Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World

280 Pages·2016·4.07 MB·English

by  Graham Wade.

Contents
Introduction
[1] Castles:
Bertram Goodhue and the Romantic City
[2] Monuments:
Daniel Burnham and the Ordered City
[3] Slabs:
Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, and the Rational City
[4] Homesteads:
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Anticity
[5] Corals:
Jane Jacobs, Andres Duany, and the Self-Organizing City
[6] Malls:
Victor Gruen, Jon Jerde, and the Shopping City
[7] Habitats:
Kenzo Tange, Norman Foster, and the Techno-Ecological City
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Also by Wade Graham
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
In order to go forward and consider the city that might be, we must look at the
many visions of our cities since the beginning of the massive urbanization that
marks this century. What have the proposals been? Have they been tested, and if
so, what have we learned from them? What were the values that guided their
authors, and to what extent has society itself changed in the unfolding of the
saga of twentieth-century urbanism?
—MOSHE SAFDIE, 1997
D
ream Cities is a book that explores our cities in a new way—as expressions of
ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and
believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose dreamed-of
cities became the blueprints for the world we actually live in. From the
nineteenth century to today, what began as visionary concepts—sometimes
utopian, sometimes outlandish, always controversial—were gradually adopted
and constructed on a massive scale, becoming our concrete reality, in cities
around the world, from Dubai to Shanghai to London to Los Angeles. Through
the lives of these pivotal dreamers and campaigners and those of the acolytes
and antagonists who translated or fought their plans, we can trace the careers not
just of the urban forms that surround us—the houses, towers, civic centers,
condominiums, shopping malls, boulevards, highways, and spaces in between—
but also of the ideas that inspired them, embodied in buildings, neighborhoods,
and entire cities. Dream Cities aims to show how to see the world we already
inhabit in a new way, to see where our urban forms—our architectures—come
from, how they intend to shape us, how we shape them in turn, and how we
participate in the whole process.
Conventional histories of architecture talk about style, and the uniqueness of
buildings as though they are art objects, like paintings, independent of their
context. But cities are all context, made up not simply of buildings but of
assemblies of forms and the spaces and relationships between them, and between
this built environment and us. These architectures are what make cities real: each
is a design, intention, assertion, thrust, or counterthrust in the long-running
battles and debates about how we ought to live. Dream Cities is a history of
where these forms came from and how they work, and a field guide for
identifying and decoding them.
Sometimes we build cities all at once, like new towns, suburbs, or capitals
right from the drawing board. Mostly, they are built over time, by different
parties, with various bits superimposed on or pushing into one another,
displacing, erasing, destroying, replacing, and being replaced. This is why so
many cities feel disjointed and complex—they can be read as layers recording
change over time as traces, stacks, and collisions, or like partial graveyards of
old architectures, many that still live on, being added to, abandoned, or
repurposed. Cities can also be read as battlegrounds where different architectures
compete, each with an agenda, and economic and political consequences. There
are winners and losers. The program of one kind of urban form is often
incompatible with other values embodied in other kinds of form. Some use more
resources than others, or take resources from another. Some divide and alienate
us from other people, from the shared life of communities, or from responsibility
for the planet. Always, when a dream architecture becomes a reality, there are
unintended consequences.
The glass towers of downtown business districts stand against traditional
neighborhoods with their mix of residences, commercial buildings, and
community spaces; the leafy streets of affluent gated enclaves seem to deny the
concrete cell blocks built to house the masses in so much of the world, cut off
from the rest of the city by elevated highways; pseudo-rural, car-dominated,
suburban sprawl competes with the density and inclusiveness of pedestrian-
scaled neighborhoods, whether in traditional older city centers or in recent
mixed-use developments; huge, hyper-designed “experience” shopping malls
and ground-up mini-cities built around retail replace Main Street mom-and-pop
stores and redefine the boundaries of public and private space in our lives.
Architectures are expressions of the desires of their designers and builders;
these forms intend to shape people and thus shape the world. As churches intend
to make people pious, prisons to make them obedient, schools to make them
attentive, or monuments to make them civic-minded, we build our cities with
intent, each type of built form designed to produce a given outcome, provide a
particular environment, promote or discourage a certain behavior. Dream Cities
is concerned with the new architectures of the modern world, as envisioned by
their most influential dreamers. Tall towers and fast highways intend to make us
feel and act modern and efficient; monumental museum districts, parks, avenues,
and plazas to make us feel orderly and civic; shopping malls to make us want to
buy, and in doing so to make us happier; sprawling suburbia to make us feel
independent and free of the city and its crowding, and when historically themed,
to make us forget our present reality by transporting us to other time realms;
“eco-friendly” developments to make us feel in enlightened balance with nature.
