greenwich Village, but some proponents of New Urbanism and smart growth interpreted her descriptions of neighborhoods as prescriptions. Nonetheless,

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simplistic interpretations of Death and Life serve neither those who oppose it nor those who claim to follow her. As Jacobs said, some of them seem to “create what they say they hate.”3 Crucially, Jacobs seemed to lack a good sense of both the ephemerality of “urban function” and the degree to which charming cobblestone streets and old buildings are genuinely cherished for themselves. Unavoidably locked into a material and social mindset “of her time,” Jacobs advocated the preservation of older buildings for their short-term economic value as affordable housing rather than for their intrinsic urban value: that they were well-built, good looking, and more sustainable than anything recent. She assumed urban knowledge somehow mysteriously resided with the inhabitants of a scene rather than any discipline. Perhaps Jacobs’s greatest error was to ignore the fact that in the long term, pretty buildings make pretty streets more so than do hot dog carts. She could foresee neither the Village gentrifying into a trendy shopping area nor its being vacated due to high rent. In the closing chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs proposed three “thought habits” for understanding cities: (1) focusing on “processes,” (2) inductively reasoning from particulars to generalizations, and (3) seeking “unaverage,” minute clues to reveal larger characteristics. While her idea that “processes are of the essence” is like saying that electric nerve impulses are what make a person, an approach that prioritizes particulars over general characteristics leaves the door open to the question, “So what’s her idea?”4 Jacobs theorized that the motivational origin of cities was agriculture and the exchange of goods. But while material trade may have pushed cultures beyond material sustenance, a lack of ideas is what brought civilizations down, making material exchange an effect, not a cause. An anecdotal quest for “unaverage” clues is not a basis for long-term urban frameworks. It might miss unforeseen opportunities such as those that naturally occur in the repurposing of good buildings. While good urbanism choreographs experience, not “use,” Jacobs’s approach inadvertently promotes tight functional fit for ephemeral uses.

Although The Death and Life of Great American Cities closes with statements such as, “Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties,” Jacobs’s incomplete narrative thrust citizens back into the arms of experts and produced unforeseen results such as moratoriums, citizen referendums, and neighborhood-versus-planner NIMBYism. While ostensibly rescuing the civic agenda, handing it back to the citizens, and encouraging them to participate in planning and overseeing the machinations of vested interests, her oft-quoted book is seldom read, and her slogans and urban legends are uncritically venerated. Jacobs’s name is brought up as an iconic sacred relic to endorse plans without understanding how they work holistically. Manhattan was also the alma mater of the American intellectual Lewis Mumford (1895–1990). Regarded as a leading twentieth-century authority on cities, Mumford largely agreed with Jacobs’s critique of planning. He called The Death and Life of Great American Cities “a fresh offshore breeze” that scattered “the foggy atmosphere of professional jargon.” But Mumford also panned it for its mingling of “sense and sentimentality, of mature judgments and schoolgirl howlers.” Mumford found Jacobs’s small-neighborhood focus incommensurate with the larger scales of urban planning. He found her statement that “a city cannot be a work of art” patently wrong. Mumford’s own book, The City in History, recorded the forms and functions of the city throughout the ages. In it, he tried to prophecy the future of cities and urban life from the understanding that their design and economic function relied on their organic relationships to the environment and to human spiritual values. He found that modern cities grow cancerously. Enveloping villages, small towns, and open land that once ensured their identity, the growth of modern cities reduced them to place names.5 Mumford observed that, while grid plans enabled even the most complex civic life, child-centric suburbia caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge. He foresaw the development of McMansions in which adults can wander dreamlike, like children, in overscale, perceptively distorted spaces that

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sacrifice reality to an immature worldview based on the pleasure principle. Fashion and built-in obsolescence, he noted, canceled the economies of machine production rather than producing leisure and durable wealth. In contemplating contemporary urban sprawl, Mumford perceived it echoing the sprawling Roman megalopolis, which ended in collapse. He expected contemporary cities to meet the same fate. Mumford identified how, once an economy was geared to expand, means rapidly turned into ends. He described how, in order to maintain output, industries favored by such expansion become devoted to the flow of consumer goods, which must soon be replaced because of their limited specifications or shoddy fabrication. He foresaw the Pandora’s box of mechanical marvels released by an ethos that would eventually absorb human purpose in automation and political correctness. For him, the 1970 World Trade Center towers might have portended a horizon of catastrophic dehumanization. One wonders what he would have thought of their destruction in 2001, or of the internet, social media, and hacking.

KEVIN LYNCH AND GORDON CULLEN Sixty-five years after its publication, The Image of the City, by the planner-academician Kevin Lynch, is still a core text for many. Supposedly explaining how we experience cities and urban form as we do, Lynch categorized their design in lengthy discussions of legibility, building the image, structure and identity, and imageability. He emerged with a theory that functionally reduced the experience of streets, neighborhoods, and plazas into five abstract components: Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, and Landmarks.6 Replacing the urban literacy of five thousand years with new jargon, Lynch reduced the term city into “a symbol of a complex society” and defined three components of a city’s “environmental image.” Identity recognized urban elements as separate entities. Structure was those elements’ relation to other objects and to individuals. Meaning was their practical and emotional value to observers. With similar good intentions, Lynch’s later Good City Form sought the connections between human

values and cities in even more abstract jargon, the cosmic, the ceremonial, the mechanistic, and the organic.7 Lynch’s abstraction and jargon failed to bridge the complexities of “objective” representations of space and individual “subjective” experiences of lived space. Adopting Lynch’s jargon justified planning’s retreat from historical aesthetic practice because it is “not of our time.” It validated the rejection of the pretty cities and towns we love for their cognitive mapping conflicts. “Discovering” that streets are important in towns, Lynch ignored their urban function of connecting people. As Sitte and Le Corbusier did, Lynch saw streets mainly in terms of mobility.8 It is easy to see that Lynch’s abstractions cannot lead to designs that give people emotional security or heighten everyday urban experience. Obviously, people orient themselves by means of simplified mental maps, and these differ from person to person, from gender to gender, and from culture to culture. So it should come as no surprise that Lynch’s jargon has found its greatest use in developing navigation programs for driverless cars. But outside computing, what is the point of discussing the mental mapping of urban environments as if they are on Mars? Lynch may not have been algorithmically wrong, and we may use GPSs today. But a bonobo in the forest is not lost. Lynch’s analyses of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City may be useful in a studio context, but they are counterproductive in community forums, as they relate nothing of the quality or character of an urban object or space. Little in his analysis is useful in guiding the synthesis of cities. And while planners today may know about paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks, they know little about plazas, train stations, and courthouses. Perhaps Lynch’s most glaring error was denying that “wayfinding,” “orientation,” “sense of space,” and “sense of place” are hardwired in humans. A slightly more useful approach was based on the concept of townscape, an extension of picturesque English landscape. The term was first used in the 1880s in the context of unspoiled English towns. From the early 1950s, Gordon Cullen (1914–1994) used it to define the visual art of town planning. He maintained that

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townscape was not the result of accident; rather, it described how planning converted a jumble into “order with variety.” The notion of townscape broke with Modernist thinking by emphasizing experience, urban character, and sensitivity to differentiated bits of a city. It assumed that the composition of a town’s physical elements generated experiential effects, and it posited that understanding these would enable one to objectively guide visual perceptions of the town and consequent interventions in it. It presaged the understanding of visual perception as a scanning of the environment and urban design as an “art of the ensemble.”9 Cullen contended that the visual perception of the built environment, urban form, and its content are not a collection of things but a holistic whole. While Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse presented a belief of how people operate in a city, Cullen’s townscape considered how people possess space. It accommodates a broad range of human needs and emotions—more than just sunlight, open space, and car travel. Making the experienced environment a basis for design, Cullen validated the human as meaningful, not just a unit that uses facilities and performs functions. Published extensively in the magazine Architectural Review, Cullen’s graphics greatly influenced urban designers. But less heeded were his emphases on reinforcing the genius loci of a place, the effects of motorways on the fabric of towns, and how large-scale development impacted fabric and eroded the character of towns. His critique of mindless suburban sprawl went unheeded entirely, as did his expanded notion of conservation, which included not only individual structures but groups of building and urban spaces as well. Cullen sought to correct the popular Sittean misconception that good townscape resulted from random historic accretion by recalling the extensive aesthetic controls that operated in medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque-era townscapes.10 Cullen elevated the concept of sequential vistas that observers encounter as they move through urban spaces. He identified design devices that cause people to interact emotionally with the built environment, and he wrote about how creating a place leads to its “canonization.” Cullen produced a notation system for evaluating physical environments, and he even devised

Gordon Cullen’s illustration styles became widely copied. Analytical drawing in the style of The Concise Townscape.

Civilia.

Gateway scenario.

