How Doth Your City Grow?

Says Douglas Kelbaugh FAIA, Dean, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, University of Michigan, in his essay, Seven Fallacies In Architectural Culture:

Our cities are too often like a World’s Fair of one-off buildings, each an exception to the rule and gesticulating more wildly for attention than the next. They are scaleless and abstract, refusing to converse at all with their neighbors. An architectural circus of styles or a typological riot does not a city make. Nor are they emblematic of a democratic city, as Frank Gehry and others claim.

And says one urban planning zealot and weblogger (name withheld for the usual reason), whose highest aspiration for cities is that they be "interesting" and "comfortable," and "pleasant places to live," and who perceives a dichotomy where one must choose between architectural genius and "good rules" in the building of cities:

So many people use the word [genius] in relation to architects such as Wright or Gehry.... Those two might be geniuses or might not; who cares? [...] It is not genius which creates cities worthy of humanity but adherence to time-tested rules. Oh genius is OK, so long as it knows the rules well-enough to know if, how and when to break them. And so long as it has sufficient self-confidence to not need to impress by breaking the rules unless there is a good reason.

Interesting views of the matter. Fact is, though, that neither building styles, nor rules, time-tested or otherwise, nor architectural geniuses create "cities worthy of humanity." The urban needs and desires of city-dwellers alone create cities. The notion that architectural geniuses create (or, rather, are capable of creating) cities is a delusion of that most virulent of architectural types: the ideology obsessed architect-visionary. And the notion that rules create cities, a delusion of nuts-and-bolts obsessed sensible-shoes urban planners with their insufferable bourgeois arrogance born of the conceit that bourgeois concerns are the measure of all things, other concerns being but eccentricities or pie-in-the-sky imaginings to be more or less tolerated — or not.

But the urban needs and desires of city-dwellers need satisfaction in concrete terms. And for that architects, urban planners, and, yes, even cut-rate commercial builders are required, all with their parts to play, but governed always by the overarching principle, Sutor, ne supra crepidam!

Our weblogging urban planner imagines rules are what's really important. But that's the result of the confusing of what's truly important with what's merely necessary. Painters, for instance, require well-made canvas, but there's nothing important about well-made canvas, or about the mechanic who makes it. Both are merely necessary. What's important are the painter and what he paints on that canvas. The business of the maker of well-made canvas is to produce a product that provides the painter what he needs for his work, while presenting the least impediment to the painter in that work. And when the canvas-maker's mechanic's work is done, he disappears from the picture, so to speak, becoming an anonymous and invisible entity forever after.

Just so the urban planner. He must do his necessary mechanic's work by laying out the city's grid with due attention paid to the accommodation of traffic flows, utilities, public transport, zoning, etc., all consistent with the needs of present and foreseeable future populations; establish the most minimally restrictive building codes possible explicit enough so that compliance can be ascertained with little or no ambiguity or application of individual judgment; and then disappear forever so that the important work, the design and building of buildings, can begin unimpeded, all design decisions, in compliance with the minimally restrictive building codes, made exclusively by the only persons entitled to make them: the individual architects or builders and their clients. And if an architect also happens to be an architect of genius, well, so much the better for his client and for the city that will emerge from their work and the work of other architects, builders, and their clients — spontaneously.

In that way, and in that way only, do vital, exciting, nourishing, and enriching cities get built and grow; messy, contradictory, and complex affairs where good spaces coexist with bad ones, and where buildings run the full gamut from bad to good; from the thoroughly tawdry, to the quotidian utilitarian, to the great work of art. The one prescription for sure death for any city is to have individual building design decisions intrusively determined or overseen by rule-besotted urban planners, or, worse, visionary architectural ideologues, the end result of the operation of which always being an imposition of the same restricted vision on the fabric of an entire city.

If you want great cities, "cities worthy of humanity," then insist the rule-makers recognize their proper and very limited place, and that they disappear forever after their initial and necessary mechanic's work is done, leaving architects and builders free to get on with the important work of designing and building buildings to fulfill the needs and desires of their individual clients, as only by and through such a process, and of itself, doth "cities worthy of humanity" grow.