It would seem logical that urban forms should reflect the enormous
differences in climate and geography where people live. The Inuit igloo, the
Puebloan cliff dwelling, and the white masonry villages of the Mediterranean are
marvelous adaptations to their surroundings. Topography, geology, winds,
temperatures, and weather all played a part in how traditional cities were built.
But these days, local variation is hard to spot. In the modern era (since about
1850 in Western Europe and America and now everywhere), cities look more
alike than they do different, from Singapore to Ulan Bator to Boston to Moscow
to Buenos Aires. Aside from those parts of them built before the modern era—
the odd churches, squares, and low-rise historic districts—there is a remarkable,
global urban monotony: here are tower blocks, there freeways, there shopping
malls, over there pseudo-historic suburbs, here a formally ordered civic center,
beyond that, mile after mile of car-dependent sprawl. These elements make up
the major part of most modern cities, and yet they are rarely mentioned in tourist
guides or architectural histories, or even acknowledged.
Each visionary thinker in this book intended his or her architecture as an
improvement on the state of things. Many describe their architecture and urban
design as a sort of medicine, designed to cure the diseases of the modern city,
which, we will hear over and over again, ail us. They often rail against
modernity: the enormity, chaos, and crowding of industrial and postindustrial
cities. Some call for a retreat to a simpler past, or to the imagined peace of the
agrarian countryside, or to basic nature itself. Others look to a future when new
technologies such as railroads, automobiles, or computers will liberate us from
the dystopian city and bring forth a new, nearly utopian way of living.
Concerned with buildings and the spaces in between them, they approach the
problem of improving human shortcomings through the improvement of things:
buildings, housing, transportation, or technologies. Explicitly or implicitly, the
visionaries profiled in this book tend toward embracing what the theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr called “the doctrine of salvation by bricks alone.” Putting our
best efforts into reforming the built environment as the means to reform
ourselves and society is a remarkably deeply held belief in our culture, as if we
modern urban dwellers are a cargo cult, putting faith in things to transform our
souls and spirits.
The results have been uneven. Some of the dream cities made real described
in this book have had less than happy consequences—in the destruction of older
urban fabrics that we in retrospect recognize for their virtues, and in the
displacement of millions of people from familiar homes into unfamiliar, often
dysfunctional landscapes. The urge to reform the congested city has meant, all
over the world, the enabling and acceleration of car-dominated, resource-
gobbling sprawl. Yet other efforts to reengage the city on its own merits while
recognizing its challenges, and to reimagine it for an evolving modernity, have
been heroic, lifelong campaigns for the visionaries at their forefront.
Dream Cities is not a history of Utopias, though some of the blueprints
decoded in it were meant to be utopian. Nor is it a polemic about the failings of
our cities; it offers no model for a more perfect world. In the words of the
historian and critic Lewis Mumford: “In the end, I promise, I shall make no
attempt to present another utopia; it will be enough to survey the foundations
upon which others build.” Dream Cities aims instead to tell the stories behind
much of our built environment, to narrate the dreams and intentions—mostly
unexamined—behind the now-mundane forms of the modern city. It strives to
give the reader the tools to identify the architectures all around us (a field guide,
as it were, such as one would use to identify types or species of creatures in
nature, and to read, decode, and understand the implications of them); to train
ourselves (to continue the analogy with the natural world) to know these urban
types by their plumage, their calls, their habitats, and behaviors; and to recognize
how they actively shape our lives, while we—most of us, most of the time—go
about our daily business.
[ 1 ]
Chapter
Castles
Bertram Goodhue and the Romantic City
All history is the history of longing.
—T. J. JACKSON LEARS, REBIRTH OF A NATION
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace
built upon the sand!
—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, “SECOND FIG”
I
grew up in sixteenth-century Andalusia. Or so it might have seemed. Most of
the small city where I was born is made of white stucco buildings with deep-set
windows guarded by wrought iron grates and topped with red roofs. The
courthouse is resplendent with brightly colored Tunisian tiles and crowned by a
baroque clock tower; even its jail resembles a Moorish palace. The scent of
orange blossoms fills the air in winter, and bougainvillea and roses drape over
homes and businesses alike. The town’s sea of red roofs is presided over by the
twin bell towers of an old Spanish church. The street grid is laid out on the 45-
degree tilt specified by the Laws of the Indies, the street names drawn from the
surnames of the town’s first Spanish settlers. A handful of the original adobe
structures have been restored and stand as reminders of historical continuity. But
99 percent of the city is fake. This is Santa Barbara, California, 90 miles north of
Los Angeles, mostly constructed in the twentieth century and still being built in
the twenty-first by Americans flush with industrial fortunes intent on living
inside a full-scale stage set of someone else’s vanished past.