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Port Grimaud. (left) Gate. (middle) Quay. (right) Residential plaza. (bottom) Canal.

a checklist for creating urban fabric that satisfies human needs, from physical safety to individual selffulfillment.11 Planners readily adopted Cullen’s jargon into their discourse, but not its authentic forms. They embraced Cullen’s deconstructivist town, Civilia, and lapped up the drama of its collaged photographs of Brutalist buildings, completely ignoring popular rejection of its horrific architecture. Tolerating only Modernist forms, their interpretation of townscape refused authenticity. They are still outraged at the most loyal invocation of Cullen’s townscape, Port Grimaud, a resort village located on the Bay of Saint-Tropez.12 There, in the 1960s, the French architect, developer, and urban planner François Spoerry (1912–1999) channeled the Giscle River marshes into nearly eight miles (12 km) of canals laced with gardens, colorful SaintTropez-style “fishermen’s houses,” and boat docks in the Venetian manner. This mainly traffic-free town is crossed by canals and populated with shops, restaurants, and small day- and night-markets.13 Spoerry did such a good job that at times people cannot distinguish that it is new. Yet despite proof to the contrary and the general lack of satisfaction with the outcomes of their own projects, dogmatic planners criticize the authentic stability, durability, and sustainability

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of Port Grimaud’s arches and cobbles as “fake.” Complaining about its image as a quiet Provençal village, they continue to laud the feral “cultural message” of Civilia’s concrete and glass.14 Although Cullen prompted environmental psychologists to study the effects of visual perception in townscapes and the ability of designers to provide satisfying environments, planners trying to follow his lead emerged with more Lynch-like jargon. Rapoport and Kantor presented hypotheses that such terms as ambiguity and visual nuance explained the need for visual complexity in urban environments. Trying to elevate the obvious instinct to seek shelter to an aesthetic response, Jay Appleton’s “Prospect Refuge Theory” proposed that the concept of place merely expressed the physiological need to hide from predators.15 As a veneer on a worldview that puts technology and machines in first place, Lynch’s, Rapaport’s, Kantor’s, and Appleton’s professional descendants generated notions of sustainability and cyclability. They argued that traditional townscapes are wrong because they adopt physical designs from long-gone eras when people walked and the majority of human contacts were face to face. But what else is there?16

LA TENDENZA, BACON, AND ROWE In Italy, where some of the finest traditional urbanism resides, a few architects did realize that buildings create the urban experience. Encountering wonderful spaces daily, they sought to enrich the sterile and dysfunctional products of the planning of the 1950s with a more local signature that better expressed urban memory and genius loci. Inspired by Pierre Lavedan’s analytical method, the architect, planner, and influential Rome University lecturer Saverio Muratori (1910–1973) developed a critical framework explaining how urban form was created and transformed. In the search for laws governing urban time-space, he linked the idea of urban fabric to that of the building types in it.17 Through analyses of Venice and Rome (1960, 1963), Muratori determined that architectural types were embodied in the fabric, creating an “urban organism”

perceived through its “operational history.” His analyses inspired a heterogeneous group: the architect and planner Carlo Aymonino (1926–2010), his junior partner Aldo Rossi (1931–1997), the architect Giorgio Grassi (1935–), the visionary draftsman and utopian painter Massimo Scolari (1943–), the Marxist historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994), and the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan (1909–1992). Their dialogue became a movement, the Italian Tendenza. In its journals, Casabella and Controspazio, the Tendenza proposed an autonomous, internalized urban and typological process. It was a counterproposal to the Modernist dogma of a universal language “sent from above.”18 Rossi knew that cities had souls. His influential text, The Architecture of the City, is partly a protest against functionalism, partly an attempt to restore architectural craft as a focus of study, and partly an analysis of the rules and forms of the city’s construction. Rossi adopted the idea that urban types replaced urban functions. He observed that, as organic parts of the whole, urban forms condensed and reflected the meanings and characteristics of human living by way of buildings. According to him, buildings contributed to a city’s soul, personality, character, and even its genius loci.19 Rossi’s critique focused on the neglect and destruction of the city as a repository of urban memory. He posited that monuments gave cities their structure and that, to retain urban memory, urban artifacts had to be durable. In analyzing the rules and forms of urban development, Rossi suggested that architectural style was connected to building types. According to him, abbey churches represented the Romanesque, civic cathedrals the Gothic, and airports Modernism. The high point of La Tendenza was the fifteenth Milan Triennale, curated by Rossi in 1973. In its catalog, Scolari elaborated its credo: urban history was the history of types and their elements; designers used those types and elements by planning through analogies, an architectural principle indifferent to time- and place-bound uses and references. But while this re-­ establishment of architecture was supposedly formed on humanistic values, it was unequivocally rooted in Modernist forms.20

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Despite alluding to deeper historical meaning and archetypes, and despite identifying that collective memory was inherent in cities, the Marxist critical frameworks and Modernist dogma of the Tendenza merely dropped “function” in favor of “type,” which Giulio Carlo Argan condemned as a hindrance to creativity. The realities of context, which played such a substantial role in Rossi’s early thinking, were replaced by scenography based on personal memories, much as the painter Claude Lorrain invented cityscapes composed of existing and imaginary buildings.21 Rossi argued that an urban collage would compose a “potential reality” to the extent that, he claimed, “I don’t invent, I remember.” Returning full circle to Modernist dogma, Tafuri stated that buildings dissociated from time and place became empty symbols. He concluded that architecture was no more than ideology. To him it was merely a “beautiful corpse.”22 Unsurprisingly, Tendenza buildings are full of mixed architectural messages. In Muratori’s buildings, columns that appear traditional rest counterstructurally midspan on beams below them, while upper-floor arches in his Brutalist buildings are loaded on spindly Corbusian pilotis. In spite of an alleged classical sensitivity, Grassi’s architecture follows the lines of the German Siedlung. Aymonino’s buildings may be characterized as Corbusian extrusions, and Rossi’s buildings turned out spare and melancholy, if not mute.23 The Tendenza failed to reimagine the postwar Italian cityscape in terms of what International Modernism had lost. But its challenge to the fading Modernist agenda inspired young architects and planners in the 1970s and 1980s, and it became central to the Neorationalist and New Urbanist movements. Léon Krier organized Rational Architecture exhibitions in London and Barcelona (1973), and New Classicists took Rossi’s ideas to their logical conclusion: the revival of classical architecture and traditional urbanism.24

Francesco Guardi, architectural capriccio.

Also looking to the past and not knowing what to do with it, Edmund Bacon’s (1910–2005) influential The Design of Cities explored cities from early Greek and Roman times to Philadelphia’s design in the 1960s. The former executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (1949–1970), Bacon examined

the spatial form and human interactions in these cities, as well as the nature in them, the environmental perception of them, their color, and the visual perspective in their design. In extension of Cullen’s townscape, but on a grander scale, Bacon described the compositional elements of design based on an architectural capriccio (fantasy) by the Venetian artist Francesco Guardi (1712–1793), which juxtaposed buildings and other urban elements in fictionalized combinations.25 But as with the thought of Lynch and others, the result was merely more jargon: “meeting the sky,” “meeting the ground,” “points in space,” “recession planes,” “design in depth,” “ascent and descent,” “convexity and concavity;” and “relationship to man.” Bacon fundamentally demonstrated that, compared with Guardi’s sketch, Modernist styles were incapable of making attractive

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urban spaces, but he could not address, let alone suggest, either authenticity or the idea of urban beauty to resolve this. More directly, the architectural historian, critic, and theoretician Colin Rowe (1920–1999) considered Modernism a failure. He debunked Pevsner’s theory of a conceptual relationship between modernity and tradition, particularly between classicism in its various manifestations and the “white architecture” of Modernists in the 1920s. Leading a “contextualist” school critical of Modernist urbanism and architectural theory, he was among the first to openly denounce the destructive effects of Modernist buildings and their failure to harmonize with good urban forms.26 In proposing to make more attractive urban spaces, Rowe suggested that the solution to failing Modernist urbanism was to create factually questionable, if not largely imaginary, “gestalts of history.” While exasperating conventional historians, Rowe became the inspiration for a generation of postmodern architects who nostalgically, if not misguidedly, came to consider history in their designs.27 Although Rowe’s method of urban design derived in part from Sitte, it was largely original, based on inventing city fabric from collaged, superimposed pieces. His treatise Collage City, which analyzed the urban form of aesthetically successful cities, challenged Modernist “function” and “program.” But Rowe too yielded only more jargon. Fragmentation, collision, superimposition, and contamination fed into the subsequent deconstructivist trend.28 Nonetheless, Rowe built his speculation into an erudite method of contemplating built space that generated a provocative transhistorical critique and resituated history as an active influence in architecture. Nostalgic for nineteenth-century eclecticism, Rowe advocated that architects should abandon purist abstraction and allow themselves to be influenced by historical references. Consequently, “the presence of the past” became a key element in the work of Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, Oswald Matthias Ungers, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Moore, and Rowe’s student James Stirling—affectionately known as “Rowe’s draughtsman”—as they promoted postmodern architecture and urbanism.

39

Colin Rowe’s inspirations and their product. Villa Rotonda, Palladio.

Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier.

New State Gallery, Stuttgart, James Stirling and Michael Wilford (1977–1984).

