Where Are We Now?
Architecture’s Place in an Era of Evolving Values
Architectural Record, March 2003
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Can Architecture thrive in privatized culture?
In much of the capitalist world, architecture remains largely a public endeavor, underwritten by the state. In America, architects constantly adapt their public consciences and artistic aspirations to the ever-changing priorities of private wealth, which has a more powerful role in creating urban form than in virtually any other developed nation. Sometimes the alignment of private capital and artistic intuition makes possible something thrilling, like the tower-dotted skylines that rose to dizzying heights in the 1920s. Skyscrapers, to be sure, have been the best advertisement for the commercial city ever since. In the last 20 years, however, private development has pretty much lost interest in using architecture to make a handsome skyline or advertise a company’s place in the community.
In the 1980s, the rise of corporate raiders and “maximizing shareholder value,” definitively ended an era in which corporations (motivated by genuine community commitment or paternalistic noblesse oblige—take your pick) considered buildings something more than warehouses for workers. Facilities since then have been regarded as profit-making assets in their own right, and any commitment to express a connection to a local community, to present corporate values in steel and glass, or to reflect by design the needs of business process have been all but banished. Business leaders have permitted themselves to be dictated by a speculative norm of real estate (demanding only the generic and the identical; obsessed with the “exit strategy”) because it could not find a way to value architectural nicety or invention.
The colossal commercial overbuilding of the 1980s, which created an inventory excess that hung over the industry for 10 years, might have taught everyone a lesson, but instead led to a nationalized and concentrated development-finance process that is even more rigid and values the contributions of architects less than ever. It’s nearly impossible to build innovatively, to recognize unique circumstances, or to choose technologies (to save energy, for example) that take longer than a few years to pay back. It is why the tremendous technological advancement one sees in commercial buildings outside the U.S. cannot find a market here. And it is why the architect’s role has been relegated to curtain-wall specifier and lobby decorator.
The nation has tolerated this temporary, disposable urbanism, simply by moving farther out into the semi-rural fringes, vastly expanding the edges of metropolitan regions. The search for a place that is, as suburban historian Robert Fishman has written, “freed from the corruption of the city, restored to harmony with nature, endowed with wealth and independence, yet protected by a close-knit, stable community” seems today to be unending. As a nation, we are still largely unwilling to consider that the very mobility that allows us to build our dream at the bucolic urban edge embodies the means by which the oak woods next door become Oak Woods Estates.
Is it a style thing?
Part of what makes our era confusing is that it offers an enormous aesthetic diversity. You can see a debt to 20th-century Modernism in much of what is built today, but most is not tethered to a single theoretical or social movement. Architecture does not deserve a central place in culture, many observers argue, because people don’t like what architects design. “Architecture should be understandable to everyone,” wrote Francis Morrone recently in the New Criterion, in a story critical of today’s aesthetic innovation. “The urban architect simply does not possess the right to impose his aesthetic vision on the public.” This echoes the plaints of many political conservatives, who increasingly see today’s sculpturally spectacular and assertive designs as emanating from a leftist political agenda.
Aside from how authoritarian Morrone sounds, those who, like him, argue for a vision of architectural civility through historic style seem blind to the conservative vision of unfettered capitalism and individualism which is precisely the agent of the chaos they abhor in urban cityscapes. If today’s buildings seem unneighborly, or inconsistent, or ignorant of history, that reflects America and its priorities today, an America made largely to conservative individualistic and anti-government values.
The boxy stores and slablike apartments that dominate the landscape may look vaguely modernistic, but they reflect not a stylistic orthodoxy but cheapness of construction. It’s the euphemistic “cost effectiveness” applauded by conservatives and enforced by Wall Street analysts, who do not regard public spiritedness in architecture as prudently contributing to the bottom line.
Aesthetic individualism has been the source of dynamism within the American architectural scene, the reason it is intellectually healthy in spite of the inability of so many talented people to build beyond the lowest-common-denominator commercial norm. Impressionist painters made compelling art of the dark hulk of the locomotive thundering through the flower-bedecked countryside. The fractured topographic buildings we see these days reflect an awe of the empty freewayscapes—today’s emblematic urban form. Frank Gehry infuriated contextualists in the Pacific Northwest by making a sensuous collision of electric-guitar-colored forms for a rock ¬ån roll museum. He didn’t build a “regionalist” pavilion of fir beams; the museum’s “context” was a sea of surface parking.
