Architecture

[Image: San Francisco, as seen from the cockpit of a 747; photo by Olivier Roux].

The last few days have been pretty awesome. We’ve been road-tripping up from Los Angeles to Reno for a dinner with author William Fox, Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, landscape activist Lucy Lippard, Land Arts of the American West co-founder Bill Gilbert, cultural programmer Dorothy Dunn, Steve Wells of the Desert Research Institute (DRI), and the staff of the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment; we spent the day yesterday on a tour of the DRI’s ice core research facilities, its micro-atmospheric testing rooms (like characters in a Borges story, they once used their equipment to test the metal content in the ink letters of a Gutenberg Bible in order to identify those letters’ near-millennium-old liquid chemistry), and the DRI’s full-scale virtual reality room.

I have some hilarious and amazing photos of Matthew Coolidge wearing black VR goggles, holding remote controls in each hand, while Bill Gilbert and Lucy Lippard look on, equally engoggled and optically stunned, flying helter-skelter over virtual terrains to chase simulated forest fires up canyon walls, the replicant ground dropping out from beneath them as we ran straight off a cliff, and I hope to post those here soon.

We had amazing conversations, as well: we’re all gearing up for a big conference next year in Reno, hosted by the Center for Art + Environment at the end of September 2011. That will definitely be something to keep your eye on if you’re at all interested in landscapes, the hydrosciences, water rights, mythology and the American West, archaeoastronomy, the contested history (and future) of weather modification, offworld exploration, the anthropology of mining, nature writing in its broadest possible sense, and much more. We’re putting together something really fantastic, to be honest, and you have 18 months to make plans to be there.

Even better, Nicola Twilley from Edible Geography and Mark Smout of Smout Allen were also on hand, winning stuffed animals together in the Circus Circus casino (Mark quipped that the casinos were simply “giant, ugly buildings with jewelry stuck on them, like earrings”), and so the three of us are now down in San Francisco, where we’ll be picking up Sarah Rich tomorrow to drive down to LA—and I can hardly imagine a better group of people to hit the Californian road with. The roads outside Reno were eight-foot canyons of plowed snow till we hit the Bay Bridge and drove past Alcatraz blinking in the darkness.

[Image: Photo by George Steinmetz/CORBIS for National Geographic; via @stevesilberman].

In any case, if you’re near San Francisco tonight, Tuesday, March 16, I’ll be giving a talk at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) starting at 6pm. It costs , unfortunately, but it should be fun, and I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends and colleagues again; as all of those friends and colleagues know, I wasn’t a huge fan of San Francisco when I lived here, but it’s good to be back in this rolling city of fog lines, abandoned bunkers that look like hills, tectonic trembling, lost ships, ghost streets, buried dunes, vinicultural microclimates, chemical weapons, a suicide bridge, and its artificially shrunken bay. I’ll be talking about quarantine, The BLDGBLOG Book (which I’m thrilled to say has just gone into a second printing), the “Glacier/Island/Storm” studio and its accompanying blog-week experiment, blackouts, and more.

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Today’s newspaper column: (Read it in the Hattiesburg American.)

You’ve heard of Leonardo da Vinci; he’s the guy who created the world’s most famous painting: the Mona Lisa.

But did you know that Leonardo embraced what we now consider a green lifestyle? And are you aware that, over five centuries ago, he articulated a way of holistic thinking that matches up perfectly with the principles of sustainability?

Born into the Dark Ages, Leonardo (1452 – 1519) ushered in an age of open-minded thinking that changed the course of history. In the thousand years before Leonardo (with notable exceptions of the windmill and the gothic cathedral) not much happened that was new and innovative. The groupthink of the day was “everything worthwhile had already been thought of or invented; only fools waste time and effort in the pursuit of new ideas.” Leonardo rejected that stagnant way of thinking.