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PATTERN LANGUAGE AND SPACE SYNTAX Matters such as the continuity of a street wall, respecting façade rhythms, building silhouettes and landscapes, and avoiding out-of-scale masses returned to the planning dialogue. Using complementary materials and promoting public use of urban space were added to the urban designer’s handbook. Analyzing contextualism, incrementalism, and urban integration, the Austro-English-American mathematician Christopher Alexander pondered how a designer could synthesize a coherent and successful form out of the elements of a design program. Using mathematics and cybernetics, Alexander proposed a working hypothesis to define the interdependence of urban patterns and design patterns in Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) and A City Is Not a Tree (1966). From abstract recurring patterns in the computer programs developed during his PhD research, Alexander developed a compendium of 253 patterns as a resource for ordinary people to produce reasonably good vernacular structures.29 Searching for more rules, Alexander proposed in The Timeless Way of Building (1979) that viable buildings or towns were governed by a mysterious “timeless way” that brought order from nothing. Trying to understand the humble vernacular from the bottom up rather than top-down, he hoped to identify deeply rooted human-­ environment interactions to guide his designs. He therefore methodically abstracted forms from the cultural contexts of his projects, expecting that the resultant shapes would cohere and reflect their context.30 Perhaps not surprisingly, Alexander and his colleagues found that the design work they inspired was crude. It lacked the simple dignity of real vernacular buildings. The method failed to reproduce, let alone replace, the robust traditional pattern languages of vernacular cultures.31 Lacking a workable, overarching philosophy, Alexander’s Romantic belief contended that things that didn’t seem to have a strong pattern were more “natural” or “organic.” He therefore examined the geometry of minerals, biology, and morphogenesis. He hoped that

by generating a model of how nature works, he could figure out how environments for people should be made. Needless to say, beauty was not in Alexander’s purview; to him it was “subjective” and “insubstantial.” He therefore replaced it with the terms wholeness and wellness, then identified fifteen qualities of wholeness.32 But the geometry of minerals, biology, and morphogenesis failed to generate a model of how nature works or how beautiful structures and environments for people can be made. A holistic view suggests that the whole is greater than sum of the parts, because it has qualities for which the properties of the individual parts cannot account. In contrast, Alexander defined wholeness as no more than the presence of objects and their hierarchical relationships, mereology, and explained far less complexity than he thought. Engineering something from these objects and relationships resulted in simulacra rather than things sensed as authentic and whole.33 Alexander’s search for a general theory led to his encyclopedically cataloguing urban elements and design methods as if they were discrete pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. His approach resulted in a vague personal aesthetic and a shelfful of books describing the parts.34 The architectural thinker Richard Ingersoll noted that Alexander’s A New Theory of Urban Design (1987) required “more faith than reason to follow.” He identified in it unacknowledged paraphrases of Sitte and affirmations of Hegemann, and he found that Alexander’s claim for the originality of his “organic” city plan came from working in a historical vacuum in which knowledge was “discovered” and “revealed” rather than transmitted and interpreted. Ingersoll noted that Alexander’s pattern emergent from a “typical” Italian hill town was so reminiscent of the ideal that one might copy the historical model and do as well or better.35 Alexander’s four-volume magnum opus, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (2002–2004), discussed order and wholeness, ignoring the architectural knowhow that has been in place for 2,500 years. His last major published work, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle between Two World-Systems (2012), systematically presented a primeval, dualistic struggle between vested interests and community good.36

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Ultimately, the fatal flaw in Alexander’s method lies in his approach to urban and architectural wholes and their parts. His idea that it is possible to create design wholes by fusing abstract hierarchies of physical relationships is inadequate. The pattern language he created was an analytical tool, but when it was applied to design, the results did not cohere. He failed to recognize that vernacular buildings are wholes in themselves, and he hoped that by reconstituting their parts according to his analysis, an equivalent whole would emerge. His discovery that a city was not a tree but a semilattice failed to characterize its experienced complexity.37 It took Alexander decades of intensive research to conclude that design and urbanism came from “the desire and firm intention to make beauty” that had been the basis of classic planning for five thousand years. But despite realizing that vernacular architecture and town planning were rooted in ancient things, Alexander mysteriously ignored what came before. Asserting the Modernist dogma that peasant builders live in a cultural vacuum, he considered their built products no more than solutions to problems that he could identify. Alexander was oblivious to the top-down influences of classical cultures on vernacular practices.38 Perhaps the most read architectural treatise of all time, Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977) became authoritative despite failing to formulate what Vitruvius presented in his modest treatise, De architectura. This thin, fun-to-read volume contains a holistic system of architecture and urbanism, including everything from choosing sites, building walls, and laying out streets to constructing pumps, cranes, and war machines and even manufacturing paint. In contrast, Alexander’s work is a testament to what happens when one attempts to reconstitute a holistic system without a holistic method.39 While A Pattern Language is ignored in architecture schools, and its impact on architecture and urbanism is limited to a handful of aficionados, its influence on software development has been notable. Not surprisingly, computer programs, written in code, are linear, and can never be more than the sum of their parts. Urban plans are four-dimensional and much more than that.40

Ostensibly, Alexander knew that one does not experience the environment by breaking a complex and interdependent whole into small parts, as one might dissect a cat in a lab. He had to know that, reassembled, it would not meow. And indeed, Alexander’s postmodern “Frankencat” lacks the full aesthetic benefits of real, traditional design. In the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander admitted that no one will become a better designer by following the underlying premises of his first books.41 Contributing less than Alexander did to understanding the urban experience, Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson, and their colleagues at the Bartlett, University College London, proposed in the late 1970s to simulate the likely social effects of urban designs—economic success, urban vitality, and antisocial behavior—by predicting traffic through them. They coined the term space syntax for their analysis of urban configurations.42 The general idea was that navigable urban spaces could be broken down into components, analyzed as networks of choices, and then represented as diagrams quantifying and describing their connectivity and integration. Space syntax has been applied in archaeology, information technology, and anthropology, as well as to predict urban correlations of crime, traffic flow, and sales. But the definitions and applications of space syntax concepts such as “integration,” “choice,” and “depth distance” may be less useful in urbanism, because reducing human experience to linear mathematical functions is very limiting. While one might assume that Oxford Street, London, would emerge as “strongly integrated,” space syntax evaluates it as “less integrated” because the street is segmented into blocks by cross streets. “Choice,” as defined by space syntax, is analogous to water flow in a pipe, and cross streets appear as leaks. Space syntax may be useful in designing museums, airports, and hospitals, where wayfinding is typically more challenging. But is urbanism just a series of discrete, narrowly defined orientation problems? What value is there in measuring people moving from place to place without considering their urban experiences

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of neighborhoods, parks, city centers, and city edges? Do we need a computer to churn a lot of data to tell us that streets with the most traffic have the most traffic?43

POSTMODERNISM Among the first aesthetic movements to openly challenge contemporary planning, was postmodernism, which argued that Modernist “pure form” and “minimalism” were totalitarian, subjective, and anachronistic. The term postmodern was first used in the field to describe dissatisfaction with the International Style in 1949, and postmodernist architecture was marked by a reemergence of surface ornament, historic and contextual reference, unusual angles, and decorative eclecticism. Its raison d’être was to escape the closed-mindedness and bleakness of failed utopian Modernism. In its colliding styles, its forms adopted for their own sake, and its abundant new ways of viewing familiar styles and spaces, postmodernism seemed to herald the return of wit, ornament, and historical reference. Its architectural inventors, Charles Moore (1925–1993), Michael Graves (1934–2015), Robert Venturi (1925–2018), and Denise Scott Brown (1931–), Venturi’s partner, mocked Mies van der Rohe’s iconic maxim “Less is more,” with Venturi’s famous saying, “Less is a bore.”44 Distinguished by an atmosphere of criticism and skepticism, postmodernist architecture emphasized differences over and against unity, favoring personal preference and variety over bland “objectivity” and revolting, soulless functionalism. In 1966, Venturi, a student of Louis Kahn and briefly Eero Saarinen’s employee, published his manifesto Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The manifesto tried to make a case for a “difficult whole,” drawing lessons from vernacular to high-style sources, including the works of Michelangelo, Edwin Lutyens, Alvar Aalto, and Frank Furness. While Venturi lambasted simplistic Modernism and sought to bring back ornament for its necessity, he mourned the fact that architects lacked both the power and knowledge to replace it.

Postmodernists bravely tried solving the problems that Modernism had created. To relate better to buildings’ contexts and to tune architects’ sensitivity to history and their clients, postmodernist urbanism rejected comprehensive, one-size-fits-all planning applied regardless of context and rationale. It broke from the notion that planning could force social reform without regarding public opinion, and it rejected planning imposed on a majority by an ideologically driven minority. Advocacy planning and participatory models of planning emerged, and postmodernists brought to light the claims of minority and disadvantaged groups.45 Through the humor of extravagant forms, sculpture, anthropomorphism, ornament, trompe l’oeil, and flying buttresses, they tried to convey ambiguity, pluralism, paradox, and irony. Columns and arches reappeared, but postmodernists rarely utilized the Greek and Roman Orders, and when they did, it was almost never done correctly. But despite reference to traditional forms, “pomo” design was immature “make believe.” Venturi, Graves, and the architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005) produced formally simple “decorated sheds” with ornamental flourishes, such as the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, the Municipal Services Building in Portland, Oregon, and the Chippendale-top AT&T (now Sony) Building in New York. Perhaps the best example of postmodernist irony is Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia (1978), an urban space in New Orleans with self-deprecating quotes from Italian antiquity. The venerable Vincent Scully lauded Venturi’s book as “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture of 1923.” But more than anything, Venturi proved that Modernism had won. It had successfully conquered the minds of architects and planners, and, as planned, rendered the following generation architecturally illiterate. Untrained in the classical method, pomo architects shuffled the “shapes” (read “letters”) of traditional architecture within their designs, rendering their buildings and spaces as architecturally incomprehensible as words wrongly spelled.46

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Influential large-scale examples of postmodern architecture. (left) Michael Graves’s Portland Municipal Services Building, Portland, Oregon. (right) Philip Johnson’s “Chippendale” AT&T (now Sony) Building. (bottom) Robert Venturi’s Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery in London.