In time we’ll know whether today’s explorations into the ironies, contradictions, and bizarre juxtapositions innate to culture now have made art of lasting value. But attempting to refract the world the nation inhabits is a serious endeavor that deserves respect, even if it does not always work. The dynamism and possibility of America is what appeals to Europeans, like Rem Koolhaas, who come out of cultures much more comfortable with architecture and much more willing to spend public and private money on it.
The deal architects and society make
Much of today’s most adventurous work does not meet Morrone’s criteria of “understandable to everyone,” and he is certainly not alone in finding much contemporary work aesthetically objectionable. But it was Daniel Libeskind, presumably not a favorite of aesthetic conservatives, who made a stirring defense of architecture’s place in public culture at the Columbia panel last Fall.
He argued for architecture as an expression of even such emotional abstractions as memory and loss. “Buildings are transformation of inert materials—stone, concrete, glass—into something living. And in that sense, they really speak a language, both communicative and also silent,” Libeskind said. “Space,” he added “is actually something like a person, a physiognomy, a soul, a spiritual entity given to a particular locale. And that’s the genius loci that we feel when we are in a place.” The material urban world is not only inescapable, he argued, it shapes our values and culture as much as any form of art, literature or debate does. “We’re not at home in language. We’re at home at home.”
The architectural community, whatever its aesthetic proclivities, largely rallies around the idea that cities should be civil places and that civility should be expressed by what people build. But what people build cannot be separated from their values.
European cities, even new ones, tend to look more orderly and their streets more architecturally collegial than do American cities. History is recognized and the nature of the city is, as Daniel Libeskind has noted, “of concern to everyone.”
These values, it must be added, are bolstered by the commitment of a great deal of public money for the creation of architecture and the nurturing of a vital architectural culture. The enormous expressive bravura we witness in much international work does not operate in an aesthetic vacuum, but is tethered to a social, technological, or ecological ideal. This is what has helped build and retain a public consensus for public buildings.
This means that society authorizes architects to build much more than museums that enhance board-member egos or glitzy restaurants for celebrity chefs. They build housing, day-care centers, social centers, schools. They design roads and bridges. Many of these projects are won in competitions, which means that architects hone their skills at doing publicly appealing buildings, not in bidding down fees to a “deliverable” that values only the lowest upfront cost.
For a nation unused to expressing itself in public construction, and unsure if it should, projects like the World War II memorial in Washington seem irresolvable. Trying not to offend anyone, Friedrich St. Florian’s design has been reduced to an exercise in thin-veneer neo-classicism that must, through inscriptions and allegorical sculptures, thank the Allies, the home front, each branch of the armed forces and so on. With this architectural equivalent of an Academy Awards acceptance speech, it will be difficult for the memorial to convey the immensity and deep significance of the event.
In our era of terror, a new “visitor center” at the U.S. Capital is being built as a bunker underground. No fortress replaced the Capitol burned by the British in 1814; Lincoln underwrote construction of the dome that crowns the building today even as the city was threatened by the Confederacy during the Civil War. Subterranean accommodations, however, appear to avoid messy questions of symbolism and expression, and are planned for the Washington Monument and the White House as well. Maybe funds will be forthcoming to replace the ubiquitous Jersey barriers in the city’s monumental core with truck-bomb-resisting monumental flower pots. Such a palliative and defensive use of design most importantly evokes a nation that has nothing to say, or at least that does not choose its most sacred and symbolic places to convey its ideals anymore.
It’s possible to see the rebuilding process at Ground Zero as changing all that. Whatever the clash of views and values, the public has rallied around the notion that the rebuilding must give pride of place to commemoration and to expressing public ideals. And officials, reluctantly, have begun to respect the enormous outpouring of concern. But they also continue to treat with great deference the private agreements and the “market driven” notion that what’s built must be much like what’s put up commercially everywhere else. Ground Zero is so difficult to resolve because it foregrounds these profoundly conflicting citymaking values.
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