In his day, Leonardo was famous for his amazing strength and dexterity. So extraordinary was his grace and poise, that people would peer out their windows just to watch him walk down the street. Leonardo consciously cultivated total body fitness centered on aerobic conditioning and daily stretching exercises (twenty-first century translation: yoga) along with diet – Leonardo was a strict vegetarian. He ate a high-fiber diet consisting of fresh vegetables, legumes, olive oil, and plenty of water. And lest you think a vegetarian diet results in frailty or weakness, Leonardo was legendary for being able to bend horseshoes with his bare hands and for stopping horses in full gallop by catching hold of their reins.

Leonardo was guided by an insatiable curiosity. Never satisfied with the status quo, he always pushed forward seeking a greater and truer understanding of the issue at hand. Leonardo was an advocate of lifelong learning, asking confounding questions and seeking answers up until the day he died. And learning through demonstration was Leonardo’s highest truth. He didn’t take the word of “experts” as sacrosanct. In Leonardo’s world, personal experience, testing, and a willingness to learn from mistakes trumped established authority.

Leonardo practiced the art of refinement of the senses. To understand something fully, he encouraged others to pay special attention to seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting to heighten the experience, and thus lead to a greater understanding of how things are and how things work.

Rather than looking at dichotomies (it’s either this or that) Leonardo embraced ambiguity and uncertainty, and he recognized and appreciated the interconnectedness of all things. In the world of sustainability, we call this “systems thinking.”

And finally, Leonardo sought in all things to achieve a balance of art and science, a synthesis of imagination and logic, in an act of whole-brain thinking that allowed him to navigate past prejudices and biases that all too often stand in the way of seeing the world as it is, not just as one wants it to be.

We can’t all be Leonardos, but with a little help from the original “Renaissance Man” we can begin to see the forest AND the trees.

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26 years ago, the Guggenheim hosted an exhibition of work by Will Insley, focusing particularly on Insley’s project ONECITY.

[Image: ONECITY by Will Insley; image via The Nonist].

The New York Times described it at the time as depicting an “imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square.” It is “’situated’ between the Mississippi and the Rockies and consists of many 2 1/2-mile-square structures, each divided into an ‘Over-building’ and an ‘Under-building’ and each containing nine arenas.”

[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley, via The Nonist].

The artist described his own interests as having “very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present” and no relation really at all to the ”utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.”

[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley].

Courtesy of a comment left a while back on the sorely-missed site The Nonist, we learn that Insley once quipped: “what was absent from the ruin is often less marvelous than we imagine it to have been. The abstract power of suggestion (the fragment) is greater than the literal power of the initial fact. Myth elevates.’” These mythic fragments of a city that never was thus take their artistic power more from suggestion—of possible archaeologies and future extensions, impossible events this civilization of the plains might yet undergo—rather than any sense of intended realizability.

[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley].

Continuing from the New York Times, meanwhile:

It’s clear, however, that the city’s inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. “Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing,” the night people sound a lot like the more Felliniesque denizens of the Lower East Side, being given to masks and elaborate makeup; they “mutter a lot” and “often carry around personal abstract structures” that they exchange “according to mysterious rituals.” And while they have homes in the Over-building, they frequently sleep in the cubby holes of the Under-building, ignored by day people going about their business.

ONECITY is a “masonite labyrinth,” the article concludes, complete with “Wall Fragments” that have been “gridded with white or yellow lines and shaped like garment sections waiting to be sewn together.” It’s the city as dystopian clothing that we tailor to fit our future selves. Imagine a dusty third-floor walk-up in the Garment District of Manhattan, where precise plans for megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness. Architectural invention by way of sewing diagrams.

In any case, you can see a few more images of Insley’s Michael Heizer-like creation of excavations and voids over at The Nonist.

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(The winning entry in Spontaneous Architecture’s Haiti-themed February competition is Trevor Watson’s proposal for a temporary organization infrastructure for post-disasterscapes.)

1) Videos of the Foodprint NYC panel discussions are now on iTunes U.