In fact, the majority of pomo professionals clung firmly to the Modernist myths of progress, artistic genius, and the primacy of novelty. While they reacted against Modernism with an intellectually literate but architecturally illiterate revival of historical forms, much of their work amounted to naught. Claiming to “reference” history rather than “copy” it, they maintained the Modernist taboo against authenticity. Unlike Renaissance architects had after the Middle Ages, they failed to adopt the “old way of building” to bring beauty back to the built world. As Charles Moore said, “People don’t build that way anymore.”47 Where the postmodernism of “reaction” sought to return to lost traditions and history in a new cultural synthesis, the postmodernism of “resistance” deconstructed Modernism itself, as evident in the work of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Liebsekind, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Ultimately, postmodernism, whether Modernist or traditional, is best defined as placing elements out of context, literally in the wrong place. In heroically trying

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Postmodernism of “resistance.” (left) Frank Gehry, Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Las Vegas. (middle) Zaha Hadid, Jockey Club Innovation Tower, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. (right) Daniel Liebeskind, Royal Ontario Museum.

(left) London. (right) London.

(left) Shanghai. (right) Moscow.

(left) Singapore. (right) Singapore.

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to create a style that communicates ambiguity, paradox, pluralism, and irony, postmodernists have ironically created architecturally incoherent designs.

SEGREGATING PEDESTRIANS TO MAKE “PEOPLE-FRIENDLY CITIES” And so the critique of Modernism continued. Notable among critics was the Danish architect and urban design consultant Jan Gehl (1936—), who criticized Brasília for being interesting at ten thousand feet and frightful at ground level. Observing people in built environments and “lost spaces” from the nexus of sociology, psychology, architecture, and planning, Gehl criticized no-man’s-lands between freeways, garages, and high-rises, automobile-impoverished design, urban renewal, and segregated, “functional” zoning. He criticized planners for not designing at human scale and landscape architects for designing just “silly benches.” He criticized architecture schools for their weak education and because, after fifty years of planning, “we definitely know more about good habitats for mountain gorillas, Siberian tigers, or panda bears than we do know about a good urban habitat for Homo sapiens.”48 Gehl criticized how, in the 1960s, while planners tried to fix no-man’s-lands between buildings with tightly segregated allotment gardens, areas for youth, and

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high-density row housing, people living in ground-floor units met with bicycle thieves, muggers, and too many neighbors. He admonished planners for having cars travel at forty miles per hour (60 kph), resulting in stressful, unwelcoming, if not dangerous places for pedestrians. He decried over-wide streets, abandoned promenades, excessive greens, and irrelevant roof terraces that reduced livability in growing economies. Inspired by Jane Jacobs, Gehl’s influential Life between Buildings advocated a methodology for improving urban form based on systematically documenting urban spaces, making gradual incremental improvements, then documenting them again. His book Public Spaces, Public Life (2004) reported how Gehl and his team converted Copenhagen’s historic Strøget from car domination into a car-free pedestrian zone with good bicycle access. The incrementally pedestrianized area grew from an initial 15,800 square meters to about a 100,000 square meters and now boasts more shoppers, cafés, and renewed street life.49 Gehl proposed that twenty-first-century cities should be “people friendly”—that is, they should have lively spaces that invite people to walk and bicycle in them. He claimed that a good walking and cycling realm was also a good public transportation environment, offering less car dependence and less fuel and energy consumption. He suggested that with individuals using their own energy to move about, society becomes increasingly healthy and sustainable.50 Sublime plazas in Brasília. (left) Pedestrian space by Niemeyer. (right) More pedestrian space by Niemeyer.

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The strength of Jan Gehl’s Strøget in Copenhagen lies in its traditional architecture, not in planning theory. (top) Strøget, Copenhagen. (bottom right) A modernist “soft” edge detracts from urban coherence. (bottom left) Strøget, Copenhagen.

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Gehl’s analytical, functional, and biological approach was based on walking and the principle that humans perceive things mostly horizontally, with little “up” and a bit more “down.” Like others before him, Gehl observed that, as part of our instincts and upbringing, Homo sapiens have a very precise system of distancing from other people, with increments ranging from the intimate to the public. He observed that, in contrast with façades articulated with niches and doors, greengrocers selling tomatoes, kids playing in front yards, and grandmas knitting behind hedges, glass, or blank walls, “hard edges” did nothing for humans. Coinciding, according to him, with the stimuli humans need every five seconds, Gehl prescribed locating shops every sixteen feet (5 m), claiming that “the stream of pedestrians will stop, look, go in and out, start using their mobile phones, and park their bikes.”51 But like all Modernists, Gehl failed to distinguish that the observations that inspired him derived from the classical principles of traditional architecture, as did the Strøget that launched his career. He did not recognize that in the classical method, the dimensions and rhythms of doors, windows, niches, greengrocers, front yards, and hedges for grandmas that he laboriously documented inhere organically. In an Alexandrine list, Gehl and his partner Lars Gemzøe formulated twelve urban “quality criteria” characterized in three groups. In yet another well-intentioned reinvention of the wheel, they too created highly specialized jargon and methods.52 Gehl and Gemzøe claimed that if the design of a space fulfilled a whole set of arbitrarily linked aspects—including sociology, policing, traffic planning, and climatology; physiological facts, noise control, and social and individual psychology; architectural dimensioning, leisure, aesthetics, and material science—that would make it a “100 percent place.” But we don’t need all that to conclude that the beautiful, seven-hundred-year-old Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy, is a “100 percent place.” Nor did its medieval builders carefully follow Gehl and Gemzøe’s twelve criteria. They organically applied to their beautiful plazas the simple, human-scale, classical method, invoking hardwired human perception and using plain common sense.

ALIEN BIGNESS AND STRANGENESS Opposite the “human scale” experience is the experience of the sublime. Burke defined sublime architecture as being huge, composed of simple geometries, infinitely repeated, and having no ornament. Fusing the technological advances and superscale cityscapes of the heady British Archigram and Japanese Metabolism styles of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Dutch architect, theorist, urbanist, and sometime scriptwriter Rem Koolhaas (1944–), in aesthetics that embody the terror and pain of the sublime, adopted the Romantic analogy of the built environment as machine. Intellectually naïve, but not commercially so, Koolhaas, like Alexander, also produced a shelf-load of books. Among these is Koolhaas’s huge book S, M, L, XL (1995). A six-pound, 1,376-page, silver-covered threeinch-thick brick of a book, it combines essays, manifestos, diaries, fiction, travelogues, and urban meditations. One critic described it a “chic juxtaposition” of violent news photos, pornographic outtakes, cheap advertisements, and fine-art reproductions. Do its labored graphic attempts at mimicking electronic media hide that Koolhaas has nothing to say?53 Ambitious to land tall building commissions for their virile bigness, Koolhaas wrote the cult classic Delirious New York (1978), part history, part reverie, part manifesto. With facts presented as a basis of its fiction, the book tangles cause and effect, theories and strategies. It dissimulates Manhattan’s “culture of congestion” as a utilitarian pursuit of the irrational within a rational grid, engineered for short-term profit with no regard for the parts. Koolhaas celebrates it as “an addictive machine with a collection of ‘hot spots’ from which there is no escape.”54 An example of his process is what Koolhaas made of Hugh Ferriss’s (1889–1962) 1922 instructional diagrams for maximum building volumes allowed by zoning. Taking the diagrammatic figures as concrete images of a “mega village,” he claimed that so-called Manhattanism was “conceived in Ferriss’ womb.”55 Then Koolhaas went on to argue that Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse was the “Anti-Manhattan,” since it proposed to kill urban

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Classic plan massing. (left) The four stages of addressing the New York City zoning ordinance, Ferriss, 1922. (middle) The Woolworth Building, 1913, which Hugh Ferriss had rendered for Cass Gilbert. (right) The Woolworth Building and its later flanking buildings display classic plan massing.

congestion by excluding the “Ferrissian Mountain.” But all Ferriss diagrammed was what any reasonable classic planner might build, as exemplified by Cass Gilbert’s (1859–1934) Woolworth Building (1913), which Hugh Ferriss rendered. Koolhaas correctly observed that extreme bigness lacks the principles of architectural scale, detail, composition, and proportion. A type of Corbusianism on steroids became his work goal. Building toward intolerable inhumanism, Koolhaas’s work is a poke in the eye to the first Modernists, who believed that their architecture would heal society. Inconsistent, random, arbitrary, and sometimes conspiratorial, Koolhaas explored Manhattan’s architectural program from the viewpoint that form follows function and concluded that Manhattan was the terminal arena of Western Civilization. He found the skyscrapers in its “mutant urbanism” to be embodiments of the idea of a building conceived as a city. Representing the ultimate neue Mensch (new man), Koolhaas comprehended Manhattan as the “capital of perpetual crisis,” cycling permanently from creation to destruction and back, from nothing to nothingness. Koolhaas defined Rockefeller Center in New York as an “unhierarchic mountain,” a hybrid building of no specific type. To him, it is a paradigmatic “city within a

city” for an unfolding urban future that resolves all the paradoxes inherent in the “promise of Manhattan.” So impressed is Koolhaas that he claims Rockefeller Center contains “at least one idea for each of its 250 million dollars” of its cost, identifying it as “a masterpiece without a genius.” But Koolhaas is wrong. Rockefeller Center is a result of pure classic planning. It was designed by the great École-des-Beaux-Arts-trained architect Raymond Hood (1881–1934) and other experienced architects, who applied to it reasonable, traditional design. In contrast, Koolhaas’s work, both written and built, perpetuates the Modernist cycle of tabula rasa to tabula rasa. Koolhaas’s architectural hero is Wallace K. Harrison, architect of the inexplicable Empire State Plaza in Albany. The 250 million ideas Koolhaas finds in Rockefeller Center are an illiterate recognition of the humanistic holism inhering in any such project.56 To Koolhaas, progress, identity, the city, and the street belong to the past. According to him, iconic buildings are of free-associable, mechanical, and surreal forms “that resist classification.” They are designed so people cannot tell what they are. Combining both bogus postmodern historicism and exhibitionistic deconstructivist angst, Koolhaas’s distinctive style subversively twists inexpensive industrial-grade materials and improvisational detailing in a constant reminder of

