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March 18, 2005
Architecture vs. Urban Design
There is a lot of debate, and anger, between those who practice & follow architecture, and those who care and plan the built environment – not that there is, or should be, any Difference between the two, but... The assumed ego mania of Art-itecture, and their Star Architects, grates against the Public’s interest keepers – planners and urban designers who are not interested in the terms of capital A-rchitecture, and the practitioners of it, but in the smooth interaction between space and user. Insight garnered for and from the ‘public’. Maybe all that anger toward the ‘star architect system’, as it is pejoratively referred to, could be channeled at the highway appropriations bill, or county building boards, or *Gasp*, toward thinking more deeply about what type of Space & Structure honors the human experience better than Neat Shops, Scaled Streets, and Pedestrian friendly Corners. Albuquerque thought progressively about their downtown, and then hired a new urbanist firm who put forward a monster Rule Book of how buildings can and cannot address the space they inhabit.
While I like, in principal, the ease of "three rules", and its applicability in the exurban and suburban landscapes, even, at times, in the newly built urbanscapes, I find it frighfully weak and terminally simplistic in the consideration of Every Building at Every Site. As a lens of criticism it doesn't even begin to approach a work of architecture with any compelling rigor in its analysis of space, or the experience of it – except in its perimeter. It looks at the outline, and then condemns the center.
The hugely important move towards Urban Design is one I applaud, especially after journeying to places like the I-95 corridor of South Florida. This is the best place, and in my estimation, The Place this type of approach is necessary, productive, and applicable. The great cartopia wastelands needs hard and fast rebuttals, to what is a hard and fast space of alienation. But the ease with which Urban Design thinks of scoffing and leveling – absolutely discounting – architecture that doesn't treat its hard, simple, and derogatory regulation is simply candy fancy. I’m not arguing that we instill a priestly trust in a system of Star Architects. But the ire and anger America’s cartopias produce shouldn’t be channeled into architect bash sessions with the unruly newurbanist designer & bitter bureaucratic planner sanctimoniously charging Contempt in the court of the Passing Pedestrian. The constant condemnation of Rem's library is partly resultant from the idea that the pedestrian & their experience from the perimeter is above all the Singular drive in the design of any building, is mildly retarded at best. That, if it does indeed fail on that level then it was failed as a structure, is laughable analysis. Walk around Battery Park City, it fails to inspire anything but Ire in its well proportioned rule obeying NU plan. Great! Because architecture doesn't matter, right?
The ramming fascism of Glass Boxes has of course produced a qualified reaction amongst us, who never enter the boxes we’re towered over by. Surely the S&L's go-go 80’s of corporate office parks and searingly derivative Mies boxes has created an unhandled steam engine of angst towards our architects disregard for the pedestrian and the sick love for oil based transport... But.
But the current direction of so much bottled anger towards how we’ve produced our landscapes, what has taken precedent, and how much we’ve lost shouldn’t remit us towards burning the few sites of architectural luster we have, but towards the millions of developer built, cinder block suck holes going up every minute around the country, in every breath of wasted condemnation on folks like Koolhaas & Herzog. While I think much of Koolhaas’s work maybe theoretical bluster, laughable contradiction, and wholly inappropriate site handling, the preconceived prejudice so many have towards a building before they even experience it is downright sophomoric. What fucking building does Kunstler like? A Leon Krier sack of neoclassical derivatives? I hope not, he’s too intelligent for that...yet I think the anger birthed from our Oil based Suburban wasteland has clouded even the most astute.
It seems to me the trend is only gaining speed. As if the angry planners, who’ve aligned themselves with the urban designers, tired neo-traditionalists, and their new urbanist bedfellows, will finally get their Power back from those meddling artists of structure. Fuck the idea that every single building should follow some hard and fast Rules we’ve somehow cooked out of our banal little assessment of a stip mall. No shit the pedestrian should be considered, even worshipped, but fuck already. It’s deeper than that. I hope.
Posted by jmarston at March 18, 2005 01:07 PM
Comments
"It seems to me the trend is only gaining speed."
Well, thank goodness for that -- perhaps those neo-traditionalists aren't so tired after all. Today, 3 out of 200 architecture schools in the U.S. focus on traditional and classical design; with luck and determination that number will increase.
In the meantime, the decon/avant gardist/novelty wing of the architectural establishment is utterly ascendant, dominating not only the universities but also the industry's journals and magazines, the museums, the prize-granting institutions, and even postage stamps. Yet still they cling to the fiction they're under attack and struggling for survival. It's their uber-myth.
But anyhow, enough of this abstract pontificating. Let's discuss specifics. Which of Leon Krier's buildings have you experienced in person?
Posted by: Laurence Aurbach at March 28, 2005 06:37 PM