As a kid, I traversed this faux-Mediterranean idyll on my skateboard. It all
seemed perfectly natural. As I got older, I absorbed the mostly unspoken
narrative that this ambience and attention to detail were what made us in Santa
Barbara different, and, it was implied, better than those condemned to live in
LA, the smog-and traffic-choked Babylon to the south. This story was
reassuring: the town’s antiquated style conferred both a measure of virtue and
some degree of protection, because of its separation in time and space from the
degraded and degrading Big City.
The separation in space was easy enough to understand: to leave the traffic
and smog to others not fortunate enough to live here was evidently a good thing.
The other part—the vague sense of virtue that the town’s architecture promised
—was harder to nail down. Gradually, I came to understand that what was at
play was psychological, the achievement of a sense of time travel to a better
world. For it to work, the place needed to be more than simply many miles away
from the city. It had to be apart from it, as if it occupied a time in the past, a
separation more important than physical distance and much harder to bridge. At
the simplest level, the veneer of antiquity promises those who invest in it a good
return, not just in property value but in worth—in the social-worth and possibly
the self-worth sense. A patina of antiquity in real estate can vest a person or
family with the aura of old money—which is why the nouveaux riches of all eras
have chosen to buy castles to launder their money, washing that bad, arriviste
smell out of their wealth. In Santa Barbara the money has mostly always been
“new,” as each generation of new arrivals brings its loot from some distant
capitalist battlefield, retiring from the fray in genteel fashion in this paradise.
The illusion of standing apart in space and time also satisfied another
longing: to not live in a modern city at all, to have nothing to do with what the
city stands for—work, toil, struggle, urgency, and other people, especially
undesirable ones. Santa Barbara is a modern city made successful by pretending
that it is neither thing. Its new “old” architecture is an illusion that sustains the
collective delusion of difference, which is what makes it so desirable. It forms
the basis for a limited-access Utopia.
After a few trips down south as a teenager, I also came to see that the
supposed hell of Los Angeles was largely filled with the same stuff: many
neighborhoods were lined with Spanish-style houses and commercial buildings,
and others were cobbled together from a myriad of different historicist and
equally ostentatious modernist styles. The difference was that in sprawling LA
there were big gaps in the continuity, as they say in the movie business, so the
illusion was rarely as perfect. Yet the basic business these areas were aiming at
was the same: re-creating historical architectures as a way of conjuring that
golden sense of separation. It was all a sort of a real estate pageant, with
romantic trappings that were just that—costumes, veneer, finery, plumage to
attract, shiny jewelry to dazzle and distract, ourselves as much as others.
Once you saw what it was, you saw it everywhere: as a part of cities in the
form of exclusive outer suburbs or inner enclaves, or sometimes as the basic
fabric of whole cities. You can see historical re-creation all over North America,
Europe, indeed, all over the world in contemporary cities. The practice began in
the nineteenth century when industrial, urban modernity first appeared, then
spread through the global “West” in the twentieth century, and continues
spreading now, in the twenty-first, as industrial modernity does. It is a curious
phenomenon: as we advance, we reach backward in time.
All of it begs the question: Why? Where did it come from? What cultural
need made this, and keeps making it? What does it do for us, that we are willing
and eager to invest so much in it? How does the magic work? The answer has
always been right there in plain sight: in the ponderous white houses along the
streets, with their carved oak doors and their gardens of myrtle hedges and
lemon trees, or perhaps in the country club up on the hill, crowned by a stout
tower like an ancient battlement, where fortunate members play 18 holes of golf
on a weekday, overlooking the sparkling Pacific.
The original designer of much of this place was one of the greatest architects
to have ever worked in America, and you have most likely never heard of him.
You may have seen one or more of his buildings—maybe the Nebraska State
Capitol, with its iconic “Sower” sculpture throwing seeds from its 400-foot-tall
tower, or the magnificently detailed Art Deco–crossed-with-Mediterranean Los
Angeles Central Library, or one of his stunning Gothic-style churches in New
York, Boston, or Chicago, but you probably don’t associate them with or even
recognize their author’s name, Bertram Goodhue. Why? Partly because, in the
opinion of the modernist critics who came after him and wrote the architectural
history books we read today, Goodhue didn’t make “modern” buildings, so they
consigned him to the dustbin of history, crowded as it is with quaint cornices,
columns, pointed arches, and ornaments—what the Viennese proto-modernist
architect Adolf Loos famously called “crime.” Yet the modernists missed the
point. In a paradoxical way, Goodhue, while drawing on the architectural forms
of the past, in fact drew the plans for huge swaths of the global contemporary
city, precisely by rejecting the forms and spaces of modernity. In their place, he,
and many others before and after him, substituted an antimodern, antiurban
world of traditional symbols and forms. They performed the magic trick of
convincing us to accept the modern world in the moment of privately rejecting it.
It all began with a bit of make-believe.