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reduced design expectations. His buildings are so ugly that they make one wonder whether deep inside he is not a reincarnation of Samson, blind to beauty, crying in anguish, “Let me die with the Philistines!” “In the end,” wrote Koolhaas, “there will be little else for us to do but shop.”57 The late Zaha Hadid (1950–2016), Rem Koolhaas’s most notable student, was a parametricist. She tried to analyze in computer programs and mathematical equations the parameters or constants that define and limit urban and architectural forms. But millions of ways exist to divide even something as simple as a square into a number of rectangular parts. Parametricists like Hadid produce

what a Martian would if she tried using only computers to describe things seen on Earth. Like her teacher, she invents, without any notion of or capacity for beauty. Like all Modernists, she worked hard to attain notoriety from the strangeness of the shapes she generated. Her style was solely intended to be conspicuously different from that of other Modernists.58 The terms parametric and parametricism bear the same relationship that the term science bears to the derogatory term scientism. Even though parametricist designs contradict Galileo’s basic cube-square law, parametricists believe in the omnipotence of their techniques and claim to be the successors of avant-garde Modernism. Their goals are to identify and code the full spectrum of human perceptual parameters and each and every parameter of the built environment, and to produce a global “best practice standard.”59 Notably, traditional esthetics uniquely express gravity rather than defy it, hence the comforting appearance of their stability and firmness. Architectural design which does away with that expression automatically stresses humans. Indeed, abusing scale in art is undertaken mostly for humor or to terrify people. Insisting that people must learn to accommodate to their shapes, even if they stress people, parametricists reject the sense of stability so violently that even they are forced to admit the ugliness of their configurations and confess that their forms trigger “gestalt-catastrophes.”60 Rather than proposing beautiful structures that people can reuse a hundred years from now, they offer kinetic, urban swarm-formations of buildings that reconfigure themselves in real time, eradicating any hope of a sense of place, let alone urban memory. Their ruins will be vast, feral junkyards for modern man as Terminator, in which walls will jump out to detain passersby. By comparison, German Siedlungen seem appealing. To parametricists, the concept of beauty is “shrouded in mystery,” and everything people love about cities is inferior. But nothing in their work is original. The forms they float originated in the 1970s when practitioners like Hadid were students. Their projects did not get built then because they were ugly and impractical. But now her generation teaches their students to design and

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The sublime of CCTV headquarters in Beijing (Koolhaas, 2009) is eschatological.

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Since its constraints and interdependencies are more amenable to algorithmic control, parametric design is present mostly in the production of building skins and roof surfaces, unencumbered by issues of history, culture, politics, and the complexities of human use. (top left) The Gherkin, London, Foster + Partners, 2003. (right column from top) Lars Spuybroek, The Water Pavilion, Vrouwenpolder, Netherlands, 1993–1997. Zaha Hadid Architects, Phoeno Science Center, Wolfsburg, 2000–2005. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport Terminal 2, Mumbai, 2014. The ceiling waves of Hong Kong International Airport can nauseate an observer. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 2007. (bottom left) Selfridges Department Store, Birmingham, England. Future Systems, 2003.

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build such projects because they can. Self-proclaimed descendants of Sitte, they analyze urban patterns and strive to express them in algorithms.61 Parametricists consider grid plans to be “nonadaptive” and “limiting,” their elegant elaborations a “visual chaos.” While parametricists believe they are fast-forwarding into the future, their urbanism is in fact backward-looking, reactive to the near-past. Parametricists reinforce 1950s-style zoning with diagrams that show streets as dividers, not connectors. Their plans have no story, magic, experience, or humanity. They may present

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polished, high-tech animations, but their models look like pasta and their plans resemble those of New Urbanists without a sensible hierarchy of spaces. Up close, their architecture is astonishingly bland. Despite parametric definitions of crowds, swarms, and mobs, nothing yet models human sociability and environmental responses, the stuff of architecture and urbanism. As utopian as Taut’s Expressionist “glass chain,” the parametricist return to Expressionism is totalitarian and megalomaniacal in ways that even Taut and his group were not. With huge computing power, they Parametricist architectural forms. (top) Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Xiaofeng Mei and Xiaotian Gao, 2012. (bottom left) Urban fabric study, Kartal-Pendik Masterplan, Istanbul, Turkey, Zaha Hadid Archiects, 2006. (bottom right) Articulation of the façades, Hadid.

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believe they can do what Alexander dreamed of doing, but they do not have even his humanism. Self-anointed priests of Romantic evolutionism, parametricists wish to emulate Le Corbusier’s hegemonic grab of design authority. They are as eschatological as Koolhaas, but lack his entertainment value. Beware of geeks bearing gifts.

NEW URBANISM Inspired by Lewis Mumford’s critique and Jane Jacobs’s calls, as well as visions of “European Urbanism” and a desire to implement Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, the architects Peter Calthorpe, Michael Corbett, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Moule, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos Polyzoides, and Daniel Solomon founded the Chicago-based Congress for the New Iconic New Urbanism. Seaside, Florida.

Urbanism (CNU) in 1993. Focused on suburbia, working within the confines of US zoning practices, and using principles such as traditional neighborhood design (TND) and transit-oriented development (TOD), New Urbanism promotes a return to the cherished, iconic, close-knit American community. With the objective of fighting suburban sprawl and housing tracts, office parks, and shopping centers floating in asphalt seas, New Urbanists try to influence developers, planners, and land-use professionals to institute walkable neighborhoods containing a range of housing and job types, public spaces, people-friendly downtowns, and neighborhoods where kids can play in the streets. They work hard to replace six-lane arterials and parking lots with decent transit systems.62 The Charter of the New Urbanism sought to revive the increasingly privatized public realm, to revitalize

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Ugly New Urbanism. (left) Prospect New Town in Longmont, Colorado. (right) Oakland, California.

Good New Urbanism. (left) Cayalá, Guatemala. (right) Cayalá master plan.

(left) Aerial view, Poundbury, Dorset, England. (right) Queen Mother Square, Poundbury.

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deteriorated communities, and to reduce excessive automobile use. It advocates neighborhoods that are diverse in use and population, communities designed for pedestrians and transit as well as cars, and cities and towns shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions. It proposes context-appropriate architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and construction. Its aims are reducing traffic, increasing the supply of affordable housing, and reining in suburban sprawl. Architecturally, New Urbanist developments are often built according to “form-based codes” in quasi­ vernacular styles. New Urbanism’s fundamental analytical method is based on a rural-to-urban “transect,” a diagram that ostensibly categorizes urban fabric into seven levels of density, but in fact canonizes 1950s US urbanism.63 The first fully New Urbanist town, Seaside, Florida, on the Florida Panhandle coastline, began development in 1981. For the quality of its streets, public spaces, and architecture, it has become internationally famous and is now a tourist destination. Seaside’s lots sell for more than a million dollars each, and some houses top five million. In the mid-1990s, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) adopted New Urbanist principles in its nationwide public housing program. In Maryland and several other states, New Urbanist principles are an integral part of “smart growth” legislation. Miami, Florida, has adopted the most ambitious New Urbanist-based zoning code yet undertaken by a major US city. About six hundred new towns, villages, and neighborhoods in the United States have followed New Urbanist principles. Poundbury in England, a suburban extension of the town of Dorchester, was built according to them. In one of the biggest New Urbanist projects worldwide, Le Plessis-Robinson, southwest of Paris,

aged Modernist block-like buildings were replaced with traditional buildings and houses in New Urbanist planning. There are New Urbanist projects in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Macedonia, Italy, Belize, Costa Rica, Canada, Bhutan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.64 In many ways, New Urbanism applies principles from Unwin and Hegemann and Peets. But instead of insisting on the same level of architectural literacy, its Modernist-trained practitioners develop catalogs of formal components incorporated in exhaustive formbased codes. The resultant New Urbanist design style is claimed by many to look inauthentic. Modernist-style New Urbanism simply looks bad, and is often built to yet lower standards. New Urbanism draws both praise and criticism from the political spectrum. Some favoring suburbanization criticize it for ignoring consumer preference for free-market and car-oriented development. Others find it to be a deregulatory force in support of private-sector developers and criticize it as a form of centrally planned, large-scale development that limits the initiative of final users.65 Modernists decry New Urbanism as a marketing scheme that “fraudulently” repackages conventional suburban sprawl behind façades of nostalgic imagery and empty slogans. They argue that New Urbanism emphasizes visual style over planning substance, criticizing it as historical pastiche, a New Suburbanism.66 Others criticize New Urbanism for being too accommodating of cars and not emphatic enough in promoting walking, cycling, and public transport. From a classic planning standpoint, New Urbanist leadership has yet to adequately acknowledge the link between planning and architecture. Because of that, it lacks a framework to determine urban appropriateness, and it may not scale well to city-center fabric.

CHAPTER 3 WHAT NOW?

