From the issue dated January 10, 2003
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Our Degraded Public Realm: the Multiple Failures of Architecture EducationBy SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGENThe public was astonished. The initial six schemes for redeveloping the 16-acre World Trade Center site, released last July, were cloddish and uninspired. A collection of clunky skyscrapers towering over postage-stamp-sized "memorial plazas" was the order of the day. Had any of those projects been executed as proposed, downtown Manhattan -- the cynosure of New York City and a symbol of cosmopolitan America -- would once again be the overly dense business district it was before September 11, with the addition of a couple of insipid paeans to public space. Under public pressure that is unprecedented in American architecture -- generated by the public's insistence upon transforming Lower Manhattan into a hopeful symbol of America's resilience and a reminder of New York City's tragic losses -- the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey solicited a fresh set of ideas for the site from seven teams of architects and planners, some spearheaded by internationally known figures in the architectural avant-garde. But it is not clear yet that what is eventually built on the site will turn out much better than those first proposals. The Port Authority is under no contractual obligation to use any of the schemes that the seven teams proposed last month. Even if the Port Authority does use one of the better schemes (unlikely) or cull this or that idea from several of the proposals and incorporate them into its own final project (a possible if not probable outcome), the process by which the site is being redeveloped is indicative of a widespread problem that plagues American architecture and urbanism, and that deserves urgent redress. Few American architects and urban designers could approach a project of this magnitude or importance with a creative and compelling vision of how the 21st-century metropolis should function and look. And those who could, including some members of the seven teams, are not likely to play anything like a central role in reconfiguring Lower Manhattan. Leave aside the specific power struggles among those seeking to shape, or influence the shape of, the trade-center redevelopment project -- with its leaseholders, owners, politicians, activist organizations, community groups, victims' groups, architects, and urban designers. Leave aside also the other factors impeding the successful development of the site, such as the current grim economic climate; the perceived imperative among the principal players for a speedy execution, which hinders considered thought; and the general disinclination of American architectural clients, including the Port Authority, to commission projects through well conceived, fairly conducted international competitions, as are common in Europe. Sympathetic clients and inspired architects are necessary if a project is to end well; and yet, the greedy, self-interested, short-sighted, or simply mediocre visions of this or that client or designer are not the cause of the problem. The key sources are deeper and more elusive, because they are embedded into the substratum of how architecture and urbanism are conceived and practiced in the United States. And that, in turn, has much to do with how those disciplines are taught -- especially in colleges and universities. The problem is so acute because it has two complementary, mutually reinforcing parts: an almost total absence of demand for excellent architecture and urbanism (except in the most atypical cases, as in the trade-center site), and the skewed character of the supply of those who can even begin to create such works. On the demand side, it has been years since corporations and the public sector have insisted upon or even pretended to patronize very good, much less excellent, architecture. On the supply side, the paradigms by which many American architects have been trained to frame design and urban-planning problems will make it more difficult for them to generate a compelling vision for a site like that of the World Trade Center. Their training has not prepared them intellectually to think about how to create a captivating, monumental urban symbol, one that will also repair the shorn fabric of Lower Manhattan. Not since the 1970s, in fact, has corporate America built stunning works of large-scale architecture such as Eero Saarinen's CBS Building, in New York City, or I.M. Pei's John Hancock Tower, in Boston. The last planning projects to gain widespread public recognition were the tony Seaside, Fla., and the Disney Company's white-bread new town, Celebration. Those projects, however, are both exemplars of the suburbanizing movement propagandistically misnamed the "New Urbanism." Turning first to the larger and more troublesome problem of inadequate demand: Citizens are the consumers of architecture. How are they educated to appreciate and judge what they must necessarily inhabit and, as taxpayers and clients, often buy? Primary and secondary schools rarely mention architecture or urbanism at all, except in the most elite or innovative schools, despite art classes being a staple of children's education from kindergarten on. The general public's lack of even the most basic education in architecture and urbanism makes for ill-informed, ill-prepared clients, be they developers such as Larry A. Silverstein (who holds a 99-year lease on the trade-center site), public servants such as the Port Authority, or advisers such as the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. With admittedly a few exceptions, asking members of those groups to judge inspired architecture is akin to asking people with a third-grade education to select the next winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In part because corporate and governmental clients are unable to evaluate what they are paying for, they are skittish and overwhelmingly conservative. For evidence, we need only look at the eligibility requirements the development corporation initially set for firms to submit their names for consideration to create a master plan for the trade-center site: Firms were required to have at least 10 years' urban-planning experience and to have worked on at least three projects costing $100-million or more. Those provisions alone knocked most of the world's architectural and urban-design talent out of the running. (The eligibility requirements in the second round were, again owing to extraordinary public pressure, far less restrictive.) Even when clients have the basic knowledge to choose quality architecture and inspired urbanism, they are often reluctant to do so. Architects and urban designers have earned the public image, not always unfairly, of being impractical, ego-driven money spenders. That unfortunate reputation is, in many ways, the failure of higher-education institutions designated to train students in architecture and urban design. The principal locus for training in these fields is graduate-school programs, which typically run for three to three-and-a-half years. (Bachelor's-degree programs in architecture exist, but the American Institute of Architects is discussing phasing those programs out -- arguing that learning to make architecture is better accomplished at the graduate level, with more mature students.) Enrolling in such professional schools are a few students with undergraduate degrees in architecture who want to continue their education in the field, and many other students with diverse nonarchitectural academic backgrounds. Given the lack of preparation of most of the students, architecture schools are put in the impossible position of trying to teach the engineering, technology, and sociology of architectural and urban design, the business and the politics of practice, and its art. As a result, architecture schools must make compromises. For most top programs, that compromise has entailed a curriculum overwhelmingly concentrated on design at the expense of sufficient training in urbanism or in engineering, business, zoning, and other pragmatic and regulatory issues that greatly affect the field. One small example of this failure of education in pragmatic matters is the architect who recently remarked on a Web site sponsored by the American Institute of Architects that fee-setting for many professionals was less a calculated business decision than "an existential act." Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of Yale's School of Architecture, recently admitted in one of the country's top professional journals, Architectural Record, that "once you get past the 20 or 30 leading architects, the rest of the profession tends to be marginalized because it's not respected, because it isn't as well-educated as other professions." Given architects' and urban designers' shaky credibility in the corporate and public sectors, it should hardly be surprising that most innovative, quality architecture in this country gets built by arts institutions and wealthy private clients. Purchasing superb, or even good, architecture has become strictly the province of the aesthetic elite. As when one buys a Jasper Johns or a Brice Marden, one expects to pay a steep premium for quality and prestige -- a blue-chip work of art. While corporate and government disaffection for high-quality, forward-looking architecture has something to do with cost, it is also a legacy of the urban-planning failures of the 1960s, when the public sector entrusted large-scale planning and design projects to top designers only to have them mess things up. (We need only remember that Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, was also responsible for the widely reviled and subsequently demolished Pruitt Igoe housing project in St. Louis, which became a symbol of half a century of failed architectural aspirations.) More recently, corporate sponsors may have turned against high-end architectural patronage because of the humiliation of their enthusiastic embrace of historicist postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, a style that later became the laughing stock of the cognoscenti. Those architects and urban designers who maintain credibility with corporate and public clients have often done so by acceding to their conservatism, thereby sacrificing social responsibility, aesthetic innovation, and sometimes just plain good judgment to expedience, the familiar, and the bottom line. Thus, they have created a blander, poorer architectural and urban landscape, setting low aesthetic standards that further reinforce the disinclination of governmental and corporate clients to create good, let alone great, architecture. Given the structure of the current system, it should hardly be shocking that Philip Johnson, a thoroughly mediocre designer who has called himself a whore, is a public icon and one of the most successful corporate architects in the field. The bifurcated nature of the profession -- innovators, many of whom work in so-called boutique practices, and workmanlike practitioners in corporate firms -- lies at the root of the problems that dog projects, especially large ones like the World Trade Center redevelopment, throughout the process of their design and execution. (A parallel catastrophe, with far less hope of a happy outcome, is unfolding in downtown Boston. That city has not yet adopted even a convincing set of principles for thinking about how to use the 30 acres of prime property that will be cleared upon the completion of the central-artery and tunnel project, now scheduled for 2004.) Those designers best prepared to think in a