2) The Wall Street Journal on Mumbai’s skywalks. “To lift the pedestrians that power this city above the fray, Mumbai is building more than 50 elevated walkways. The skywalks will sprout from train stations across the city and snake over the traffic for up to two miles to create a pedestrian express lane.”

3) Mammoth on the future forests of the Eastern Seaboard.

4) F.A.D. on reclaiming the Florida Everglades. “The debacle at the south shore of Lake Okeechobee demonstrates that the Everglades restoration is a bit of a misnomer. The science-based engineering effort is much more a project of reclamation because it’s virtually impossible to recreate the Everglades as they originally were due to the extent of transformation that has occurred and the existing colonization of the territory by corporate processes. Not to mention all of the imported invasive plants, animals (such as escaped and willfully released Burmese Pythons) and other organisms that will never be fully removed.”

5) FASLA on James Corner and Field Operations. “[W]hile long renowned for his pretentious intellectual attitude, it is now reaching a new level. In a phone interview he and Mr. Hawthorne were discussing the new Santa Monica project. When discussing the budget, Corner had the temerity to remark of the 25 million dollar budget that ‘it’s hardly generous, but it’s not bad’. Well, excuse us, Mr. Corner. Excuse us for not having 130 million to throw at a project!! Excuse us for putting only 25 million toward the park in the middle of the worst recession in 80 years when forced furloughs, state budget crises, home foreclosures, and long-term unemployment are all common place.”

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The Herbert Jacobs House. An efficiently planned house.

 Built with a small budget, though incorporating all ideas that were applied to his more expensive houses.

Refer to Ford’s Details of Modern Architecture for further information.

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• UK develops ‘intelligent CCTV’
  "CCTV cameras that can pick out abandoned luggage, suspicious behaviour and lock onto potential suspects are being developed by UK researchers." [BBC News]

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Pruned posted an image the other day by artist Nicolas Moulin (more of whose work can be seen over at Vulgare). Looking into Moulin’s work further, however, I came across another series he produced a little more than a decade ago called Vider Paris. Here, we see Paris transformed into an abandoned maze of lifeless streets. Every building is sealed shut behind a seamless, Berlin Wall-like concrete monolith.

[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].

Vider Paris “is a series of computer-altered images of the streets of Paris,” we read in a PDF portfolio of Moulin’s work. “All traces of life are removed from the images: vegetal, urban furnishings, pedestrians, cars, etc.” Further, “all the buildings are sealed with sheets of concrete up to the second floor.”

[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].

The effect is oddly exhilarating; whether because these images have the appearance of being stills pulled from a much longer video, or simply because of their haunting, Ballardian overtones, Moulin’s vision of an empty Paris seems tailor-made for Hollywood art directors or even for someone sketching out ideas at Thunder Game Works.

A dream of apocalypse, twelve centuries from now, when you wander into the concretized canyons of a Paris with almost no signs of life, its skies grey, the barest trace of weeds growing up through cracks in rain-filled gutters. There are sounds of distant animals rustling, the city’s rhomboid geometries now animated by unpredictable acoustic effects. You see smoke somewhere, but it could be miles away. Looking for clean water, and a place to sleep before the sun goes down, you walk onward into the city core.

(This is now the second post I’ve written from an airplane… flying somewhere over SW Nebraska).

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Now that Landscapes of Quarantine is up and open for view—and will be until April 17—we’re off for a quick vacation. The opening night was amazing; thanks to everyone who came out, to everyone who helped set up, and to everyone whose work appears in the show. Thanks, especially, to Glen Cummings of MTWTF for a fantastic exhibition design, and to Josh Hearn and César Cotta for sticking around all week for 3am vinyl installations, multiple coats of paint, and more.

[Image: Outside-in: looking into Brian Slocum's panel installation (left) and Jeffrey Inaba's/C-LAB's temporary sidewalk pavilions, built from Tyvek and blown air, at Storefront for Art and Architecture; photo by Nicola Twilley].