As gleaming glass structures multiply in vacuous parklike developments or cheek-by-jowl in dreadful downtowns, Le Corbusier’s ghost is laughing while Ebenezer Howard, Unwin, Olmsted, and Hegemann and Peets roll in their graves. Modernist urban design continues worldwide with growing dysfunction. Poorly built buildings, ugliness, and unlivability keep piling up. Congestion and sprawl reign unchecked. From the goals of “making history” and “creating newness,” Modernism systematically purged the planning profession of thinking and know-how that had developed over millennia. With no predictability of outcome, it denies, excludes, and fights at all costs the direct application of anything that has worked in the past. Naïve and architecturally illiterate, Modernists try to “discover the essence” of what makes cities tick, but they tolerate only imitations and regurgitations of inbred contemporary work they see online and in magazines. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, Modernist planning solutions created new problems. Their sustained myth of engineering efficiency, which suggests that vigorous calculations could economize on expenditure without affecting performance, resulted in increasingly flexible structures. They rust, bend, and then crack to let water in, ultimately leading to failure. The nurtured myth of professional expertise led to the field’s ever-expanding fragmentation and growing inaccessibility to the communities it is meant to serve.1 Comprehensive planning, which supposedly integrates, articulates, and coordinates multiple systems, is difficult if not impossible today. Forbidding themselves from using any of the historic precedent they universally consider the best and most successful urbanism, planners desperately avoid creating environments as magical as Italian hill towns or as charming as eighteenth-century town squares. Instead they speak of FAR (Floor Area Ratio), of “density,” “livability,” “Transit Oriented Design,” and lots of bicycles. These are good things, and the reader may know what they mean. But none, even

executed at the highest level, generates as fine an urban experience as what came before. Since World War II, the majority of architects, planners, artists, and cultural leaders have held on to their ideologies. They deeply believe that the needs to “innovate,” “to express technology,” and “to be of our time” stem from fundamental truths. They invalidate dissenting approaches a priori and hold as taboo styles other than Modernist. And so the wholesale destruction caused by planning has left tabula rasa legacies for generations in a new cycle for humanity, from tabula rasa to tabula rasa, from dust to dust. Having eradicated from the profession the knowledge base of what came before, planners, in the name of progress, try to create out of thin air solutions to problems that for millennia had been resolved. Worse, in their development and construction, they unethically experiment on live subjects. The sole criterion for their designs is that no one has seen their like before. To address a century’s worth of consistent failure of recent plans, bridges, highways, and buildings, planners propose patches and fixes such as “parametric design,” “walkability,” “sustainability,” and “smart cities.”2 Attempting to protect itself from more failed design and construction, society deploys ever more NIMBYism, bureaucracy, zoning, and laws of unprecedented volume and complexity. Six-hundred-page codes, LEED, AASHTO, and NACTO guidelines, and myriad additional ordinances add ever more jargon and legal hurdles. For a substantial additional cost, your project can be “green,” a popular choice of largely unproven benefit. Meanwhile, traditional Roman, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese city plans, aqueducts, bridges, sewer systems, theaters, and roads—some well into their third millennium—are still in use today. The elephant in the planning room is that what we are doing today does not work, but what came before does.3 Since the late 1970s, the architect, urban planner, and theorist Léon Krier (1946–) has been one of the most influential and reasoned voices against current practice.

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Among the founders of European urbanism and the intellectual godfather of New Urbanism in the United States, Krier is a champion of traditional urban form, legislation for quarters within cities, and limited-size cities. His texts deeply critique zoning, megastructural cities, vested-interest industrialization, and mechanistic composition. In a 2001 interview by Nikos Salingaros, Krier said, “Modernism’s declaration of war against tradition was not just a rejection of obsolete traditions but it included all knowledge and know-how which does not fit its reductive vision of humanity, history, technology, politics, and economy. It is a systematic rape of man’s psychological and physiological make-up . . . a mental rape which goes against human experience . . . intelligence, instinct, and sensibility. . . . It is a form of radical brainwashing from which very few, once they have experienced it, are able to escape.”4 For Krier, cities and architecture have a rational order and typology: a house, a government building, a market, a campanile, a plaza; but also a roof, a column, a window, etc. His architectural style is unique, drawing on classical principles in what can be called an authentic New Classical vernacular. To Krier, the measurements and geometric organization of a city and of its quarters result not from mere chance or simple economic necessity. To him, they represent a civilizing order that is equally aesthetic, technical, legislative, and ethical. Krier claims that Paris works because it is so adaptable, something that new cities are not. He argues that Work by Léon Krier. (left) Village Hall, Windsor, Florida, 1997. (right) Perez Architectural Center, University of Miami, Florida, 2005.

new cities cannot survive serious crises because their planning models are unsustainable. Thus, Krier argues not merely against the Modernist city but against a tendency to gigantism in urban growth, evident in the exploding scale of urban blocks and increasingly tall buildings. His critique of Modernism is that, in its trial and error, it has committed monumental errors: Architectural and urbanist modernism belong—like communism—to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. They are ideologies which literally blind even the most intelligent and sensitive people to unacceptable wastes, risks, and dangers. Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e. unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions. . . . Very great sums are being invested now to renovate 1950s and 1960s modernist estates and campuses, but many of these are no more than the artificial prolongation of failed experiments. . . . The very great challenge of the future, however, will be the urbanization of suburbia, the redevelopment of sprawl. In response to this, Krier proposes the reconstruction of cities, based on human scale, with size determined not by zoning and transport routes but according to the premise that one should be able to walk across neighborhoods and quarters in five or ten minutes. He has

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applied his theories in several large-scale, detailed plans for world cities, including Rome (1977), Luxembourg (1978), West Berlin (1980–1983), Stockholm (1981), Washington, DC (1984), Poundbury (1988 onward), and Cayalá, Guatemala City (2003 onward). Uniquely among architects and planners, Krier uses only common sense and basic arithmetic to qualify quantities and quantify qualities. Krier observes that, in spite of politically correct verbiage, Modernists, dismissive of the long-term future of the built and natural environments, have let urban growth run amok in the globalized city. According to him, the catastrophe in the making—in every town and city—indicates that good urban planning principles and traditional codes cannot be replaced by open-ended political negotiations between partial-interest “stakeholders.” Nor can the dominant Modernist typologies—skyscrapers; metastatic, monofunctional suburbs; and McMansions—be sustained without cheap fossil fuel. “Very little legacy of that collective malpractice will survive the inevitable global consequences of peak-oil,” he wrote. “[It] is a striking demonstration of how partial human intelligence is, how shortsighted and irresponsible otherwise perfectly wise and gifted individuals can be.” Likening urban architecture to human speech, Krier writes that “architectural language sprouts from empirical practice or proceeds from intentional design. . . . It cannot develop in functionally zoned territories nor flourish in excessive urban concentrations or suburban dilutions.”5 Despite modern cities’ growing through political, technocratic, and professional means under the direction and power of charismatic personalities, Krier and others find twenty-first-century urbanism curiously anti-urban and full of “lost spaces” and “inscrutable geographies.” He demonstrates that traditional rather than high-rise urbanism offers the density solutions to the planet’s ecological problems.6 Krier is not alone in his critique, but the chorus of voices one can imagine from reading planning publications is a patchwork cacophony. Some writers emphasize that place matters to individual identity and civic well-being. Others contend that public parks are the key to livable communities. For those studying public

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The basic, humanistic parts of Krier’s city: Res Publica, Res Economica, and Civitas.

life, the notion of urban experience now embraces the criteria of individual happiness and community “agility” for attaining well-being and wealth. Some observe that well-intentioned but single-minded programs turn towns into NIMBY battlegrounds. Others decry the utter dysfunction of Los Angeles and Phoenix.7 Some call for broken politics to be fixed, the planning game repaired, the car reinvented. Others find that the promise of green is proving to be illusory in buying our way to sustainability. Those discovering the benefits of an urban stroll distill the idea of urban experience to the concept of “walkability.”8 New ways of living and working are sought in the quest for ecological democracy. People wonder whether

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“civic hackers,” who calculate urbanites as swarms, will lead with big data programming to the promised land of “smart cities.” Perhaps the template of public toilet usage will create new techno-utopian paradigms such as “Urban Entrepreneurial Ecosystems” and “Startup Communities.” Perhaps the great reset of postcrash urban economics will arrive on the silver tray of the politics of sharing.9 The array of ideas is mind-boggling, but we should not be fooled by seemingly sophisticated jargon or trendy taglines in the media, and certainly not by ideology or politics. It is the same functionalist, city-asmachine paradigm that first gave us freeways midcity, and which is now messing up streets with bike lane posts and “bike boxes.” Planners continue to abdicate planning to traffic engineers and to impose plans on the public because “they know better.” But what they know is exemplified by pedestrian sidewalk rings thirty feet Foolish modernist urbanism. (left) A spaghetti interchange. (top right) A “bike box.” (bottom right) The Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator.

(10 m) up in the air threading through four-level interchanges. How long will they engage in wishful thinking and technological promises?10 Just in the last few years, the already sagging shelf of planning, zoning, and building codes has seen ten more feet of hefty additions, including an Urban Street Design Guide, Sustainable Housing Solutions, Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Sprawl Repair Manual, Walkable City, and Pocket Neighborhoods, not to mention Urban Planning for Dummies and the reissued Charter of the New Urbanism.11 While the city may be among mankind’s greatest and oldest inventions, urbanism founders in the jargon of sustainable development, efficient land use, reduced automobile use, restoration of natural systems, community involvement, and preservation of local culture. Together, they do not add up to places that enrich and uplift the human spirit. The places they make are not appealing.12

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Pedestrian ring suspended through an urban freeway interchange at Yan’an Elevated Road and South-North Elevated Road, Central Shanghai.

