Where Are We Now?
Architecture’s Place in an Era of Evolving Values
Architectural Record, March 2003
(Continued - 3 of 3)
Dare architecture represent ideals?
Since De Toqueville, America has been described as a nation of joiners. Community feeling and participation have eroded in recent years, according to Robert D. Putnam, whose book, Bowling Alone (2000, Touchstone), asserted that the spatially and socially segregated urban places we make contribute to a loss of community engagement. Whether in the desolate neighborhoods of abandoned industrial centers or in the gated communities of the disconnected pods of sidewalkless suburbia, there’s not much about the built environment that today expresses a sense of connectedness or common values.
If we don’t have a sense of community, we don’t have any reason to build to any values or tastes but our own individual ones. If we fail to underwrite architecture that speaks to common values, it is not surprising that we use our best architects only when a certain level of spectacle is called for or as a toy for the wealthy. Nor should it be surprising that these projects alone fail to bring vitality to urban places or fundamentally transform them. (For all the attention the Bilbao Guggenheim has garnered, it did not on its own transform the city. A program of public investment in airports, a subway, and other cultural facilities reinforced the job the museum did of putting the city on the map.)
Architects have long defined themselves as people who will make lives better. Is this necessary to retain legitimacy as a profession? Or does such a definition marginalize practitioners in a culture that prizes construction that costs little and that is supposed to deliver the maximum dollar turnover per square foot?
Pragmatically, AIA’s agenda in Washington succeeds, pitted as it often is against much larger, better funded special interests, in large part because people do see architects as the kind of people who want to put the community’s larger welfare first. That is a very precious reputation that we will pay dearly to squander.
Leon Wieseltier was not the only observer to see architects as “too avid” in the speed with which they began to organize ad hoc rebuilding coalitions, like New York New Visions, after the September 11th’s disaster. But the effort proved to have enormous influence over the rebuilding, and the volunteers have reaped enormous public appreciation. The consortium was there to fill a planning void that yawned because local officials were so unused to planning, and could not put together their own efforts for months afterward.
Such important efforts notwithstanding, the rewards for acting to advance the ideals of a larger society are, for architects, slim. There are those who say our most adventurous designers are not socially responsible, but there is not now a substantial milieu for architects to be socially responsible within. As a nation, we don’t make it easy to build ecologically. We expect architects to accept below-cost fees for doing bureaucratically ensnared “affordable” housing. To the extent they are built at all, senior centers, hospitals, clinics, and daycare centers hew to the same painted-drywall, dropped-ceiling, and fluorescent-light norm as everything else. Architects are shut out of bridge design (as well as most other forms of infrastructure building) for fear that they will make public works cost more.
One can argue that this is the profession’s own fault, that it does not work hard enough to demonstrate the very good things it can do, and such criticisms no doubt have some basis. At some point, however, it’s people—individually, in government, in business—who must commit to societal values architecture is capable of expressing.
“Government” has been turned into such an evil word that direct investment in transportation, in schools and colleges, and in other kinds of public facilities is suspect today, whatever its value to the economy as well as to our health as a society. (Ask the average business group what its greatest priorities are and you usually hear “improve the quality of the workforce,” i.e., invest in education, and “improve transportation,”—another direct government investment.) Instead, we manipulate the tax code in hopes of spurring greater consumer purchases or in trying to get businesses to buy equipment it would otherwise not order.
Perhaps this is the moment to be gutsier: to put our money and our best thinking—and some of our cash—into schools, transportation, housing for those who need it, public places—places that exemplify our ability to work together and help each other; places that express what we share rather than aggrandizing who we are. We can propose architecture that’s not just about “adding the aesthetics,” but about using building fabric to meet the ample real needs out there. If Americans want to stand for something—not just in the world, but within their own communities—and want to pass those values on, architecture remains the most permanent barometer of a civic culture.