I’m obviously biased, as the show’s co-curator, but the works on display are awesome. They are:

Pages 179–187 by Joe Alterio
Q-CITY: An Investigation by Front Studio/Yen Ha, Michi Yanagishita, and Joshua Cummings
MAP 002 QUARANTINE by David Garcia Studio
Did We Build The Frontier To Keep It Closed? by Scott Geiger
Field Notes from Quarantine, Katie Holten
Hotel III, Camp II, Lab IV, and Cell V by Mimi Lien
Cordon Sanitaire by Kevin Slavin
Context/Shift, Brian Slocum
Containing Uncertainty, Smudge Studio/Jamie Kruse & Elizabeth Ellsworth
NYCQ by Amanda Spielman & Jordan Spielman
Quick by Richard Mosse
Thermal Scanner and Body Temperature Alert System by Daniel Perlin
Precious Isolation: A Pair of Invasive Species by Thomas Pollman

And, for the opening night party only, Suck/Blow, a pair of sidewalk pavilions constructed from Tyvek and pressurized air, by Jeffrey Inaba/C-LAB with former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, Joseph Grima.

[Image: Photo by Emiliano Granado].

The show is already getting some great press, such as these articles and previews in Azure, Dwell, and Fast Company. Pruned, mammoth, dpr-barcelona, and Life Without Buildings have also all added interests of their own.

I’ve included a few photos here, meanwhile, but will be posting more about the show once the next few days of travel are done.

I should also briefly add that this is the first post I’ve ever written while flying in a Wifi-enabled airplane—in this case, over the American midwest—riding through invisible geographies of air, turbulence bobbling us side to side in an experiential, transparent plate tectonics of the sky.

[Image: Photo by Emiliano Granado].

So thanks again for coming out for the exhibition opening. Regular posts will resume soon.

[Images: All photos, except the last five (two of which are by Nicola Twilley and Stacy Fisher), by Emiliano Granado (who appears, with tripod, in the final image)].

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(One true mark of a great competition organizer is providing ample graphics for bloggers to choose from.)

Architecture for Humanity must be after our hearts!

Access to Trestles, one of North America’s most celebrated waves, is under threat due to safety and environmental concerns. Currently, over 100,000 people each year follow informal trails through wetlands and over active train tracks to gain access to the surf breaks at Trestles. These impromptu manmade paths present a safety hazard with passing trains and threaten the fragile ecosystem of Trestles.

In response, a coalition of concerned groups organized by the volunteer non-profit organization Architecture for Humanity, are launching Safe Trestles, an open-to-all, two-stage design competition to create a safe pathway to serve surfers, the local coastal community and day visitors to San Onofre State Beach. This coalition is looking for cohesive designs that eliminate the danger of crossing active train tracks, help to restore wetlands that have been damaged by the present path, preserve and improve vistas, and offer education about the history of the site and the beach marsh environment. The new path should ensure continued access to the resources by all members of our community and adhere to Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards.

While placing no limitations on the originality or imaginativeness of design ideas, we are looking for tangible low-impact solutions that can actually be built at a future date. Ideally, the winning entry will be sensitive to the remote and undisturbed nature of the area—providing safe access without compromising the pristine environment and views of this rare example of natural Southern California coast.

The deadline for registration and submission is April 17, 2010.

(Plan of project site. Image courtesy of Architecture for Humanity.)

Once you’ve fully reviewed the project brief and guidelines, check out the comment section where there is an interesting discussion about the need for such a competition. One commenter appears to be arguing that since a self-perceived element of hazard is an important part of the landscape’s character, a designed access path “will just take the adventure away and whole surfing experience.” The landscape is sublime, and making it “safer” would betray this supposedly inherent nature.

Setting aside the question of just how one goes about determining the “true” nature of landscapes (there’s no such thing, if you were wondering), is there a design solution that will give you the best of both worlds: sublimity and ADA approval? Where is that balance? Does one even have to strive for balance, aiming instead for a strategy that’s unequal parts feral wilderness and bureaucratic restrictions?