Technocratic experts, bureaucracies, and organizations have siloed agendas and jargon, leaving them mostly oblivious to what others are doing around them. They lead a movement of roughly one and a half million architects, planners, and engineers worldwide, half a million in the United States alone. While all are well-meaning, the vast majority considers the authentic viability of traditional design taboo, and they are thereby unwitting agents of the contemporary cycle beginning and ending in a tabula rasa.13 Cities may be full of green buildings, but green buildings alone cannot make Dubai sustainable, let alone a real city. Admirable as the goals of the New Urbanism may be, it maintains, sustains, and propagates the Sittean mistake that urbanism is in the plan alone, not in the buildings and experience of public space. Without taking anything away from Jan Gehl’s successes, his method does not really explain what it does, which pushes those trying to emulate it to resort to flat-out copying.14

That is why, when Léon Krier took an unequivocal stand in the face of Modernism’s most sacred dogma—that we cannot build in classical and vernacular traditions—the art historian Vincent Scully (1920–2017) wrote, “Krier literally thought the unthinkable, said the unsayable. And his remarkably powerful take on the European city produced a much more convincing and three-dimensional urbanism . . . which could not be brought up satisfactorily into three dimensions using the prevailing Corbusian architectural vocabulary.”15 We know that lovable, sustainable, and resilient traditional buildings and urban fabric survive better than Modernist efforts do. We know that people experience streets as rooms in which the buildings make up the walls. They intuitively respond to the fact that there is no good planning without good architecture. We know that they flock to beautiful streets and urban spaces which are, more often than not, traditional and classical. The big question is, then, why reinvent the wheel all the time? What requirement lies behind the perpetual need for novelty?

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All recent urbanism, from Century City, Los Angeles, to Tysons Corner, Virginia; Kazakhstan; Dubai; and Shanghai, has produced the same wastelands. The city of London, among the finest pieces of urbanism and architecture in the world, is morphing into a tormented and tormenting monster, destroyed more by architects than by the Luftwaffe. It did not deserve for the year 2000 millennium celebrations a Ferris wheel, a failed bridge, and an arena in the shape of a hedgehog.16 Rarely asking what people want, architects mock citizens who dislike Modernism as uneducated, out of touch, or old-fashioned. Sequential generations of planners have imposed idiosyncratic, dysfunctional, unsustainable environments; jargon; fixes; and patches, each with its attendant failed promise. Indeed, people, who “vote with their pockets” generally choose to live in traditional-design houses and neighborhoods. Even Sir Norman Foster lives in an eighteenth-century château. Krier likens urban architecture to speech.

How many more projects, freeways, and subdivisions do we need before we accept that modern planning simply won’t work? How many more branches of specialization do we need to remediate new flaws originating in “functional problem solving?” How many more times must we look at plans that do not really make sense? How many more times do we have to scratch our heads in embarrassed wonderment and have experts tell us we “don’t understand” or that we are “not of our time.” Based on results, their only purpose is to give the next generation the opportunity to reinvent the wheel all over again. An average early eighteenth-century architect would judge as amateurish how planners today deal with pedestrians and nature; their understanding of how the parts of a city relate to each other; how we try to design places that “stimulate public activity” and “support a variety of uses.” They would castigate us for how we deal with history and rebuke planning for neither recognizing place nor offering a viable future. As China destroys itself for the third time in two centuries by adopting the worst of what the West has to offer, the massive growth of its cities threatens the sustainability of the planet.17 While Le Corbusier’s myth that preindustrial forms and spaces are not suited to postindustrial ways of life is still being promulgated, the thinking person realizes that there is no alternative to returning to humanistic cities and towns. Many agree that it is important to not replicate the errors already committed if we do not want to live in machine cities dominated by buildings floating in concrete asphalt.18 The remainder of this book shows how.

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CLASSIC PLANNING FUNDAMENTALS

The one thing planners today almost never think of is to simply build that which worked well long before their profession came on the scene. Although they study Paris and Rome for their histories, they are compelled to create fabric and spaces that are intentionally alien and different. While in Part I of the book we learned how that sort of thinking brought us here, and Part III will describe the how of classic planning, this part of the book focuses on the what and why of classic planning. It reveals the few simple concepts behind classic-plan cities and their enduring service as backdrops for much of the spectrum of human activity. It describes how accretion and improvement occur organically in them as well as the scientific reasons for their success. It explains how and why, in response to the hardwired perceptual programming common to all Homo sapiens, classic planning has been around since the first cities. Chapter 4 is about the origins of the classic planning sensibility in city building, the fundamental types of urban fabric available, and the primary methods for elaborating them. It discusses the four types of urban fabric: classic plans, “organic” kasbah-like fabric, Grand Manner plans, and radial utopian cities. It probes deeper into the Haussmannian project in Paris and its international success, contrasting it with the sublime, scary urbanism of bigness without beauty. Chapter 5 demonstrates the classical process in more depth by following three rounds of planning in Washington, DC: L’Enfant’s plan (1793), the City Beautiful McMillan Plan (1902), and the Anacostia River Plan (2005). Chapter 6 asks readers to contemplate their own experience of urban form, the cities’ raisons d’être, and their

community aspirations. Through the concept of urban happiness, it arrives at this book’s conceptual heart: the matter of beauty. Delving into the neurobiological mechanism and mathematical mechanics of the cognitive experience of beauty, we will see that a physical sensation accompanies it, and that our responses seem to be hardwired in evolutionary adaptations dating to our origin in the African landscape. In this part of the book, we will see how recent science, which tracks and quantifies how individual experiences are processed in the brain, corroborates Socrates’ determination that the experience of beauty occurs in the mind. Following a path to beauty, we will discover that the shapes and proportioning systems of the Greco-­ Roman aesthetic system—and the classical method as a whole—can be used with some accuracy to predict user experience. We will see how this method makes design consensus possible, that it can be applied to enhance productivity and profitability, that it definitively elevates the spirit and reduces stress, and that it could even be used to predictably reduce crime.1 By understanding the what and why of the classic planning method, we will see that “building it right” safeguards against fatal flaws in the short run, ensures adaptive reuse down the line, and simplifies projects while increasing their benefit. Originating in the holism of the experience of beauty, the classic method ties aesthetics to asset allocation and durability. This will take us to a surprising conclusion regarding the purpose of urbanism.

CHAPTER 4 CLASSIC PLANNING WAS ALWAYS THERE

Mies van der Rohe’s reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion, originally built for the 1929 Barcelona Exposition, is among the first places a dutiful architecture pilgrim will visit in Barcelona. Many are surprised by its diminutive scale, but all recognize its parts from the books they have read and caress its now-clichéd chrome-plated columns and book-matched stone panels. Some are disappointed that the pavilion, revered by many as a design ultimate, in reality looks like a San Fernando Valley bank branch or an over-designed 1950s building-materials showroom. Most visitors emerge from this reconstituted shrine with such reverence that they fail to look up and see the large castle looming four hundred feet tall directly behind it on Montjuic hill. It and the grand, elegant stairs and magical fountains rising up to it are rarely if ever mentioned or shown, and certainly not with regard to Mies van der Rohe’s pavilion. Drawn to the ensemble as if by magic, I followed the fountains and stairs to the hill’s towering crest. At the top of the hill, a large gate opens onto a pleasant, traditional plaza surrounded by the Pueblo Español. It is an open-air urban design and architecture museum, conceived and built for that same Exposition by the great Catalan architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867–1956) and

his team. Over thirteen months, they synthesized in the Pueblo Español a ten-acre (4 ha) model village with streets, squares, and 117 buildings. Each building displays in its style the architectural heritage of Spain’s fifty provinces. Walking through the Pueblo Español for the first time in 1994, I realized that I had been duped by my teachers. They had never mentioned the Pueblo Español, even though it appeared to concentrate in one place thousands of years of urban knowhow and wisdom. A one-stop school of urbanism, Pueblo Español is all about what works best for cities and what is inherently good for human urban well-being. It documents in its buildings and streets the grid, the plaza, and numerous precedents of urban experience. It was founded on knowledge that my teachers removed from the curriculum simply because it was in traditional styles. The long-ignored Pueblo Español is not a superficial style exercise, but rather the result of a rigorous and durable, yet intuitively obvious method of thinking and planning. Rich in qualities and experience, its forms instinctively align with human sensibilities that, despite differing degrees of acuity, everyone has access to. Starting in this chapter and throughout the book, we will see that, by virtue of evolutionary makeup, humans Five thousand years of urban design wisdom in one place. Pueblo Español, Barcelona Exposition, 1929. Aerial view.

PART II

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CLASSIC PLANNING FUNDAMENTALS

Pueblo Espan�ol, Barcelona, 1929, Puig i Cadafalch. (top left) Plaza. (right) Plan; Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion in red. (bottom left) Street view.

are born as innate classicists and share a common sense of the beautiful. Few noticed that, while the Barcelona Pavilion was demolished right after the Exposition, the beauty and love invested in the Pueblo has kept it open continuously since its construction. Cynics may not be surprised that a finely executed place, demonstrating accrued human knowhow, goes unmentioned and unappreciated by most. But we increasingly see how great a price we pay for intentionally ignoring such knowledge. This chapter looks first at cities and what underlies their establishment. Then, building on the four distinct spatial forms of urban plans identified by the leading architectural historian Spiro Kostof (1936–1991), it

discusses grid cities, picturesque kasbah-type fabric, and Grand Manner interventions that have added great beauty to cities. It also discusses their opposite, the sublime urbanism of terrifying bigness, as well as the phenomenon of utopian “diagram cities” imposed on the landscape to reflect religious or ideological beliefs.2 Additionally, this chapter looks into the international dissemination of Haussmann’s approach, which exported from Paris the idea of making large interventions that maintain, if not add, great beauty to cities. But before we begin our journey, we return to Africa, fifty thousand years ago. There, programmed during our emergence in Africa, the human perceptual mechanisms that underpin the classical method and its approach to cities evolved.

