Urban Topics

Urban Topics

John J. Parman

The texts collected here date back to the mid-1970s. Richard Bender coauthored several and was a continual source of ideas. Anthony S.C. Teo brought us, with Emily B. Marthinsen, to the Univer-Cities conferences he convened in Singapore and Australia in 2013, 2016, and 2019, including our papers in the conference proceedings published by World Science. Dean Renée Chow of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley kindly sponsored me as a Visiting Scholar from 2018 through 2o23. This book is for them, in thanks for their support.

My title refers to the broad category in which this work falls. The Bay Area often provided a context. Observing it over five decades prompted a lot of thoughts and some recurring topics.

Educated as an architect and planner, I worked in those fields until 2020, with stints at Gensler and SOM. Along the way, Laurie Snowden and I founded and published DesignBook Reviewfrom 1983 through 1997. It now has two online archives and a portal on California College of the Arts' library homepage.

Elizabeth Snowden, my daughter, is the founder/director of San Francisco's Pallas Gallery, the sole outlet for print copies of this book. Our editorial studio, Snowden & Parman, is the publisher, thanks to the miracle of short-run digital printing.

Rocky Hanish took the photo of me (left) in the "barn" behind my North Berkeley house. Monthly "sketch calls" (overleaf) with him (right) and Peiting C. Li (bottom) discuss how visualization in its different forms affects our writing and thinking (among other topics).

Not Too Slow, Not Too Smart

Can we “Slow” the growth of San Francisco’s metropolitan region without stopping it? By Slow, we refer to the Slow Food movement and its CittaSlow offshoot, especially their emphasis on the value and pleasures of regional difference. “Without stopping it” acknowledges the region’s projected growth. Our title’s "Smart" refers to Smart Growth "livable" is another favored adjective endorsing density without always asking what it means in practice. Like the Buddha, we seek a middle way between Slow and Smart aimed at conviviality. Like the Californians we’ve become, we want to have our cake and eat it, too.

The “problem space”

Between 2007 and 2030, the nine counties that make up the Bay Area will grow in population from 7.2 million to 8.7 million people, a net gain of about 1.5 million people.1 Will these newcomers be housed within the 700,000 acres of currently developed land, about 15.5% of the region’s total land area of 4.5 million acres? Or will they continue to erode the undeveloped balance, reducing still further the land available for farming, recreation, wildlife, and the maintenance of the region’s ecosystem? (No small matter, as it includes much of the river delta that supplies many California cities with water an area for which substantial low-density residential development has been proposed.2) This is half of the problem; the other half has to do with the density of development required within the region’s already developed areas simply to maintain their current boundaries. (Ideally, it would be possible to pull them in, especially where low-density sprawl has penetrated mindlessly into farmland or the ecosystem.) Greenbelt Alliance and others have tried to determine what density would be required, but this analysis does not fully consider the qualitative side of the problem:

what increases in density would actually mean for a neighborhood in human, experiential terms.3

So, the “problem space” that the region poses is how to accommodate future growth in ways that preserve and even reclaim open space, yet do so in ways that are not just “sound” in terms of current planning dogma (e.g., “dense, compact, and transit-served”), but also create appropriate settings for a humane and enjoyable life as this is broadly understood by those who live and work in its towns and cities. In framing it in this way, we want to emphasize that the future of the region must be thought of holistically, seeing open space preservation and fine-grained development as connected ideas, both of which point to the pleasure and prosperity that the region can offer its residents.

Greenbelt Alliance’s prescription

Focused on preserving open land, Greenbelt Alliance has formulated a program that is widely accepted by other policy-shaping organizations in the region. Here is the gist:

Growth boundaries: cities, towns, and other communities in the region should agree to establish inviolable boundaries for development. Lands falling outside them (but within their jurisdiction) are to be left as open space, whether under private or public ownership.

Walkable urbanism: to accommodate future growth, cities and towns should require a higher density of development, especially around transit (train and light rail stations) and transit corridors (arterials served by buses). Even when transit is not yet in place, patterns of development should anticipate it by favoring compactness and higher density.

Opposition to this program came initially from owners of large land parcels that fell outside of the growth boundaries established on the urban edge. Elections in these communities often feature ballot measures aimed at creating exceptions for specific parcels. Opposition is also coming from some of the affected urban neighborhoods. The Association of Bay Area Governments sets goals for housing development in the region that, if disregarded, can theoretically impact a city’s ability to tap regional grants for affordable housing and other purposes. In Berkeley, for example, meeting the goal would require the construction of 14 16-story housing towers in its downtown core, according to the city’s planning staff. The state has also mandated development “bonuses” that increase multiunit housing density in a way that overrides local zoning.

Density and its enemies

Density is emerging as a major point of contention in the region. In the urban core, it is focused on absolute density height and bulk and how it contributes to or detracts from the community around it. In urban neighborhoods, the question of impact is heightened. Style, use, ownership, and a desire to preserve the existing fabric figure in the debates about each and every project. In the newer suburbs, intensification of established areas to preserve greenspace vies with efforts to carve out new territory for office campuses and large singlefamily home developments.

Especially in cities and their older suburbs, the debate about density comes down to two positions: that it’s good because it provides affordable housing and prevents sprawl; or that it’s bad because it undermines a community’s existing character (and, by implication, its property values: Berkeley was extensively down-zoned in the 1970s by residential real estate interests, representing middle- and upper-middleclass owners). In recent years, these positions have hardened, with each side refusing to acknowledge the other. Adding density is “entirely good” and preservationists “almost always wrong” (about the historic merits of what they try to preserve) and vice versa. This deadlocked situation has created a vacuum that developers and politicians have not failed to fill and exploit.

Fear of overdevelopment has led to constant skirmishes in Berkeley around the issues of growth and density. Measure P, put on the ballot by petition, sought to limit the height of new construction in the city. A more recent measure sought to maintain a current, restrictive landmarks ordinance. Both measures failed, but the second lost by a much smaller margin.

As in other US cities, San Francisco and Berkeley have politicized development so that almost every project of any size has to be reviewed in a way that stretches out the entitlements process inordinately and makes the owner or developer liable to a variety of political pressures. The time and money involved favor politically-connected developers with the deep pockets needed to get through it. This creates a “duopoly” that links their interests with their political gatekeepers. It produces projects of a scale and nature at odds with their surroundings and even with the city itself as a place with a unique character oversized and overly prepackaged. Prewar developers left room for demotic content in their projects, not just in the retail mix, but also in the ways that “communal” open space was provided and used. In the grip of the duopoly, we have lost this art. Our cities fail to encourage ordinary

people to participate in their reshaping over time. There’s no flux, and no real life.

