Back in 1996, The New York Times’ architecture critic announced, “The Congress for the New Urbanism is the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era.” He was on to something.
What is the CNU? According to its charter:
We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns ... , the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.
We advocate … the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; … urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.
Founded in 1993, the CNU has been the foremost opponent to suburban sprawl and the Geography of Nowhere, together with horrendously planned cities and towns. The New Urbanist movement it represents has achieved real-world success: new and rehabilitated communities around the country, and indeed the world, that put its principles into practice, often via zoning codes. Examples include the new towns Haile Village and Rosemary Beach in Florida, and the mixed-income redevelopments Martin Luther King Plaza in Philadelphia and Park DuValle in Louisville, Kentucky.
Last month, hundreds of people gathered in Dallas for CNU’s annual convention. Mark Lamster, the architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, reported on the event in an article titled “Why Is So Much Architecture Junk?” He begins:
This is a golden age of the American city, with urban centers more prosperous and popular than ever, but somehow we continue to build boorish and boring works that do nothing to enhance the public realm, and all too often diminish it. How does this continue to happen, and right in front of our eyes? Who is to blame, and what can we do about it?
As an example of the diminishment of the urban realm, Lamster points to a planned block-sized parking garage in Dallas. The building is simply a massive blank box with a flat street wall; it has no decoration or detail.
His answer to his rhetorical questions is curious, and is worth examining since it raises the additional question: Why is so much architecture criticism junk? Lamster is a voice of the architectural establishment—the incestuous complex of leading practitioners, schools, and critics who produce and are apologists for the ugly, alienating world in which we live. (There is a great irony in that long before he was a newspaper critic, Lamster, as he confessed, co-edited “The Gutter,” a snarky blog that mocked that complex.)
Lamster reports that the CNU convention addressed his titular question in a panel called “How to Rebuild Architecture.” The discussion was inspired by a New York Times op-ed with the same title. (Lamster previously called the column “very smart.”) The CNU panelists’ verdict was clear: They blamed contemporary architects—which is ipso facto to blame the architectural Modernists who dominate the profession. Lamster doth protest.
While he concedes the New Urbanists have achieved some beneficial success, “generally for the good,” he compares them to Tea Partiers: “the CNU is perceived as something like an architectural Tea Party: a reactionary organization that has succeeded due to pugnaciousness and intensive grass-roots organization. As with the Tea Party, it is typical to hear New Urbanists bemoaning the ‘indoctrination’ of students at elite universities.”
This analogy is odd to say the least. New Urbanists in fact have long been associated with the left side of the political spectrum: after all, they advocate not just for more regulation and thus restraints on the free-market in development, but they support crunchy policies such as bike lanes and walkability. In fact, CNU played an influential role in the Clinton administration, and one of the organization’s presidents was John Norquist, former Democratic mayor of Milwaukee. And when you look at the personal politics of leading New Urbanist thinkers and advocates, you find that the vast majority are liberals.
Indeed, New Urbanism’s perceived political associations have caused the American Conservative magazine to attempt to persuade the Right to support the movement. You find opinion pieces with titles such as “New urbanism isn't just for liberals — conservatives should embrace it too.” And there was even a panel at the conference Lamster attended on the theme “Bipartisan Placemaking: Reaching Conservatives,” which stressed that New Urbanism is pragmatic and non-ideological.
Lamster is a man of the Left who made a point of announcing, in a piece of architectural criticism, that he supported the Occupy Wall Street movement. Thus, for him, to compare CNU to the Tea Party is to equate it with what he believes to be the cretinous booboisie. One finds more bile on Lamster’s Facebook page, where he called New Urbanists a bunch of “neocons.” Tea Partiers, neocons? Whatever, the Right all looks the same to him.
Why does Lamster interpret the New Urbanists’ stance on architecture politically? Like many Modernist critics, who cling desperately to their doctrine of faith, Lamster simply can’t think straight when it comes to traditional design. Just as when cult members are challenged with contrary evidence, his intellectual faculties fail and he lashes out. His thought process is as follows:
Premise 1: If you favor new traditional architecture, you must be a conservative.
Premise 2: New Urbanists favor new traditional architecture.
Conclusion: New Urbanists are conservatives.
That so many New Urbanists—who, as I noted, are so often liberals—favor traditional architecture proves that his first premise if false. (Note that to favor such architecture is not to oppose Modernism in all instances.) But Lamster cannot think of architecture without simplistic, self-righteous political posturing. Instead of architecture criticism, he offers us the knee-jerk conformism of so much punditry.
His inability to think straight also causes him to make a strange claim about the history of architecture. He notes that New Urbanists blame much of the failures of the post-war built environment world on the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, a totalitarian planner who advocated demolishing historic cities and replacing them with anonymous towers in open spaces dismembered by high-speed freeways: a frightening utopia he proposed in his Ville Radieuse. He also advocated mono-functional zoning in which the domains of housing, working, and recreation were strictly separated. He also wished to liquidate the architectural tradition of Western civilization and replace it with un-ornamented, austere industrial forms inspired by factories and grain elevators. Le Corbusier was a Rationalist to the nth degree: “Gothic architecture is not, fundamentally, based on spheres, cones and cylinders. . . . It is for that reason that a cathedral is not very beautiful,” said the techno-futurist guru.