CHAPTER 4

CLASSIC PLANNING WAS ALWAYS THERE

OUT OF AFRICA Imagine sitting together at the mouth of our cave in the Serengeti fifty thousand years ago. The view before us is beautiful: the plain, the rocks, the trees, the clouds, the water, the sky, the grasses, the plants, the mountains in the distance. For humankind, it is home. But Homo sapiens did not materialize solely as the physical bodies of a physical species. Our perceptual faculties and mechanisms were also hardwired at that time and place. We emerged as a species with our perceptions of orientation, space, place, and beauty predicated on that natural environment. The natural landscape is uniquely multiple-fractal. Rocks are fractal, trees are fractal, clouds are fractal, and the appearance of water is fractal. The grasses, plants, and mountains beyond are fractal too. The environment in which Homo sapiens evolved physically and in which our senses and behaviors were programmed is characterized by its multiple-fractal nature. Our perceptual mechanisms respond to visible fractals, and our experience of beauty is triggered by sets of fractals with specific properties.3 Fast-forward forty-five thousand years. Humankind has walked from Africa to India, Australia, and China, from the African Syrian rift valley to Mesopotamia and central Asia, toward the Mediterranean and Europe. Civilization has long been established. Alphabetical writing as we know it has been recently adopted. It is known that the earth is round and speculated that the universe is composed of atoms. Many houses have plumbing,

65

Solomon’s temple has glass windows, and there are cogwheeled machines. During peacetime, the quality of life is good for many, with more household help and a lot more time off than we have today. The abundance of agriculture allowed the ancient Greeks to sit under the olive trees, contemplate the meaning of life, and launch a philosophical discourse that continues to this day. Aristotle considered the city a natural product—that is, a product of nature—because it is in the nature of man to make cities to achieve the good. Through introspection and dialogue, he, Socrates, and others determined and came to understand that Goodness, Beauty, and Truth were a unified trinity. The path opened for them to reason whether by creating Beauty, Truth and Goodness would be invoked as well.4 Under that premise, the Greeks focused on and developed an aesthetic system designed to elicit a common experience of beauty. And so, in an experimental mode, based on architectural elements already partly in place, Greek architects sought a design method which, when built, would generate an experience of beauty in others. They built what is arguably the single most beautiful building ever constructed, the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. We know their effort was intentional because in order for the human eye to perceive it as perfectly straight, the Parthenon was built with subtly curved horizontal lines and tapered columns. A similar intention was adopted in the unique Taj Mahal two thousand years later in Agra. African savannah.

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The miracle is how briefly the Greeks worked on their “beauty project.” It was remarkably soon after the initial understanding of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as a unity that they came up with their golden-section-designed and -detailed aesthetic system. To this day, it satisfies the fractal expectation of our cognitive mechanisms, regardless of our cultural origin. The Greeks articulated the parts of the building—the beams, columns, and openings—by means of a unique aesthetic system, consisting of modes or styles that are called the Orders: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Their purpose is to help produce a common, designable, and measurable experience of beauty. Notably, the Orders correlate to Aristotle’s statement that “art imitates nature,” that the experience of art should imitate the experience of nature. Experience of the built beauty of the multiple-fractal Greek and later Roman, Renaissance, and Neoclassical Orders closely emulates the experience of natural beauty, a matter recently proven to be true across race, culture, and gender, as discussed in Chapter 6. The Orders are as unique as alphabetical writing, the system in which this book is written. As is discussed in the section “Architectural Literacy” in Chapter 7, this unique system comprises a few small shapes or moldings (the “letters”), arranged into specific short sequences or elements (“the words”), according to multiple simultaneous proportional systems. Appearing in different sizes in the design of a building and its spaces, and being self-similar at different scales, these proportional systems are fractal. Notably, the fractal dimensionality of the Greek Orders is the same as that of the African savannah. A human brain responds to viewing a classical building in the same way it responds to viewing a tree.5 All other aesthetic systems (read “styles”), attractive as they might be and as appropriate as they might be under different circumstances of culture, history, and place, do not trigger the same degree of individual aesthetic experience in the brain. The Classical Orders are therefore a key to built beauty.6 Subtly manipulating the shapes and proportions of moldings, architecturally literate architects can finetune that experience, ratcheting it higher and lower as appropriate for the occasion. Intentionally designed to

evoke an experience of beauty, the Orders, more than any other design styles in existence, contain the specific fractal geometries that most evoke that experience in humans. For almost 2,500 years, the Classical Orders provided the measurable basis for pleasing European design. But then the sublime was identified, and even the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) urged us in his book Kindergarten Chats (1917) to experimentally live without ornament, and thereby without beauty, in design. However, eliminating the elements necessary to evoke an experience of beauty in humans does not result merely in ugliness. For a hundred years, we have built countless buildings with very simple geometries, infinitely repeated, and with no ornament. Together, they form cities in the sublime forms of terror and pain. To assess whether we need to reintroduce beauty and ornament into the built environment, we need to ask what cities are for. To address that, we need to understand why and how they originated.7

THE ORIGIN OF CITIES Existing theories on the origin of cities get much of the story right. The commonly held view, that agricultural activity was necessary for cities to form, is correct in that cities emerged chronologically after the Neolithic agricultural revolution, around 10,000 BCE, when denser human populations became possible. It is also true that theocratic “god-kings” and elite religious, military, and commercial groups controlled resources and the political system. They governed people, collected taxes, built fortifications, and codified the first laws. They also invented writing, accounting, metal plows, and recordkeeping, and resided in substantial buildings while ordinary citizens lived in tightly packed mud huts along narrow lanes. But that may not be telling the whole story.8 Although Mumford noted that fifteen thousand years ago, villages included the basic institutions that predated cities—the granary, bank, arsenal, library, store, citadel, and sacred precinct—he posited that, in the transition from small open societies to amorphous, walled communities, ancient customs and comfortable,

CHAPTER 4

CLASSIC PLANNING WAS ALWAYS THERE

easy-paced routines were replaced by rigorous, efficient, and often harsh or even sadistic new ways.9 Theorists such as Jane Jacobs and John Reader proposed that the emergence of a class of itinerant, specially skilled artisans with technological knowhow freed up farmers from having to create certain goods. This enabled villagers to grow enough food to support the craftsmen and thus propel the establishment of skills-differentiated cities.10 But the proposal that Neolithic population density was that of tiny, scattered agricultural villages and that the first cities occurred when as few as a single member of a village focused on nonprimary production activity falls apart when the great size of early cities is taken into account. Classifying cities as “primate cities” or as societal products of preliterate, feudal, preindustrial, and pre-urban-industrial societies may be too limiting. It is a myth that ancient cities had no sewage facilities, and a myth that people dumped their garbage in the streets. Clearly, cities were not developed exclusively to economize on the costs of defense.11 It is probably a myth that the large cities of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome were tied exclusively to the local economy for food, that handicraft played at best a secondary role, and that cities supplemented their economic weaknesses solely with military strength. As the table below shows, it is most likely a myth that the cities of the ancient world were generally small, had only a few streets with a public building or two, and were surrounded by much larger rural populations. It is certainly not true that urbanized societies developed only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12 Our forebears were as intelligent and capable as we are. The list of material inventions they produced between 6000 and 4000 BCE—the ox-drawn plow, the wheeled cart, the sailboat, metallurgy, irrigation, the domestication of new plants, writing, bronze, bureaucracy, accounting, the beginnings of science, the solar calendar, measuring, geometry, and the ubiquitous use of the right angle—is monumental. The extraordinary oral traditions in the history and poetry of these people, as documented in the Bible and Homer’s Iliad, the first

POPULATIONS OF LARGE CITIES, 3200 BCE TO 1850 CE BCE

City

Population

3200

Abydos, Egypt

20,000

3000

Memphis, Egypt

40,000

3000

Uruk, Iraq

45,000

2500

Lagash, Iraq

60,000,

2500

Mari, Syria

50,000,

2400

Mohenjo-daro

40,000

2250

Akkad, Iraq

35,000

2000

Isin, Iraq

40,000,

2000

Ur, Iraq

100,000

2000

Memphis, Egypt

100,000

1750

Babylon, Iraq

65,000,

1500

Thebes, Egypt

100,000

1200

Pi-Ramses, Egypt

160,000

850

Haojing, China

125,000

850

Nimrud, Iraq

75,000

850

Nineveh, Iraq

100,000

430

Babylon, Iraq

250,000

300

Carthage, Tunisia

500,000

200

Pataliputra, India

350,000

100

Alexandria, Egypt

1,000,000

CE

City

Population

200

Rome, Italy

1,200,000

500

Constantinople, Turkey

500,000

575

Ctesiphon, Iraq

500,000

600

Daxing, China

600,000

900

Chang’an, China

800,000

1000

Cordova, Spain

450,000

1000

Kaifeng, China