Resisting the forces of Fast

Preserving the quality of urban life means accommodating growth in sustainable ways. This is the other side of Slow. In urging local producers to find global markets, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini acknowledged that growth can be positive, an indication of quality and urbanity. This is a crucial distinction. Folco Portinari’s Slow Food manifesto, written in 1989, attacked speed rather than growth as the enemy of “a better future.” The 20th century, he wrote, that “began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.” He asserted that “real culture is about developing taste rather than demeaning it,” arguing for “a firm defense of material pleasure” as “the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life” that “in the name of productivity has changed our way of being and threatens our environment.”4

The forces arrayed against the quality of our urban life are also Fast, and “Smart” development is too often part of it as in our willingness to accept bad design if it hits a density target. And no-growth is Smart growth’s inevitable twin, locked in a battle that produces mediocrity and sameness. Just as we oppose Fast in this sense, we oppose a Slow that clings without reflection to what exists. Slow is not the same as No. Growth is desirable if it enables a region to remain “alive,” and to “rediscover the flavors and savors” (quoting Portinari) that make it what it is. That this also requires pruning and paring has to be faced as part of this active cultivation.

There are signs of change. Politically-connected architects who regularly secured commissions in San Francisco based on their ability to push projects through the entitlements process are finding that they’ve lost their touch. Much better architects are showing that pleasure is affordable, and that not every new building has to cater to empty-nest baby boomers returning from the suburbs. If a proper balance can be restored between the city as a looser framework for development and its citizens as more active city makers, then life will be more pleasurable and the region will be better protected.

Notes

1. AtRisk:TheBayAreaGreenbelt , 2006 edition, Greenbelt Alliance, 2006, pp. 2-3.

2. See Jane Wolff, DeltaPrimer , William Stout, 2003.

3. SmartInfill , Greenbelt Alliance, 2008, also the source for my "gist."

4. See Fabio Parasecoli, “Postrevolutionary Chowhounds,” Gastronomica . Summer 2003. Cittaslow’sfounding charter is in English on the Cittaslow UK website; and Paul L. Knox, “Creating Ordinary Places: Slow Cities in a Fast World,” JournalofUrbanDesign , February 2005.

Coda: Our Slow Bay Manifesto

Create boundaries for density, not just growth

We need to cut through the current impasse by agreeing on what we mean by density in each and every area where development can still occur. Density is not just an abstraction; it has to serve communities and support their existing residents as well as new ones. There’s nothing wrong with establishing goals for density, but they have to contribute in clear and fundamental ways to the experiential qualities that make each place what it is (or what it could be).

Make urbanity count

We need a robust vision of the region’s urbanity that takes lessons from its rich culture of food and wine, not shrinking from creativity, experimentation, and the demotic element that challenges and changes tastes, and is unafraid of outside influences knowing that the region will absorb them and make them its own. Then we need to put this vision first.

Restore the demotic; end the duopoly

The tendency of Bay Area cities to politicize development at almost every scale, making owners and leaseholders jump through endless hoops, is depriving us of the spontaneous contributions of individuals, operating within rules that are broad enough to allow creative interpretation. It makes for a duopoly that favors large projects that are shaped by “global” assumptions about market preferences, and that attract only the biggest players. There are exceptions, but this is too much the norm.

See the region as a whole

Understanding the region holistically as an ecosystem would immediately put a halt to insanities like the current pressure to develop the Delta, its main source of fresh water, as low-density tract housing. It would encourage the region to invest much more in transit and much less in freeways, and to value open land like its first-born.

Honor our real traditions

The historic patterns of the region have favored a humane density in urban development coupled with the preservation of the natural landscape. They have always acted as a brake to heedless sprawl, and making them the law of the land would solve a lot of problems.

Put our money where our mouth is Americans tend to wait until the future they dreaded arrives before dealing with it. We have to break this habit. The best way to do so is to fall in love again with a region that, for many of us, captured our hearts when we first set eyes on it, savored its delicious food and wine, and walked its captivating streets. Something so beautiful demands our indulgence, our generosity, and our commitment. We know how to treat it well, and yet we have so often failed to do so. It’s time to change.

Written with Richard Bender for the Forms in the City / Spaces in the Metropolis Conference, Rome, Italy, 2-3 April 2007, and published in Rassegna diArchitetturaeUrbanisticano. 126, September–December 2007, pp. 50–55.

Urban Terroir

Terroir refers to the conditions of terrain and microclimate in winegrowing regions and, more specifically, within a given vineyard. It takes in those attributes of place that influence the grapes and thus the wine. Terroir is an evolving context, subject to human intervention and to the vicissitudes of nature in a larger sense. It evolves, but the pace of evolution of its different elements can vary radically. As a mix of the found and the cultivated, terroir can be improved, revived, diminished, and even destroyed.

We use words like structure, scale, density, and fabric to describe the urban context, but these are all elements of something larger. By calling this “something larger” terroir, we raise the possibility of cultivation, but against a deeper background the regional ecosystem in which a city is situated. Terroir could also be said to be that part of nature we can influence. Thus, its boundaries are potentially vast. Exurbia, the embodiment of our economically and culturally divided society, is also a byproduct of a cultivation strategy that treats social displacement in its different forms as an externality. The question of who cultivates, and why, is as legitimate for city making as it is for farming, fishing, or forestry.

Reclaiming terroir

In TheArchitectureoftheCity , Aldo Rossi writes of scale that “it is conceivable that a change in scale modified an urban artifact in some way; but it does not change its quality.” Citing the urban geographer Richard Ratcliff, he adds, “To reduce metropolitan problems to problems of scale means to ignore…the actual structure of the city and its conditions of evolution.”1 Rossi then quotes the critic Giuseppe Samonà, writing in the mid-1960s:

It is absolutely out of the question, in my opinion, to nurture any idea of gigantic spatial parameters. In truth, we find ourselves, as at all times, in a situation that, from a general point of view, presents man and his space in well-balanced proportion, and in a relationship analogous to that of the ancients, except that in today’s relationship all the spatial measures are greater than were the more fixed ones of fifty years ago.2

The key words here are "quality," "well-balanced proportion," and "relationship." To be avoided are “gigantic spatial parameters” which ignore or traduce the relationship between “man and his space.” Terroir posits human cultivation, and cultivation in an urban sense is how a city

becomes “our space.” In cultivating our urban terroir, we address and value the relationship itself. Whatever furthers it scale, for example becomes part of the terroir, cultivated both for its own sake and for what it can contribute to the outcomes we desire to achieve and also to sustain. Sustainability is intrinsic to terroir, one reason why we cultivate it. Structure and scale (for example) lack this connotation. They can be dead, to use Christopher Alexander’s apt word for it; terroir is organic, alive.3 What gives terroir efficacy compared to words like density or fabric is that it explicitly takes in humanity and nature, so we cannot treat it as a thing unmoored from both.