Perhaps we’re reading the comments too closely but territoriality seems to be bubbling just below their surface. Those who don’t mind and indeed can navigate the dangers of passing trains (e.g., surfers) hold proprietary use over Trestles. A safer route would bring the wrong kinds of users, the “rude people” (e.g., non-surfers) who “go off the paths” and “will bring trash.” This inaccessibility is a sort of filter separating the rightful users from the public at large. If you’re on a wheelchair or intimidated by informal trails or a non-surfer, this landscape just isn’t for you. But should it remain “closed” to you? The issue here, then, if there is such an issue, is not the usual private property vs. public access debate but rather which public.

In any case, we’re very excited about this competition, and can’t wait to see all the submissions, not just the finalists.

In the Archives:
Pure Geography

(Via Design Under Sky.)

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As reports and revelations about the diminishing credibility of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) continue to unfold daily, there is no question that it has major implications. If the science behind AGW were beyond doubt, it would provide a powerful argument for greater government regulation and economic participation. It would empower a worldview geared against greater personal liberty and a rising standard of living. Accumulating wealth would depend more on subsidies and catering to a marketplace in which supply and demand are dictated by government policy rather than actual needs and wants of free people.

As professionals who try to address such needs and wants in all of its variety, architects are very much subject to AGW’s affect on buildings, both in the way they are designed and engineered and in the way they respond to government mandates. In fact, architects are very much wedded to AGW, as it justifies their guiding design philosophy and helps structure their firms’ core values. Many signature designers, including a few that I personally know, have put global warming at the the center of all that their work aims to be about–whether it be in the aggressive employment of green technologies in their buildings, to their promotion of a planning solution (e.g. smart growth) or building type that can be shown to be earth-friendly (e.g. skyscapers). The issue’s inherent demand for greater control over the environment in the hands of an enlightened elite complements well with architects’ own (and as yet, unrealized) ambitions of becoming the major shapers of the built environment. Idealistic architects ultimately want to transcend the rough-and-tumble, at times crass, reality of the free market, and if the global warming issue makes this possible they will quickly jump on the bandwagon.

Now that the bandwagon’s coming apart due to the quickly evaporating authority of AGW’s leading scientific gatekeepers, will these same climate-fearing architects insist they won’t be fooled again? Will they gladly go back to merely designing pretty buildings that hopefully fullfill a client’s programmatic needs and budget? Such has been the reality for architects for most of human history, but the last couple of centuries seem to indicate that many designers will latch on to other issues that rely on the self-serving promotion of mass hysteria. These manufactured crises have helped spawn major architectural evolution and innovations we enjoy and often take for granted. However, they have also served as excuses for the abandonment of aesthetics that have bred public contempt for modern architecture and the oppressive dullness that it has wrought to our cities worldwide.

If anyone is bookish enough to read about the history architectural theory, one is struck by how the discussion changes dramatically around the late 18th century. Up to that point, when an architectural treatise was written, the question they tried to answer was simple but profound: how should one build to satisfy Nature or God? Before Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was written in first century BC, architecture in the academic realm was pretty much a religious matter, often done by priests, and rules were created for the proper design of temples and tombs. After fall of Rome (and with it, obscuring Vitruvius), a return to the religious question emerged during rise of European Cristendom until around the 14th century. Then the Renaissance kicked off 500 year-long stream of architectural treatises that tried to answer another seemingly inescapable central question: What was Vitruvius trying to say?

Far from being some sort of narrow academic obsession with the ruminations of an unremarkable Roman military engineer, it actually provided a highly practical basis on which it was possible discuss and debate about architecture from a secular point of view. Vitruvius plainly stated the values that architecture should embody: beauty, firmness, and commodity. The basis from which these values could be achieved was suddenly subject to all sorts of secular interpretation, whether through math, science, or some sort system of universal taste. Squabbles between architects over the minutiae of classical proportions may seem petty and a bit arbitrary to us now, but they were a part of a highly serious exercise in trying to figure out how to make good buidings and pleasant spaces. This strange fixation on Greco-Roman classicism left us a built legacy of undeniable appeal that continues to beloved by people the world over.