Lamster bizarrely claims Le Corbusier “is no more responsible for American urban problems than L’Escoffier, the great hero of French cuisine, is for American obesity.” Compare what esteemed architectural historian Vincent Scully wrote in American Architecture:
By the 1960’s, it was the striking visual effect of the ville radieuse … which came to dominate the conceptions of urban redevelopers. It constituted their preconceived formal image, which they discovered could be as appropriate for luxury apartments as for office buildings as for the proletarian army that Le Corbusier had paraded.
As Lamster knows, Le Corbusier was the most influential architect of the twentieth century. The parking garage Lamster bemoans in his article is a direct descendant of Corbusian ideas. It is a horizontally-oriented cuboid, an unadorned machine for automobiles with no concern for human scale or its surroundings (especially not the pleasing Beaux-Arts building nearby).
Not only are many contemporary architects neo-Corbusians building near replicas of his designs, some influential planners today are explicitly calling for a return to his urban planning principles. A case in point is Vishaan Chakrabarti in his book A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America, which Lamster praised when it was published. Chakrabarti is an associate professor at Columbia University and a partner at SHoP Architects, a super cool Manhattan-based firm cum think-tank responsible for the Barclays Center in Brooklyn (a rusting slug of a stadium), among other colossal projects. Admittedly, such neo-Corbusians are better than outright nihilist planners such as Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who don’t believe in attempting to improve the world. In an essay on Atlanta, Koolhaas wrote, “The city is out of control; let us be irresponsible [urbanists].”
Lamster cannot bear to think that Modernist architects are responsible for the ugly, inhumane public realm we find today:
The truth is that architects don’t have that much power. Architects don’t design most buildings; they are designed by developers or contractors working from cookie-cutter plans. Perhaps an architect signs off. Even when architects are designing, they are subject to the whims of clients who often have more interest in the bottom line than in quality. A developer looking to make a quick dollar by building and flipping property has little interest in building for the long term.
Thus, Lamster allows architects to abdicate responsibility. By no means should they set the tone for developers and contractors. By no means should they steer greedy clients in the right direction—as if the problem of the client’s profit-motive is somehow a new problem in architecture. As if we haven’t been building junk architecture for decades, under economic booms and busts alike. As if there hasn’t been junk architecture around the world in both socialist and capitalist countries. Lamster repeats the classic refrain that allows architects to maintain their self-respect: When architecture is bad, blame the clients and socio-economic structural forces. When it is good, credit the hero architects.
One of the problems for those who lay the guilt on commercial clients is that architecture is in just as bad a state in buildings where there is no direct profit motive: universities, churches, museums, public housing, courthouses, and so on. Indeed, it would appear that the more architects are given the leeway and funds to build as they wish, the worse the result. And then there are the vanity corporate skyscrapers whose starchitecture—both expensive to build, dysfunctional, and prone to high maintenance costs—makes no economic sense, as Lamster himself has previously noted: “we seem to be creating placeless modern places that look great in ads for luxury automobiles.” Stodgy corporations can want to appear hip, and businessmen are sometimes motivated by ego and prestige.
Lamster ends his piece with some wishful thinking: “A younger generation is coming into the [New Urbanism] movement, a generation not interested in tendentious arguments about traditionalism and modernism, but instead focused [sic] on the task of building the kinds of walkable urban centers that progressive thinkers of all stripes can embrace.” Who is being tendentious here?
The fact is that the younger generation shows no such trend, and indeed CNU has attracted many new young fans of classical and traditional architecture. At the convention, there was no evidence that the younger members of the audience disagreed with the panel Lamster reported on. What the youngsters have come to understand is that Modernist architects are simply ignorant of the urbanist heritage—the proven design technology—of the last 2,000 years. They do not know how to design an articulated street wall or buildings with pleasing, hierarchical compositions—all factors with direct impact on urban life. Architects used to understand how to do this, which is why smart, free-thinking designers look to the past for edification.
Consider that the same young architects and planners, like so many millennials, eat heirloom tomatoes in slow-food restaurants, wear heritage flannels and Red Wing boots, live in historic districts with contextual additions, listen to roots rock, and drink pre-war cocktails in new bars with new tile floors, tin ceilings, and exposed brick walls. The most cutting-edge Modernists, by contrast, offer up the architectural equivalent of pretentious molecular gastronomy, experimental GMO Frankenfoods, deconstructed Helmut Lang fashion, and atonal synthesizer music. And they prefer petrochemical to natural building materials.
Lamster once argued, “[Y]ou don’t drive a Ford Model T, so why build a Colonial Revival House?” Putting aside the fatuousness of the analogy, what would he say to those young people who prefer antiquated technology—the bicycle—and who travel by the still more primitive foot? Can older ways be better, and more in harmony with human nature and the environment? Does anyone really think the Occupiers of Wall Street—living in tents and participating in drum circles—want more steel-and-glass boxes or piles of polygons, those physical embodiments of global capitalism?
Lamster, however, does. Despite his political chest-thumping, he has, for instance, fawned over the American mega architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which he called “the profession’s great bastion of corporate strength, the Brooks Brothers of glass and steel.” These architects, he makes clear, have a great deal of power. Yet they build corporate and institutional buildings no better than that Dallas parking garage.
What really motivates Lamster is his architectural partisanship. His political assertions are merely a rationalization for Modernism and a weapon with which to intimidate those who question it. The good news is that more and more young people have the confidence not to fear being called backward. They understand that cheap politics is the last refuge of the Modernist.