Resisting gigantism

Samonà cautions us that scaleis necessarily a human scale, or gigantism may result. In a different context, Wallace Stegner described his talkative aunt. Finally noticing the huge rock formation rising dead ahead of them they were in a car she was rendered speechless, unable to wrap her mind around it. “You have to get used to an inhuman scale,” Stegner wrote.4 Cities can also have a scale that diminishes the possibility of a human relationship. Before we build urban canyons that become wind tunnels, we need to ask if we can do so without ruining the city streets and public open spaces they adjoin

If every act of building has the potential to further the human relationship, then gigantism is really an egotism that disregards that possibility. As this suggests, gigantism flows from a willful or mindless ignorance with respect to terroir. Preservationists that reflexively resist higher-density development, privileging their own neighborhoods over the region’s remaining open space, show a similar egotism, yet their fears of gigantism seem justified by experience. 5

Why is it that we get gigantism much more often than we get urbanity? One could say, borrowing from Jean-François Lyotard, that the “grand narrative” of regional open space preservation, so well accepted by Bay Area opinion makers, has become a pretext for the “soft terrorism” of Smart Growth. The results fall right in line with Lyotard’s now 30-year-old critique: “On the one hand, the system can only function by reducing complexity, and on the other, it must induce the adaptation of individual aspirations to its own ends. The reduction in complexity is required to maintain the system’s power capability.”6 This power capability is very much in place. Reforming it doesn’t mean streamlining the process we tried that under former Mayor Willie Brown but taking it out of the hands of politicians, restoring

consensus and rule of law, yet doing so as postmodernists, accepting nuance and difference.

Rethinking tradition

Entire swaths of San Francisco neighborhoods we know and love were built based on a shared understanding of the city’s terroir. The introduction of taller, more massive buildings, first in the financial district and then in lower-density industrial areas to the north and south, ended that consensus. Especially south of Market, the results are mixed. Yet there are a growing number of examples of higher-density projects that achieve the kind of urbanity that we associate with the best of the city’s established districts. Certain architects stand out in their ability to do this across a range of building types and scales, and their work in the city is worth studying as potential precedents.7 The best new tall buildings around the city’s Mission Street corridor make room for the people on the ground. These aren’t lifeless plazas, either. They’re run just as well as they’re designed, and their owners clearly get that a civic gesture not only buys them constant goodwill, but makes their properties stand out from the competition. The best mid-sized developments create open space and through-block porosity, add balconies that people really use, and vary the height and shape of the buildings and their elements to avoid a monolithic look that substitutes groundscraper for blocky highrise.

Rethinking cultivation

Pattern books were part of a consensus about city form at different levels that made the rule of law in development possible. Although pattern books posited specific designs, they were liberally interpreted by individual builders. More importantly, they reflected a shared understanding of how neighborhoods took shape, with the underlying house pattern reflecting the way the individual blocks were divided up In APatternLanguage , 8 Alexander and his collaborators documented the elements that make everyday life worth living. It may be timely to take their work further to update the patterns that supported the urbanity of our cities through the early postwar decades, but then fell into disuse as the desire for a higher density took hold. We have never really replaced these older patterns, which could be tailored to each and every block. Without them, we are cast adrift in the politicized world of case by case, and cultivation becomes a shouting match. With them, city making can shift back to what it was for eons: a widely-shared human activity.9

The cultivation of urban terroir requires this kind of working consensus. Despite a planning apparatus and an elaborate playbook, the recent development of cities like San Francisco and Berkeley has mainly reflected the developer-influenced whims of politicians, with each new project serving as a vehicle for securing contributions and bragging rights. Only GSA and the genuinely civic groups responsible for the new public museums have used this license intelligently. Since those philosopher-kings and queens are not always available, putting cultivation back in the hands of the community is safer.

The city’s leadership still has a role to play in guiding cultivation. They are the stewards, to use a word that often arises in university campus planning. Part of their responsibility, part of what they guide, is the urban terroir. They have to balance the claims of the region the necessary preservation of open land, for example with the claims of the community to live well within necessarily higher densities. They have to connect the dots, do the math, and help the community understand and explore its options not in abstract, but literally neighborhood by neighborhood. Most of all, they have to avoid the “grand narratives” that paper over false solutions, and acknowledge that consensus can only really be achieved at the local level, as an evolving, constantly negotiated resolution.

The community, too, has responsibilities. Neighborhoods are alive because the people who live in them care about and participate in their cultivation. One way to make this happen is to devolve power to them, but to hand that power over with stipulations. How a higher density is to be achieved is ideally a neighborhood decision. Friedrich Engel’s idea that the housing crisis could be solved by rethinking how existing housing is used is relevant to a number of San Francisco and Berkeley districts.

Density does not always mean bigger it can also mean used more intensively. Many neighborhoods are working to address urban crime and post-earthquake recovery, topics that force them to interact with others to pursue shared interests and initiatives. They could also come to grips with how to meet their communal obligations to the region to absorb expected population growth, reduce congestion and pollution, use water and energy more efficiently, and preserve the larger ecosystem while maintaining, reviving, and creating urbanity where it counts.

Rethinking participation

At a time when, in virtually every other walk of life, people go online to find information and plug into specific communities to understand their

options and track and cultivate their personal interests, the mechanisms of “community” are inefficient and out of touch. The remarkable Obama campaign exemplified what can happen when the means and methods of the rest of life are applied to neighborhood-scale organizing and initiatives: a dialogue becomes possible across “interested” communities, which the official city can support, participate in, and sometimes help frame or augment.10

Our cities need to face reality and begin to leverage the tools that everyone else is using now on an individual basis, and put urban cultivation on a new footing, so that this shared civic responsibility can be carried out in a more open and balanced way with terroir in mind. Politics will continue this is not an argument for “good government.” That said, bringing the city and the community back on the same page is a necessity, both to define a new consensus about each city’s cultivation, one neighborhood at a time, and to recognize that the relationship between them has to change. The cities' discretionary powers their easy recourse to case by case will be curtailed, while the individual communities will have more to do. Every neighborhood will need to tend its own vineyard, with a better understanding of how this contributes to the city's terroir.