Before the industrial era of the latter half of the 18th century, architectural design neglected something else just as important as beauty: function. It wasn’t because it was deliberately ignored, but rather because life up to that point was relativly simple. Wealth was small and highly concentrated, physical comfort was unknown, people died like flies, and everyone was at the mercy of nature. The most a building was expected to do was to shelter the occupant from the rain, and have rooms big enough for a couple pieces and furniture, and, if you had the funds, some servants. Staying warm was futile, plumbing was non-existent, and you interiors were dark and draughty. The most an architect could do was to embellish the exteriors and interiors, which is partly why arguments about the Greek orders mattered so much to them.

The industrial revolution completely upended this state of affairs. Technological advances made it possible to live in a way that transcended what until then was nasty, brutish and short. Industrialization unleashed exponential increases in productivity, and with it, wealth, which then became more widely distributed and created a new middle class. The modern mentality was born, in which one was influenced by the idea that things are so new and changing that nothing from the past applies. Closely tied to this mentality was that the problems that afflicted man since the dawn of time were not immutable facts of nature, but capable of being solved or improved upon. Poverty, hunger, sickness and social injustice were no longer accepted as part of the natural order of things, since Reason, coupled scientific empiricism that made industry possible, would show the way towards a better, more enlightened future.

In this modern outlook, both age-old human problems and new problems resulting from the changes brought about by the industrial revolution were now neatly packaged under the term crisis. What was once the natural cycle of life, death, plagues and famines were now crises of public health, sanitation and unacceptable squalor. As the fecundity of the human population rose with ever greater production of food and improved medicine and a bit more money, there were crises of overpopulation, resource depletion, traffic congestion and pollution. Then later, when the masses were more properous than ever before, new crises were made out of more aesthetic and spiritual issues such as a low quality of life, poor education and more recently environmental damage. Labeling the existence of certain complex problems as a crisis instantly lends a sense of urgency and seem to imply that only grand (and preferably state driven) solutions will work. Those that operate with the crisis mentality attribute problems that afflict mankind to a lack of a rationally-inspired design. Naturally, architects of the modern era were quite keen on this.

In the past century, architectural theory changed from plodding treatises on the correctness of the classical orders or the moral quality of materials to blunt manifestoes, written often in an urgent tone and composed of a series of bold assertions and even bolder solutions. The overall attitude in these manifestos, whether it be written by the Italian futurists, the Bauhaus founders, or Le Corbusier himself, was that everything had to go. There were no small fixes. It was fundamental to start from scratch. One notices the term chaos used frequently in these manifestoes, referring to not only the rapid displacement of people and livelihoods due to the machine, but also in the way ideas, art and style continued to multiply exponentially in variety and personal whim. Corbusier’s own philosophical movement, Purism, began with the notion of a retour a l’ordre, or a return to order. To achieve this, it was necessary for the biggest players in society to take the lead, such as major industrialists and ultimately, the State.

To these Modern idealists, war had a practical benefit. It was seen by many as a way of cleansing, of ridding the old, chaotic order of the present. War’s aftermath would then bring about the opportunity to begin anew with supposedly better solutions. Closely tied to war was a financial crisis, the Great Depression, which would bring down the unjust, chaotic order of laissez-faire capitalism in which people freely make their economic choices and would then set the stage for the State to engage in centralized economic planning. Once the state was the only agent making economic choices, it would then also decide what gets and built and where, assuming it would follow the guidance of enlightened design experts. Ego-driven Nietzchean supermen such as Le Corbusier himself would be at the ready, with plans for a new radiant city, where up to three million residents would be housed in skyscrapers, multi-storied zigzaging apartment slabs, driving on highways, and enjoying abundant greenery and collective gardens. To further prove that these grand plans of his were based on the utmost rationality, he proposed to abolish the traditional urban street, which were emblematic of the chaos in traffic, inadequate daylight and fresh air, and architectural incoherence. Le Corbusier and his Modernist contemporaries were big believers in never letting a crisis go to waste.

