Month: March 2017

In recent blog posts we have taken our colleagues in the architecture, design and development communities to task for “drinking the kool-aid” of a fashionable but damaging form of Neo-Modernism.   It might well be asked, what’s the alternative, then? Our answer is to bring up the “b” word – that is, “beauty”, in the ordinary and humanistic sense.  Beauty in the sense that human environments have been loaded with up to “modern” times – and a word that has been all but banished from the profession in the last half-century or so.

Why is that? In part because architecture has stopped being about providing artfully designed human habitat, and started being about making avant-gardist art-statements, as a language for marketing and propagandiizing industrial systems, but that has become complicit, reactionary and even corrupt.  (As we will discuss more below.)

This approach says, let’s just take the industrial systems of large expanses of glass, shiny steel, blank metal panels and so on, and compose them in pop-arty ways. This is what we have to do to be “of our time,” right?  Maybe we can even be really avant-garde, and make some really exotic swoopy forms that no one has seen before. WOW! Look what we made!  (I’ve seen this kindergartenish impulse first-hand in many of my students in design studios in the US and Europe.)

But there is a deep philosophical problem with such an approach to human habitat – and a great many thoughtful critics have pointed it out. In a word, it contributes to the growing ugliness of the world. And in some deep and important way, that has a relation to the growing unsustainability of our world too.

And by the way, it also has a close relation to the natural reaction of residents to these proposed buildings: “Not in my back yard!”   But on the other hand — and as we will discuss more in a future post —  what if the proposal was “beauty in my back yard?”  What if it was much easier to convert residents to “yes in my back yard” or YIMBYs?  How many of Portland’s current stalemates and difficulties could be alleviated?  How much better would the overall legacy be (as opposed to an art work here or there) for future generations?

This question arises at an interesting time in the sciences — one that gives us a very different picture of natural structure from that of the early Modernists, as we have written about elsewhere.  Beauty, viewed from a more recent scientific lens, is starting to look less like some bourgeois artifact from “ye olden days” and more like a basic property of biological systems – and a necessary property of healthy ones.

Specifically, beauty seems to be the name that we give to an experience of coherence, health, integration, natural orderedness. This is no less important in human environments too – although of course, there is scope for other qualities in human environments, like surprise, novelty, expressiveness, and so on. But the problem arises when we focus too much on those aspects, to the detriment of ordinary experiences of beauty. Then we compromise the needs of our own clients and public, for the sake of our own artistic and financial agendas. Professionally speaking, this is a deep rupture in the question of our ethical accountability to human well-being.

Recall the warning of profession leader Rem Koolhaas:

“The work we do is no longer mutually reinforcing, but I would say that any accumulation is counterproductive, to the point that each new addition reduces the sum’s value… So there are many problems, first of all our work, which is not able to find its way out of this recurring dilemma, then there are the many reasons to question our sincerity and motives.”

– Rem Koolhaas, speaking at a symposium on “Market versus Meaning”

What Koolhaas was referring to is the subtle corruption that takes place, encouraging us to justify our acts of industrial marketing as somehow lofty goals of art or sustainability. Are they? Have we really examined the evidence?  Or do all our works just add up to urban noise and decay, slowly devastating cities around the world?  We think there is reason to be troubled, even deeply troubled, by what has happened at the hands of the design professions (and the development professions that are served by them, often poorly).

At the same time, defenders of this Neo-Mod approach can be vicious when attacking even tenuous new works of non-modern architecture – the kind of viciousness that is seen in a cornered animal. “It’s impossible to do this kind of hackneyed historicist kitsch without coming off as shoddy, fake, inappropiate for our time,” they hiss.

Historicist!  Kitsch!  Pastiche!  These are stylistic curse words, with no more sophisticated thinking than that behind them (as has begun to be recognized in some surprising places).

But how sensible, really, is the thinking behind them?  That yes, the beautiful old places everywhere around us are wonderful, beloved, cool, and sustainable, precisely because they have sustained — but we must never, ever build anything like them again?    This seems downright lunatic.

Is the architecture “of our time” doomed to be ugly?  Why is that?  Is it because we are wicked and must be punished, with in-your-face artiness of questionable quality and appropriateness?  This is a kind of architectural masochism – or worse, sadism.

On the contrary, is there not a necessary place for the “good background” and the “good contextual,” that provides ordinary delights, and supports an active, intricate public realm? Is that not an important quality for a city’s ultimate sustainability? I think so.

Is the shoe now on the other foot — that the Neo-Modernists are now the reactionary ones, defending a failed experiment in human habitat, in the words of the great urbanist Jane Jacobs,  “almost neurotic in their determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success”?

Has the “every building a Mod art object” approach failed us? I think so.

Is it time to take the really radical step — re-accept the revival of the ornaments and other geometries of an evolutionary humanist history?  I think so.