Notes

1. Aldo Rossi, TheArchitectureoftheCity , MIT Press, 1982, pages 160–161.

2. Rossi is quoting (on page 161) from an essay by Giuseppe Samonà, published in 1964.

3. Alexander’s insistence in TheNatureofOrder , that we measure the built realm by its vitality radically asserts its connection to the rest of life. Alexander, the Tolstoy of architectural theory, is much criticized for his discursive and messianic writings, but on the fundamentals, he has always been on to something.

4. Wallace Stegner, “Thoughts in a Dry Land,” WheretheBluebirdSingsto theLemonadeSprings , Modern Library, 2002, pages 52–54. The quote reads, “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.”

5. It is not just regional open space that is treated as an externality by gigantism of this sort; the homeless are another “urban externality” that mysteriously drops out of the frame of neighborhood preservation on the one hand and high-density redevelopment on the other. One could mention the exclusionary nature of public employment here, too: no sign of the poor sweeping up the parks, for example, and their rifling of recycling bins is considered a crime in the well-to-do neighborhoods of Berkeley.

6. Jean-François Lyotard, ThePostmodernCondition , University of Minnesota Press, 1984, page 61. The book was first published in 1979. It’s interesting that Rossi, Alexander, Lyotard, and others like Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, and Paul Feyerabend whose works also have a bearing, directly or indirectly, on the theme of terroir, were all writing around the same time. That period was characterized by left/right debates on issues that are back on the table today, from oil shortages to urban terrorism. It ended with the US and the UK shifting rightward toward unfettered global capitalism. As the US now shifts the other way, let’s hope we learned something in the interim.

7. For example: SOM’s UCSF Mission Bay Housing; Pelli Clarke Pelli on Mission Street; Jim Jennings and Studios' Foundry Square on Howard Street; Stanley Saitowitz on Folsom Street and on 14th Avenue; Leddy Maytum Stacey on Sixth Street; Thom Mayne/Morphosis on Seventh Street; and David Baker on Eighth Street and elsewhere. There are others, but collectively they are the exception and banality is the rule in a city that is remarkably and even courageously cosmopolitan in many other respects.

8. Christopher Alexander et al., APatternLanguage , Oxford University Press, 1977. Alexander is best at recording specific attributes of towns and cities their settings at different scales that make them truly livable and enjoyable. His willingness to say that we know if a place or a building is alive or dead restores ordinary people to their rightful place as measurers of all they survey. When we start to consider new patterns of city making that are in tune with humanity and nature, we often find that Alexander has been there before us. We may not agree with his account of the terrain, but we can appreciate what he knows and what he’s seen.

9. Ivan Illich comments on modernity’s “loss of proportionality” or “common sense” (in TheRiversNorthoftheFuture:TheTestamentofIvanIllichas toldtoDavidCayley , Anansi, 2005, pages 136–137): This loss of proportionality points to the historical uniqueness of modernity, its incomparability. The poetic, performative quality of existence was erased and forgotten in field after field… And in this transition from a world based on experience of fit, of appropriateness, to a world which I can’t even name, a world in which words have lost their contours, what was once called common sense has been washed out. Common sense, as this term was used of old, meant the sense of what fits, what belongs, what is appropriate. It was by common sense, for example, that the physician understood the limits of what he could and should do.

Illich and Alexander share a sense that modernity is fatal to humane patterns of living/being. I think they would argue, in contrast to Samonà’s statement about scale in a modern context, that gigantism is inherent that is, a constant danger in the modern loss of proportionality and common sense (as Illich puts it). In an earlier introduction to Illich and his work (IvanIllichinConversation , Anansi, 1992, page 15), David Cayley

writes that Illich, drawing on the work of Leopold Kohr, who pioneered a philosophy of social size, claimed that:

To each social environment there corresponds a set of natural scales. … In each of these dimensions, tools that require time periods or space or energies much beyond the order of corresponding natural scales are dysfunctional.

In RiversNorth , Illich describes the introduction of tempered scales in music (pages 134–136) a passage that suggests to me that modernity requires us to find “tempered” forms that can be harmoniously combined. We have to “learn not to hear disharmony,” he says. Perhaps we have to learn not see it, either, in order both to feel at home in the modern city and begin to reclaim it for ourselves. It is in this spirit that I point to Saitowitz’s Congregation Beth Sholom and Mayne’s Federal Office Building, each of which has been accused (by John King and Dean Macris, respectively) of disharmony buildings that are tempered as the latter building’s neighbor, the SoMA Grand, is not. Seeing them, I felt that each fits harmoniously with its context, but in a new way. By studying this new way, we may be able to find new patterns of city making that are suited to the city we’ve become. (By patterns I mean precedents that suggest ideas about how to work plan, design, and build in a given context.)

10. In Berkeley, Kitchen Democracy provides an online forum to discuss and weigh in on issues of public debate. There are signs that the city’s leaders are paying attention. Some question if this is really participation, but it may be where it needs to go to be effective.

Written for the “Slow” issue of _line , January 2009.

Urban Density, Then and Now

In the 1960s and 1970s, a series of critiques of the modern city appeared. Jane Jacobs’ attack on those intent on redeveloping New York City was the most immediately impactful, loosening the grip of Robert Moses and his followers, but others had a broader influence on architects and planners. As an observer of the San Francisco Bay Area's cities, I wondered if their books from this period would shed light on current issues of adding density in urban contexts.

I started with Aldo Rossi’s TheArchitectureoftheCityand and Manfredo Tafuri’s ArchitectureandUtopia , two books that loomed large in the era of postmodernism. Both approach the European city through the lens of history, with Rossi stressing the importance of types, seeing cities in themselves as works of architecture, and arguing against function as a generator of form. In considering types, Rossi lights on urban artifacts as valid exceptions to a city’s existing contexts. He points to a “people’s palace” in Padua, a landmark building that has housed a great variety of uses. (So, he asks, where is function?) In all, Rossi doesn’t provide much guidance about adding density, but Tafuri, citing Piranesi (below), cautions us to use urban artifacts sparingly.