sustained, creative way about architecture and urban design lack credibility as responsible professionals. While that disconnect between patrons and appropriate designers was not created alone by the failure of the architectural education of our citizenry and by the educational system from which the practitioners emerge, certain assumptions and practices in the academy have consistently contributed to it, and should be rethought. Among clients, then, our educational system is thoroughly implicated in the insufficient demand for superior architecture and urbanism. What about supply? If corporations and the public sector were to turn to the best and most creative talents of our generation, would such practitioners give New York and other cities the dignified, thought-provoking, and inspiring spaces and architecture they deserve? The answer is yes, though a qualified yes. As several of the second-phase designs for the trade-center site illustrate, talent, seriousness of purpose, and creativity abound in architectural- and urban-design practices. And although clients are understandably skittish about hiring high-end architects, they have allowed their anxieties to overwhelm common sense. True, many architects in the boutique and the larger innovative practices lack technical proficiency and business acumen. But they could make up for those deficiencies in pragmatic knowledge by using the creaky but rotating mechanisms currently in place: associating with large corporate practices and relying heavily on consultants. Yet architects and urbanists would have to overcome other legacies of their training. What do graduate programs in urban design, and especially in architecture, teach? Although they vary from institution to institution, certain commonalities exist. One is that such programs generally give short shrift to the study of sociology of urban and suburban life, leaving students without the knowledge or tools to understand the environments for which they design. As a result, students tend to focus their ideas overwhelmingly on forms, with little informed awareness of how their buildings will contribute to a larger urban composition and to the social existence of communities. Another problem is that graduate schools, in choosing to emphasize the cultural and artistic aspects of architectural design, have almost by default allied themselves closely with the humanities. Like their counterparts in those disciplines, such schools have been dominated for the past two decades by postmodern theory -- a conveniently vague and seductive term that characterizes loosely linked inquiries into language; cultural studies, including multiculturalism and postcolonialism; feminist and queer theory; and the post-Nietzschean philosophies of French thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jean Baudrillard. We cannot ignore that postmodern theorists have profoundly influenced how many of our best-educated designers think about making architecture and urbanism, if in sometimes unexpected ways (although postmodernism's complexity and heterogeneity make it impossible to detail all those effects in one article). The impact that postmodern theory has had on design is, in some ways, providential. Creative designers approach their environment and their commissions with a sociocritical frame of mind. They look for nuance, disjuncture, and complexity in the built environment, and in the demands made by their clients. They are acutely sensitive to cultural difference. They seek to confront urban and exurban cultural and social conditions that many people might prefer to ignore, contemplating junkyards in Los Angeles, shopping malls in Minneapolis, the architecture of Route 128 around Boston. Postmodern theory's influence in schools of design has been good, and it has been bad. For preparing designers to approach projects like the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, it has several indisputably negative consequences, because postmodernism's core assumptions and shared principles make it more difficult to conceptualize a vision of what our society and our public realm should be that is at once positive and realistic. Such a vision necessarily and by definition underlies the design of thought-provoking, inspiring, monumental architectural symbols that also function as truly great urban spaces. Foucault's long shadow darkens the writings of many postmodern intellectuals, who secretly or not-so-secretly assume that contemporary institutions, even if peopled with often well-meaning individual agents, are structured to dominate in insidious ways. That assumption may make it hard for designers to take a positive stance toward governmental, civic, and commercial organizations of power -- much less to the structures that are to reconstitute an institution that has become a preeminent symbol of "world trade." To them, world trade embodies the nefarious omnipresence of capitalism. Several other convictions that are often found in the work of postmodern theorists emerge from this first assumption. One is that most individuals, participating in and relying upon these structures of power, can achieve few genuine social improvements, much less effect significant social change. Hence architects tend to focus on the pragmatic and immediate, on what they believe is realistically achievable rather than what is ideal. (In a one-hand-dirties-the-other relationship, postmodern theory generates a sense of social impotence that is reinforced in practice because innovative designers are in fact increasingly marginalized in society for the reasons discussed above, and so often are able to accomplish little.) Another conviction underlying postmodern theory is that if one respects diversity in different traditions and cultural identities, one must be on guard, because quests by privileged countries or peoples for a