For architects of above-normal aesthetic sensibility, their insistence that their design was based on functional considerations alone seems a bit naive to us nowadays. If one trudges through the oftentimes dry CIAM manifesto published in the 1940’s, one is stuck by how this club elite modern urban planners were so unflinchingly certain in their diagnosis of existing cities, in uncritically accepting population growth projections that often never panned out, and in their conviction that the solutions offered was the only way forward. And then to couch this all in an aura of objectivity and ’science’, it only seems a bit absurd to us today, especially upon taking stock on the havoc the CIAM movement has wrought to urban development in the latter half of the twentieth century.

But hey, they did offer a reasonable solution to all the crises as they were understood at the time. The CIAM city would fix traffic congestion by separating car traffic from people; quality of life would be dramatically better due to abundant parks and greenery; skyscrapers and towers would efficiently organize density while allowing more space for fresh air and vegetation, thus improving the health of its inhabitants. Housing would be of higher quality as well as a lot more equitable. Isolating the workplace from the residence, and confining walking to park-like pedestrian paths would also make life a lot better than what it was before. Still, in addressing the crises at the time, CIAM’s practices begot newer crises: encouraging car traffic to bridge the distance between work and home contributed to air pollution due to heavier auto traffic, the giant apartment blocks helped generated a crisis in criminality and ghettos. Modernism’s rejection of ornament and the human scale, along with copious amounts of concrete helped spawn an existential crisis, in which much of the public still doesn’t accept the works of its cultural elite, whether it be in art or achitecture. For all of modern planning’s collective fervor, their ideas seemed to disrupt cohesive communities and produced the most alienating landscapes.

Never learning from the law of unintended consequences, architects and planners responded to these new crises undiminished. Fears of a global population bomb, vanishing natural resources and a potential nuclear apocalypse led some to focus on sustainability, either as a self-sufficient village (Arcosanti, Drop City) to a new high-tech civilization based modular design (Archigram, Japanese Metabolists). These movements were quite short-lived, due to the fact they tried to address a global crisis in complete isolation from political, economic, and technological realities of the time.

Other architects and planners who were less driven by apocalytpic concerns tried instead to solve the existential crisis of communities and crime by looking backward into a simpler time before modern crises arose. A new classical historicism emerged, in which the restoration of traditional styles effectively addressed the pressing need for familiarity, security, and timelessness in a rapidly changing world. New Urbanism served as its planning arm, aiming to restore valuable social bonds through structuring streets and neighborhoods along traditional patterns. A popular theory of a “Pattern Language” argued that much traditional design resulted from natural experiences engrained in human memory. For the first time in many decades, much of the public responded favorably. Still, to much of the academic elite in the field, historicism was inadequate partly because it was too engrossed in formalism and surface treatment. Large social and environmental problems that afflicting the modern world were not being more directly engaged by a historicist movement that was busy narrowing the scope of architecture back to preoccupations of the past (eg. embellishing exteriors and interiors, keeping the rain out, worring about a building’s ‘appropriateness’). This wasn’t the premodern era where architects were mere artists-craftsment quietly serving their patrons. Now, architects expected themselves to be agents for radical change.