Kevin Lynch’s GoodCityFormand TheImageoftheCitystress the need to observe cities over time and to plan incrementally, with an awareness of the past and of the imprecise nature of any intervention. Like Jacobs, but aimed specifically at planners and architects, Lynch argues for a richer texture and a finer grain, noting that modern planning too often fails to achieve them. What he provides are notes and sketches, not a set of principles, and a new vocabulary for describing cities. As a result, “fine grain” quickly entered the developer lexicon, often claimed but less often achieved.

In Supports , John Habraken blames the loss of human scale in cities on the way they deny individual householders the ability to house themselves. This results in top-down planning that “knows best” what households want and fails to engage them. That “knows best” extends from households to neighborhoods to districts, cutting through these levels to deliver housing as a mass product to its captive consumers. He recasts multi-unit housing as ribbons of frameworks, drawing on loft buildings and precedents like Le Corbusier’s Marseilles Block (below), with housing infill that can be tailored with prefabricated elements.

Thirty years later, in TheStructureoftheOrdinary , Habraken finds his framework and infill idea present in vernacular and traditional housing. To guide growth effectively, we have to bring form (“the physical order”), place (“the territorial order”), and understanding (“the cultural order”) into play as the raw material with which cities can be made suitable for human life. As part of this, we need to give communities and neighbors the ability to lead development.

Gauging proportion, setting limits

In a series of books intended as a history of scarcity, the social critic Ivan Illich offered a more sweeping takedown of what he called “the modern project,” tracing it back to the Enlightenment’s privileging the universal over the local, a move that made gauging proportion and setting limits difficult. As his biographer, David Cayley, writes:

It was Illich’s view that “all worlds before our own” were shaped by a sense of proportion. There was no individual thing or person able to define itself everything depended on its other and on “the net of correspondences” in which it was enmeshed. People and place were similarly related the people’s way of life given by the landscape and natural endowments of that place. Cultures differed, but sharing this “experience of fit” provided its “ethical” standard, insofar as ethics, originally, was nothing other than this ability to discern what is proper to a given setting. This world has now gone, replaced by a reality ruled by contract, choice, and self-determination. The “common sense” by which people discerned what was fitting was washed away, and we now live in “social constellations” to which nothing corresponds, “a wombless world” in which every frontier leads out not to a beyond but only to more of the same. (Cayley, pp. 362–363)

Illich used the word “conviviality” to describe what a communally shared “experience of fit” among neighbors could achieve: a locally appropriate agreement on proportion and limits.

The word “urbanity” speaks to the pleasures a city affords at whatever densities people find congenial. These densities will vary across a city’s territory and across time in response to the ebb and flow of human activity. When setting density is the question, the answers will be arbitrary or contingent without a shared understanding to guide fit and set limits in terms of proportion as a convivial respect for others. Zoning is a blunt instrument in this regard, and form-mandating legislation “from above” is worse. Both mandate answers to the density question which, to the extent they fail to account for the unforeseen, whether locally or in terms of their implications, immediately push a supposedly worked-out, by-right process back into case by case, defeating the rationale for them that planners and politicians offer.

Planning for neighborhood fit

Neighborhoods evolve at different paces. As Lynch noted, the modern city reflects a search for order to supplement what tradition omitted or no longer affects. Growth increases the pace, coming up against the existing order and its political dimensions. Where the weight of

entitlements is lighter, community-based developers experiment with fit at a smaller scale. Interface Studio Architects’ XS House (below) made use of Philadelphia’s building code to fit seven apartments on an 11-by93-foot lot. (Over-sidewalk air-rights give the top three floors 14 feet.)

Corvidae Coop in Seattle (below), developed by Frolic Housing with Allied8 Architects, builds on zoning changes in that city that permit up to three units per single-family lot. By combining two lots and using a cohousing approach, with two shared kitchens, the project provides 10 affordable units, including two studios, two cottages, five one-bedrooms, and one two-bedroom.

XS House was a locally commissioned project, while Frolic’s business model seeks to engage owners of existing single-family houses

in their redevelopment, keeping them in place with a smaller unit while giving them a return on their investment. Both reflect an interest in helping people in their communities to house themselves, albeit at a small scale. At a larger scale, some of the most interesting examples are the work of nonprofit developers committed to neighborhood participation in their multi-unit housing projects' planning and design; the building societies of Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands similarly identify and involve their projects’ residents. The resulting housing has a family resemblance, in that they prioritize communal settings over private ones, and pay attention to the neighbors beyond their property lines. This goes beyond form and fit to improve crossneighborhood access, for example, or provide shared outdoor amenities.

In their book MissingMiddleHousing , Daniel (and Karen) Parolek and Arthur C. Nelson lay out an effort over several decades to bridge in scale between the single-family house and the urban apartment block. The authors, influenced by postmodernism and New Urbanism, mine the past for examples of how to add to the capacity of upzoned neighborhoods without overwhelming them. They credit Lynch’s student, UC Berkeley Professor Michael Southworth, as a mentor, pointing to scale, form, and housing type as more important to urbanity and fitting in than density per se. They also propose zoning reforms that deliberately limit ways zoning is exploited, needlessly sacrificing urbanity to density. Like the New Urbanists they admire, the Paroleks and Nelson look to tradition for inspiration. Others, including those mentioned above, aim consciously to evolve these typologies. If zoning is a “language game,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, these parallel efforts are engaged in a different game from the often glacial one of entitlements more creative and more open to local inflection.

Over time, the steady welling up of better examples will change the cities around them. What works in Philadelphia, with its unusual lot sizes, will be different from what works in Seattle, but Lynch’s impulse to observe and learn from these changes over time, and Habraken’s and Illich’s faith in the vernacular as the wellspring on which convivial urbanity draws, suggest that fit as a locally aware sense of proportion and limit, acknowledging form, place, and understanding as order, make it possible to answer in the affirmative Christopher Alexander’s essential question, posed in TheNatureofOrder : “Does it have life?”

Sources

Aldo Rossi, TheArchitectureoftheCity , MIT Press, 1982, first published in Italy in 1962.

Manfredo Tafuri, ArchitectureandUtopia , MIT Press, 1976, first published in Italy in 1972.

Kevin Lynch, TheImageoftheCity , MIT Press, 1960, and GoodCityForm , MIT Press, 1959.