meaningful national or communal identity may be a cover for latter-day imperialism abroad or advantage at home and, therefore, the oppression of the less privileged. Finally, postmodern theory's ambivalent emphasis on the intrinsic value of the banal and the everyday casts still further doubt on the social relevance of the large-scale, the monumental, and -- dare we say it? -- the heroic. There is nothing wrong with, and plenty that is good in, astute social and institutional criticism, and respect for and sensitivity to subaltern peoples and practices. There is nothing wrong with treating architecture as a form of knowledge rather than a social act. But it can be both. The truth remains that it is extremely difficult to design architecturally inspiring buildings and spaces when guided by these convictions: that the institutions one is designing for are, even if necessary, basically bad for society and bad for people; that the underlying symbolism one is being called upon to celebrate is social oppression; that monumental architecture and urban spaces are irrelevant to contemporary life; and that one's hands are tied behind one's back by social forces beyond one's control anyway, and, therefore, contemporary designers' only possible mode of expression is social criticism. Educational reforms that would remedy such weaknesses in American architecture and urban design would be far-reaching. College and universities should consider it part of their mission to help secondary schools develop programs to train students in visual literacy and the basic principles of sound urban and architectural design. They should also reject the AIA's proposal to phase out B.A. programs in architecture and urban design and, instead, institute more of them -- as well as encourage their graduates to go on to professional school. For their part, professional schools should not truncate their programs for students who come in with undergraduate degrees in architecture. Quite simply, for a profession that requires one of the most complex and wide-ranging skill sets in existence, students need more training than they get now. Requiring that schooling will not only make for better architecture but also will enhance the reputation of designers, resulting in more commissions being awarded to professionals who are trained to think about design as part of the public realm. Professional schools should consider it part of their mission to educate students well in the urbanistic, technical, and pragmatic aspects of architectural design. They should also expose students not only to the most fashionable intellectual ideas but also to competing traditions in social theory and philosophy that, precisely because they are less radical, ultimately may be more progressive. In addition to the theories of modernity of the Marxist-influenced Frankfurt scholars like Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, students could learn those of the social democratic-influenced theories of sociologists like Anthony Giddens. In addition to the poststructuralist philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze, they could learn Jürgen Habermas's pluralistic theory of communicative action in the public sphere. In addition to the skeptical Marxism of Fredric Jameson, they could learn of the skeptical communitarianism of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. In addition to the ferocious anticapitalism of Jean Baudrillard, they could learn the principled democratic pragmatism of Richard Rorty. If all these ideas were instituted, architects would be better trained and better prepared to meet a larger range of challenges than they are now. Meanwhile, clients could become educated and demanding consumers -- people who appreciate that the marks they make on the urban landscape, good or bad, profoundly affect the public life of their society. The last great architectural and urban public space to be designed and built in New York City was Rockefeller Center. Whatever the politics or reservations of its designers, Raymond Hood and his partners decided to build a monument to the ideals embodied in American civilization rather than to its unhappy reality, since the country was then in the throes of the Great Depression. Those ideals include a respect for the individual and a belief that enterprise can produce not just meaningless change but substantive human progress, coupled with the conviction that a just individualism must include people regularly coming together in a rich variety of socially meaningful ways. Those ideals pervade the Rockefeller Center complex, and they should be embodied in other parts of our cities and landscapes. Architecture and urban spaces should become symbols of our aspirations for our country, our communities, and ourselves -- reminders that, no matter how far off course we may be, we are, or should be, working toward common and fundamentally just goals. Meanwhile, as we await the final plans for the World Trade Center redevelopment project, the public, stunned at what just might happen in downtown Manhattan, keeps the pressure on the Port Authority not to dismiss the better designs that have finally emerged. Even if the site does, in the end, produce the first excellent large-scale architectural and urban project in the nation in more than a generation, it will have come about only because the catastrophe that cleared the site has, for once, created the insistent public demand for what the public deserves -- ordinarily and everywhere. Sarah Williams Goldhagen is a lecturer on architectural history and theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She is the author of Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism (Yale University Press, 2001). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 18, Page B7
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education