Foreword

Margarita Jover

Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture is a book on an essential contemporary topic: large-scale urban thinking. It is part of a lineage of the awakening of architecture’s discipline to the subject of large scale after five decades of progressive shrinking to smaller scales and the economically efficient production of buildings. In this sense, it is a book to celebrate. It offers a methodology for designers to urgently address the collective destiny of the built environment and its intertwined political, ecological, and social crises. In the United States, neoliberalism is hegemonic, which means it is an economic system and a cultural framework that implies suspicion of collectivism 1 and the public sphere while glorifying the market, the private sphere, and the individual. Added to this neoliberal hegemony is the citizen’s distrust of largescale national investments in the territory due to its historical tendency to favor the private interests of big companies and powerful individuals over the rest. This national investment’s legacy makes it difficult to promote large-scale projects from the top, even if they genuinely seek the common good, without generating a societal distrust.

Before the advent of neoliberalism and the acceptance of the market as the main leading force for the design and construction of the city, large-scale territorial and urban design decisions were inscribed into a public-private legal practice called urbanism. The word urbanism,2 coined during the mid-19th century in Europe, was the result of the search for new urban models and the construction of a new discipline to accommodate the transition from organic to industrial societies 3 Reimagined urban models allowed the overcoming of the social and ecological crises of the crowded and polluted cities of emergent industrial societies, while facilitating their spiritual, physical, and economic flourishing. Successful deployment of urbanism occurred when collaboration between private actors looking after maximizing profit was in friction with strong public actors looking at increasing social welfare across all social classes while supporting ecological needs. However, this successful deployment of urbanism did not always take place.

Nineteenth-century urbanism emerged as a set of rules and methodologies similar to this book’s spirit. Several architects, planners, landscape architects, and philanthropists advocating for reforms and new city models used different types of urbanism to respond to unregulated industrial cities and associated degradation. Thinkers such as Charles Fourier, William Morris, Otto Wagner, Patrick Geddes, Baron Haussman, Ildefons Cerda, Frederik Law Olmsted, Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Edwin Lutyens, and Tony Garnier, among many others, wrote about cities and designed parts of them. There were significant differences in each methodological approach and output, ranging from isolated utopian communities to the bulldozing of old cities or new cities’ design. However, despite differences, the standard tread was the ambition to transform the medieval city model to accommodate population growth and industrialization.

This 19th-century lineage of urban thinkers on a large territorial and urban scale had its last cultural manifestations during the Modern Movement, when architectural culture organized the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM 1928–1959). Confident optimism in technology and sciences, mass production, and new aesthetic values characterized this period. Working-class upheavals and their increased societal influence and power allowed progressive universal suffrage, universal primary education, decent wages, and regulation of working hours. Social ambitions of equality in accessing resources for life and a more isotropic distribution of wealth in the urban context are often part of modernity’s projects in Europe. Architectural projects, manifestoes, and regulations that came about in that period produced significant innovations and societal improvements. However, after this period of heroic modernity, the social and economic instability of the 1930s led to World War II, with more than 60 million deaths worldwide. Post–World War II reconstruction in Europe took time and used prewar modern principles that included societal ambitions of redistribution and new technologies and materials in the context of socialist democracies. Postwar United States took on modernity principles that were adapted and often cleansed of social ambitions. The suburban model of separated functions in the territory4 took the lead, leaving behind the mixed-use city model with better social and ecological performances. The suburban model is predatory, with high levels of energy, land, and resource consumption, but it is successful for being a more efficient model of driving capital accumulation.

The giant American war industry—which saved Europe from tyranny and fascism— mutated and integrated into industrial societal dynamics creating new markets for its survival and subsequent growth. Today the industry of war is one of the major causes of climate change, but it runs unquestioned.5 Consumerism, suburbanization, and a culture of abundant energy coincided with postmodernity 6 in architecture and planning, which meant skepticism towards grand narratives and a focus on building forms and their cultural meaning. During the 1980s, the discipline became an avoidable friction to capital accumulation and retreated into the building scale. In the meantime, market