N. John Habraken, Supports , Praeger, 1972, first published in the Netherlands in 1961, and TheStructureoftheOrdinary , MIT Press, 1998.

David Cayley, IvanIllich , Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021.

Daniel Parolek, et al, MissingMiddleHousing , Island Press, 2020.

Christopher Alexander, TheNatureofOrder , I–IV, Center for Environmental Structure, 2002–2004.

Written for CommonEdge , 6 July 2022; reprinted by ArchDaily , 8 July 2022.

The Factory Without Walls

Since the 1930s there has been a call for the industrialization of residential construction in the US. This effort has had a very specific image the image of the auto industry and of the gradual domination of the housing industry by larger and larger firms involved in factory production of housing units. This image reflected the belief that the methods of the auto industry the assembly lines and mass production, as well as the industry's financing and marketing methods could be brought to bear on the problems of housing.

The image of industrialization

The experience from 1930 through 1975 shows that industrialization in the housing industry took another form. This has involved mass production as well, of building materials, products, and tools, but in a more significant way it has involved the creation of an industry that serves builders and that has provided new methods, tools, materials, and products that greatly expand the number of persons who can so describe themselves. In this way the entire industry has been transformed.

One of the results of this transformation is that more people can participate effectively in the building process, and a larger variety of options now exist between products, tools, materials, and methods which are capital-intensive and those which are labor-intensive. This trend has implications which are already being felt in the housing industry, and which may change it more dramatically in the future, opening it to new kinds of workers women, the unskilled, the young and excluded; and to new approaches to production and development that are better suited to meeting the nation's housing needs and less rigid and tradition-bound in terms of how and by whom housing is provided.

The dream of mass production

Proponents of industrialized housing have been consistently spellbound by the image of General Motors. This dream of the mass-produced house and the mass manufacturer of housing has taken increasingly sophisticated forms since 1930, but the basic feature of the dream has remained the same: the transition of the housing industry from a fragmented group of many small firms, each using obsolete methods to serve highly localized markets, to a much smaller number of larger firms, each mass-producing housing to serve sufficiently aggregated markets. The dream has been fueled by spurts in prefabricated housing production during World War II and by the apparent success of massproduced, factory-built housing in Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the Middle East. Yet in the United States, while the mobile home has captured an increasing per­centage of the low-cost, retirement, and transient-worker market, the prefabricated house (or "modular," "industrialized," "manufactured," or "factory-built" house) has never managed to supplant conventional housing construction, and no firms have emerged among housing producers whose size and volume of production would place them, even by analogy, on a par with American auto manufacturers.

The failure to realize this dream has not been for lack of effort. This can be illustrated by a capsule history of such attempts. Several firms with names like "General Houses" or "American Houses" were started in the early 1930s to make and market steel-frame prefab housing. These firms had backers such as Inland Steel and General Electric, but despite in one case a direct connection with a major retail chain, Sears­Roebuck, and despite apparently favorable initial publicity, they were unable to set up adequate dealer networks or reach volume production of any magnitude.

The idea of using prefab housing in public housing programs is fairly old; the number of units involved offered the market an opportunity to capitalize and experiment with new techniques. (Some prefab concepts are quite old, also: John Grosvenor Atterbury built a concrete panel building in New York City in the 1890s; prefabricated metal buildings, like the Crystal Palace, are even older.) But this concept was not applied at any real scale until World War II, when the press of new workers in industrial areas made rapid production of housing a necessity. Prefab housing surged during the war, with a total output of nearly 200,000 units, of which 116,000 were used in federal housing programs. The federal government also tried to help prefab housing achieve better marketplace acceptability, underwriting a demonstration

of such housing at Indian Rock, Maryland, in 1941 (below). This demonstration, which used the houses of a number of manufacturers and had a site designed by a prominent land planner, in some ways resembled the recent federal demonstration program, Operation Breakthrough.

The end of the war brought a second housing crisis, a shortage of middle-income housing for returning veterans. The government responded with a comprehensive program, the Veterans Emergency Housing Program (or Wyatt Program, after housing "czar" Wilson Wyatt) aimed at overcoming the shortage by the use of wartime emergency powers to coordinate housing and building material manufacture, allocate resources to residential construction, and underwrite factory production of housing by giving wartime plants and money to manufacturers.

The Wyatt Program represents the high point in government efforts to reshape the building industry and achieve increased housing production. It called for a first-year production target of 2.7 million units in 1946, of which 31.8 percent (800,000 units) would be prefabricated. No program since has been as comprehensive, ambitious, or willing to intervene in the private sector. The program carried forward the central planning approaches of the war years, the same approaches which in fact led to increased industrialization of housing production in Europe and the Soviet Union in the postwar era. It is important to note that the program was backed by the industrial unions, the United Auto Workers in particular, which had much to gain from the continuation of production in wartime factories.

The Wyatt Program was not successful. The coalition of federal agencies on which it depended broke down; conversion of wartime factories became a difficult and protracted business; approval of prefab units for Veterans Administration (VA) mortgages was not made in a blanket sense, putting manufacturers at the mercy of individual officials, the needed financial mechanisms were also not forthcoming. In the absence of interim payments and mortgages that could be rapidly processed, the time-saving qualities of prefabrication became irrelevant. Conventional methods, which were suited to the climate of existing practices in government and finance, did better.

In 1946, the first year of the Wyatt Program, there were 280 prefabrication firms in existence, many backed by larger firms with no connection to construction. By 1949, there were only 85.

Interest in prefabricated housing simmered in the 1950s and 1960s, with continued limited manufacture and sporadic interest by the armed forces. In the second half of the 1960s, however, two sets of circumstances coincided and gave rise to a new interest in factory-built or industrialized housing by the federal government and the private sector.

The first of these was a resurgence of interest and support for housing research. Such research had previously been conducted on a limited basis by the Armed Forces, the National Bureau of Standards, and the Housing and Home Finance Agency. With the formation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the mid-1960s, research efforts expanded and HUD began to consider larger, more ambitious programs.

The second set of circumstances was the identification by several national advisory groups of a national housing shortage of crisis proportions. The National Commission on Urban Problems (chaired by Senator Paul Douglas), the President's Committee on Urban Housing (chaired by Edgar Kaiser), and the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (chaired by Governor Otto Kerner) were particularly concerned with the lack of adequate housing for lower-income groups. They stressed that the production of between 20 and 26 million housing units over a 10-year period would be necessary to alleviate this shortage. The Kerner Report also took the view that the failure to meet this objective would result in continued urban chaos.