By the time centers of architectural thought, the schools, had rejected the historicists and isolated them to a couple of programs in the U.S. in the early 1990s, a new crisis began to take shape that would inspire many bright young architects from that point onward. Unlike previous crises, where architectural solutions were a bit out of touch with reality, this new one, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), had the potential of putting the design of buildings at the very epicenter of a broad strategy in combatting it. Since a hefty portion of overall carbon emissions (40%) is generated by buildings, architects were now in position to lead the way in devising critical solutions, and thus saving civilization from impending climate-induced collapse. Instead of wallowing in isolation imagining future fantasies as was often the case in the 1960s and 1970s, in the era of global warming, all things are aligned for architects to make a difference. Economic and political entities perceive the cost of climate change to be so great so as to fundamentally rethink how we build, how much our structures consume, and in what other new ways our buildings can perform. The technology has also caught up, thanks to modern computing, with new automated systems in adjusting energy usage, daylight, and enabling all kinds of surfaces to absorb and transmitt solar energy. Knowledge of green design had recently become more systematized, with widely accepted ratings such as LEED. And unlike the efforts of a few decades before, most green buildings looked mainstream, differing from non-green buildings only in terms of specified materials and systems.

All these improvements and advances don’t come cheap, and like anything that bills itself as environmentally friendly, they have yet to be competitive in the market place due to this inherent price premium. Businesses that push green projects can only circumvent this market disadvantage with taxpayer-funded subsidies and intensive government patronage. Supporting these projects thus relies on state policies aimed at regulating the marketplace based on an overruling belief in the public good. As long as AGW presents itself as a crisis that threatens everyone’s well-being, then the government sees itself as justified in redistributing wealth towards companies (and the designers that depend on them) that promote its definition of the public good. To put it crudely, many architects saturated in green orthodoxy, have become willing instruments of the state. This is nothing new in the profession, but it has become a prevailing pattern in the past century for architects to be joined at the hip with all kinds of regimes. To many idealistic architects (which is at least half of them) serving the goals of the state is fine so long as the policies pursued are enlightened. It beats having to make a living in the messy marketplace, to which many of values architects hold dear have either a high price tag or no worth at all.

If carbon emissions from humans are proved to have no affect on climate change, and thus government-led action is irrelevant to stopping what is a complex natural occurence, is it a valid public good? It’s important to remember that although crisis often bring about a lot of wrong-headed solutions, there are just as many innovations that we could not live without. Making buildings much more efficient over its lifecycle as a means of reducing carbon emissions is clearly a public good, especially as it adapts to growing competition for natural energy resources due to rapid economic development throughout the globe (which is also good). Implementing ways to reduce a building’s negative externalities to the environment is also a public good, if it improves air and water quality and minimizes the disturbance on ecosystems.

What is not a public good is expending extraordinary sums of other people’s money when the benefits are either meager or non-existent. Nor is it good when the vast sums of money shield producers from the market discipline, thus slowing real innovation. What AGW has done so far is to force lots of money to be spent on measures that achieve comparatively little benefit but incur an enormous burden for everyone whether through higher overal prices, increased taxes, and the uneconomic elimination of perfectly productive and profitable industries that employs millions. It has also apportioned even more gobs of state money towards subsidizing renewal energy, which, by the immutable scientific laws that apply to them, will remain a highly inefficient and expensive means of producing energy. In buildings, it has encouraged designers to integrate wind and solar generation, which dramatically raises construction cost and maintenance in exchange of providing a small fraction in the operation of the building itself. Another example is that the fear in the carbon produced in the transport of vegetables from farms has gotten a number of young architects to embrace the idea of growing produce on the building, whether through green screen walls or green roofs. Never mind that such practices do not make food cheaper nor make city dwellers better farmers nor our time more wisely spent. And then add to those the extra cost of moistureproofing and reinforcing structures.

Once the urgency in AGW sputters to a standstill, what are architects left to do? Maybe what they have always done, before modern crises appeared on the scene: focus on beauty, strutural soundness and the way it functions in relation to what is appropriate according to circumstances. It does not mean one has to resort to historicist styles or classicism. Rather, we should openly encourage aesthetic and technical experimentation and development, but within the limits placed by reality, such as the client’s wishes, the site’s urban context, natural properties and climate. For the more politically idealistic, these goals don’t go far enough. For the rest of us, it assures a more honest dialogue with the public that we serve, and in return, the public awards us with higher esteem for our creations. An added bonus is that we won’t be portrayed as elite dupes.

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