It seems the architecture and design community has forgotten a painful lesson.  All through the 1960s and 1970s, the world saw a brilliant set of critiques of the colossal failures of modernism in architecture — Peter Blake’s Form Follows Fiasco, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities,  Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, and many more.  We also saw the beautiful historic cores of cities  demolished to make way for ugly outscale boxes, meant as much to market the shiny new corporate world as anything else.  “New!  Improved!”

Out in the sprawling suburbs this new orthodoxy also brought in giant boxy department store malls and wide Le Corbusier-style freeways lined with slab-tower offices.  The houses, superficially traditional, were also exceedingly modernized too — stripped of ornament, full of blank panels and crude window proportions.  But it was all so… modern!

Of course these structures were incredibly profitable for the companies involved.  Of course they all left us immeasurably poorer, in the environmental disaster of suburbia, in the civic life and the public spaces of the profoundly damaged cities.

In those heady activist days, Portland seemed to learn its lessons, and a wave of revival swept into the city:  new traditional structures around Pioneer Square, historic renovations in Old Town,  revitalizations in the historic neighborhoods, and revival of “old-fashioned” planning ideas like transit and walkability.

But now the fashion has shifted, and what was new and then old is now new again.  A generation that forgot its lessons about human scale and public-space delights — or never learned them — is now profiting from the latest op-art fashions.  It will be all right this time, they tell us.  This time we will jam them together and put propellers on them!

It’s not like no one knew.  All along, the critics have been very articulate about the problems of modernism, even up to the present day.  All along we have witnessed the complicity with environmental disaster — which won’t be mitigated with a few bolt-on gadgets.  Here is the  world-famous “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas, speaking much more recently:

Modernism’s alchemistic promise – to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition – has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn’t work. Its ideas, aesthetics, strategies are finished. Together, all attempts to make a new beginning have only discredited the idea of a new beginning. A collective shame in the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater in our understanding of modernity and modernization.

Where is the “collective shame” in Portland?   It has been forestalled for a time — until the latest crop of failures catches up to us yet again. And then we will wonder, as we did a half century ago, how we let so much of our livable heritage be destroyed.

More on this subject:

“Architectural Myopia: Designing for Industry, not People”

“How Modernism Got Square”

 

The level of anger among Portland neighborhoods is palpable.  The promise of Portland’s neighborhood involvement system, a noble creation of activists of the 1970s and 1980s, is now in doubt.  Instead of focusing on the core agenda of empowering grass-roots democracy and participation, too much of the focus seems to be on “turf protection,” “damage control,” blaming “NIMBYs” and suppressing “troublemakers.” Too many competing agendas – many of them unaccountable special interests – are acting to suppress healthy democratic debate and grass-roots problem-solving.

What are the key issues?  We see four main areas of concern:

– Funding equity. Surely each citizen should receive, through their local neighborhood association, an equitable share of the support provided by the City for neighborhood involvement and participatory budgeting. At present, funding disparity is an unacceptable condition for many East Portland neighborhoods, and for neighborhoods with significant minority populations. More broadly, it is an issue for all neighborhoods, whose democratic participation and financial equity are diluted and filtered by coalition bureaucracies, and by misguided attempts to insert competing “non-geographic communities” in a heavy-handed, hodge-podge fashion.
– Direct and meaningful democratic representation. All neighborhood associations should be free to form coalitions and caucuses so as to magnify their influence on issues of common concern. However, the current non-profit coalition system, which was created and imposed by the City, has produced significant problems. Most seriously, it introduces an extraneous, essentially unaccountable unit of governance (i.e. a State-recognized non-profit corporation, which is a legal person outside of City governance). This structure causes interference with democratic representation, by introducing a discontinuous layer of administrative bureaucracy. Because it is a separate corporate person, it does not and cannot operate effectively within the accountable system of City governance. This extraneous layer must be reformed.
– Efficiency, transparency and accountability of support. Funding and other forms of support should be leveraged to provide maximum impact with maximum transparency and accountability. All actions should focus on direct citizen participation, participatory budgeting and capacity to act within their own neighborhoods. However, as noted previously, the current coalition system inserts a series of bureaucratic layers, inefficiencies, and competing (sometimes unaccountable) agendas.
– Subsidiarity and meaningful participation. The principle of “subsidiary governance” relies upon the recognition that ultimately, “all politics is local.” It follows that all other levels of government are subsidiary and should be in the business of empowering the most local units. While other non-geographic communities can and should be recognized, they should not be placed into competition with the neighborhoods and their associations, or within the Office of Neighborhood Involvement. Geographic representation is a fundamental principle of American governance, and therefore, the focus must be on maximizing participation by excluded communities within the neighborhood associations themselves – not by placing the City’s “thumb on the scale” and diluting the authentic democratic participation of neighborhoods and their citizens with City-selected “non-geographic” entities.

Portland has an internationally celebrated neighborhood involvement system — but the evidence is that it has become complacent, stagnant and dysfunctional. Both the new mayor Wheeler and Commissioner Eudaly have been elected with a mandate for reform.  The moment of opportunity is present, but limited.  The time for reform has arrived.