The Douglas and Kaiser reports were issued prior to formulation of the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act and influenced it in several ways, the most significant of which was the addition of the socalled Proxmire Amendment, Section 108, which authorized HUD to

conduct an experimental housing program. This gave rise to the federal In-City Low Cost Housing Program, aimed at identifying constraints to volume production of housing and carrying out demonstrations of experimental approaches to housing provision, including factory-built housing.

In January 1969 the Nixon administration took over the White House and George Romney was appointed Secretary of HUD. He soon after introduced a new program, Operation Breakthrough, which went further than the In-City Program in suggesting factory-built housing as an answer to the need for volume housing production. It became the major focus of HUD's research efforts for the next several years.

Operation Breakthrough tried to do three things simultaneously: underwrite the design and development of new housing systems and their demonstration on nine prototype sites; eliminate institutional and other constraints to industrialized housing (such as the lack of marketplace acceptability, lack of truly national building codes and transport regulations, union hostility, unacceptability to lenders, and lack of FHA approval on a uniform basis); and aggregate sufficiently large markets for manufacturers of industrialized housing by making their products suitable for use in the FHA subsidized-interest programs and by earmarking 25,000 such units for their products exclusively.

The Operation Breakthrough Program was able to carry out its demonstration, although with delays and at a smaller scale than was initially anticipated, but it was not able to increase the share of factorybuilt housing within the total housing market. The program faltered for several reasons cuts in its overall budget, problems with design and development of the housing units, problems with HUD's "performance criteria" (standards that describe the qualities of a product) for the housing, and, midway in the program, a federal moratorium on housing subsidies. This lack of success brings us back to a central question: how is it that factory-built housing, which enjoys reasonable success elsewhere in the world, has remained only a negligible factor in American housing, despite periodic efforts to stimulate its growth?

The answer is two-fold. First, the aggregated market for standardized, factory-built housing that exists in Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union does not exist here. Aggregation can really only occur where the government takes a role in creating projects or allocating production, so that an acceptable volume of steady production can be maintained. Second, the nature of conventional residential construction

in the US has become increasingly streamlined and amenable to the use of prefabricated components and semiskilled or unskilled workers. It has also grown increasingly productive, as was evidenced by its ability earlier in this decade to surpass 2 million units per year in construction volume. The Breakthrough Program assumed this was impossible and tended to view conventional construction as hidebound and slow to innovate.

Factory-built housing has remained negligible in the US because improved technology and organization have allowed conventional construction methods to remain competitive, while no special circumstances, such as government aggregation of large projects or adequately large markets, have emerged to give the factory assembly of housing units a competitive edge over conventional on-site assembly.

From the 1920s forward, the dream of factory mass-produced housing in the US consistently saw residential construction as static and backward. While it's true that conventional construction may harbor counterproductive practices, its central tendency since World War II has been toward greater productivity through the use of new tools, products, and organizational methods. This is also industrialization, but it has mostly gone unnoticed among those calling for assembly-line manufacturing of housing in factories.

The situation today

Residential construction in 1975 combines the use of prefabricated components with on-site assembly and finishing of the housing unit. This process continues to use on-site labor, the function of which has changed from "crafting," using typical elements like milled lumber, window and door frames, and molding, to combining prefabricated products and assemblies of increasing size and complexity.

The use of prefabricated components has simplified the on­site construction process. On-site handcrafting has been shifted to the factory, where it has benefited from the application of new tools and methods. The resulting building products are not only more directly usable by on-site workers, but are less labor-intensive in general. The use of more complex components, such as units that combine kitchen, bathroom, and mechanical core in a single package, results in a highly simplified construction process. What is possible using complex components has not been realized fully in the US, but has been amply demonstrated in Japan and Italy. The use of simpler components is now common in housing construction in the US.

The general simplification of residential construction processes has been reinforced by simplifying the means by which the various building components are combined in the assembly process. The latter simplification is best described in terms of its objectives, which apply to components, construction methods, and tools.

The first objective is to decrease the time needed for a worker to master the skills needed to use a building product or tool. Ideally the product or tool should be so straightforward that any worker can use it competently with brief training. As a result, the level of skill needed in residential construction will be lower and the number of workers able to participate in it will grow correspondingly.

The second objective is to increase worker productivity. In general, this has meant that new building products and tools aim to do more in fewer steps. Prefinished panels have replaced hand-tiled bathroom walls, while nail guns have replaced hammers and nails. Workers have discovered synergies among tools and products that allow even greater productivity in the field than envisioned by their makers.

The changes that have occurred in the organization, methods, tools, and products of residential construction have turned today's residential building site into a place of final assembly almost a factory without walls, to which are brought a host of prefinished building parts, to be assembled by workers whose tasks increasingly resemble those of other industrial workers.

There are other resemblances between the residential building site and the modem industrial assembly line and its working conditions. Suburban tract sites, for example, have come to resemble assembly lines in configuration. Their site plans are designed to accommodate special equipment for putting in foundations, utility lines, streets, and sidewalks. The site-development and housing-assembly processes have been coordinated to allow them to occur concurrently. Assembly of the housing units tends to be carried out by workers moving from house to house, as opposed to the industrial assembly line, where workers tend to remain in one place while the work moves by them.

Urban sites tend to be more complicated than suburban ones, and their similarities with industrial assembly lines tend to be in terms of working conditions and the nature of the work force. The last decade has seen the construction site come increasingly under the domain of such federal regulations as the Occupational Safety and Health Act and various civil rights and equal opportunity actions taken by Congress. Compliance with these measures has changed the urban building site,

making it a safer workplace and introducing to it a number of workers who were previously excluded from it or from certain jobs within it.

The combination of better on-site worker safety, better opportunities for employment, and simplified methods of construction has meant that the construction industry has attracted a younger, more varied work force. If this trend continues, the presence of women and of ethnic and racial minorities should be commonplace at construction sites in five or 10 years. The end of exclusionary practices and the potential for greater use of unskilled workers should tend to make construction wages more on a par with industrial wages over the same period.

Self-help techniques and systems buildings

It is important to note two interesting developments in the area of building design and construction: the phenomenon of self-help housing, and the steady development of systems buildings of increasing sophistication.

Self-help housing has roots in the same tradition that has fostered the do-it-yourself movement within the US middle class, and such phenomena as urban squatter housing developing countries. It is one means of attacking the problem of providing housing for the poor, and it has demonstrated a better track record in this effort than have the industrialized housing systems imported from Europe and elsewhere. Self-help housing is an amalgam of the idea of the owner-built house with more recent developments in building tools and products and in social policy. It is based on the observation that housing requires either time or money to buy the services of others, and time is a major resource, even for the US middle class.

Self-help techniques have been greatly improved by the development of products and tools, like fast-drying paint and the paint roller, that are widely available and make it possible for an unskilled person to perform tasks quickly at an acceptable level of quality. Variations of the self-help approach have been tried in different parts of the US over the past five years, particularly in urban areas where local governments have become the holders of large amounts of low-income housing. Another set of experiments has been based in rural agricultural and Native reservations.

Self-help's expansion as an approach to housing construction depends on a number of factors changes in housing policy, income distribution, building codes, and the issuance of building and occupancy permits which depend in turn on the attitude of government toward the validity of self-help techniques as a method of

alleviating the housing shortages of the poor. The governments of some cities have made preliminary moves toward approval of self-help techniques, while the federal government has interested itself mainly through research efforts.

Systems buildings are made up of systems of components. One such family of these buildings is derived from British school construction systems like CLASP, designed in the 1950s. The first of the American branch of this family was the School Construction System Development (SCSD) project, designed by a team of architects led by Professor Ezra Ehrenkrantz. SCSD called for specific building components to be developed by manufacturers in response to performance criteria set out by the system's designers. The manufacturers assumed the burden of development costs because the program had aggregated some $20 million in California public school projects, beyond which lay a much larger potential market in national school building programs.

Many of the systems that came after SCSD found it difficult to replicate its approach because of the difficulty of aggregating a sufficiently large market to attract manufacturers willing to develop new components. As a result, the tendency is to work with existing components. But some system designers consider, in abstract, the relationship between building components and building functions, and work with these relationships in developing their systems. This approach is promising.

Both systems and conventional buildings tend to achieve flexibility of use through repetitive design, rather than through careful analysis and planning for future changes in occupancy. Also, builders tend to ignore total or life costs of operation, maintenance, replacement, and renovation in favor of a focus on first costs. This new approach to systems design makes a thorough analysis of occupancy patterns and building life costs, recognizing that buildings vary in their need for flexibility and in the useful life beyond which they will require renovation. The building systems that result from this new approach are more like systems of rules than kits of parts. This level of abstraction ensures that the buildings that meet the rules will have greater diversity in appearance and better suitability to purpose than those using specific components.

In the last decade, some interesting experiments have combined aspects of self-help with systems building approaches. One example is a concept developed by the Dutch architect John Habraken that provides the dweller with an infrastructural frame supports and

utilities for the dwelling unit but leaves it to the dweller to provide the infill of needed components that fit within it. Townland (below), one of Operation Breakthrough's selected housing systems, is an example. While it was not fully implemented, a modified example of it was built in Seattle as part of that program.

These experiments represent an attempt to integrate capital-intensive and labor-intensive approaches within an overall organizational framework. They display a new attitude toward the boundary between public and private, moving this boundary closer to the dwelling unit. (Something similar occurs in the concept of a condominium). They provide added opportunities for diversity in unit design and fit-out than is possible in conventionally developed building types like row houses and multistory apartment blocks.

Industrialized housing systems

In tracing the development of industrialized housing systems since the 1930s and in outlining directions for their future development, we have seen that they have gone from a narrow preoccupation with factory mass-production to a greater rationalization of the field-assembly process, together with improvements in tools and building products and components. Present trends indicate a further shift toward greater diversity in the construction process, and greater dependence on manufacturers outside of the building industry. If we tried to arrive at a definition of industrialized housing systems which reflected this, it might be as follows:

An industrialized housing system is one that uses the tools, processes, and resources of industry, finance, and government to complete a building process that meets predetermined objectives for the system's performance, the means by which it is realized, and the nature of its outcomes.

The situation of residential development has become visibly more complex, especially in the last five years. So, too, have the problems addressed by the housing industry. In the 1930s, industrialized housing was defined in terms of mass-production. This idea of it predominated through the late 1960s. If residential development is to occur today and address such diverse demands as concern with overbuilding, minimizing energy use, increasing user control of elements of the design and construction process, and avoiding rigid solutions that shorten a building's useful life, this posits a housing industry and building systems organized to allow a greater diversity of approaches to its products and services. Making this happen will be the industry's main challenge over the next quarter century.

The transformation of residential development and the creation of new building systems hinge on the recognition by individual participants in the building process contractors, developers, users, designers, bureaucrats, lenders that their roles in it are mutually dependent and interactive. This transformation will require their coordinated as well as their independent efforts.

Sources

1. Industrialized housing

§ Richard Bender, ACrackintheRear-ViewMirror:AViewofIndustrialized Building(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973).

§ Albert G. H. Dietz and Laurence S. Cutler (eds.), IndustrializedBuilding SystemsforHousing(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971).

2. The SCSD Program and other building-system projects

§ James Benet, et al., SCSD:TheProjectandtheSchools(New York: Educational Facilities Laboratories, 1967).

§ Richard Bender, "Alphabet Soup (From SCSD to URBS to ABS with BSD)," in Kenneth F. Reinschmidt, ed.: SystemsBuilding(Gaithersburg, Md.: Committee on Systems Building, American Society of Civil Engineers/ National Science Foundation, 1972).

§ John Boice, AHistoryandEvaluationofSCSD(Menlo Park, Ca.: Building Systems Information Oearinghouse, n.d.).

3. Self-help housing

§ N. J. Habraken, Supports(New York: Praeger, 1972).

§ John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter (eds.), FreedomtoBuild(New York: Macmillan, 1972).

4. Operation Breakthrough

§ AReportonOperationBreakthrough(Washington, D.C.: Technical Panel, Advisory Committee to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (AC-HUD), Building Research Advisory Board (BRAB), National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, (1974).

§ DesignandDevelopmentofHousingSystemsforOperationBreakthrough (Operation Feedback, Volume I) (Washington, D.C.: Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1973).

§ IndustrializationForum . Volume 6, No. l. Special issue devoted to Operation Breakthrough; University of Montreal, 1975).

Written with Richard Bender for CaliforniaManagementReview , Vol. XVIII, No. 3, Spring 1976, pp. 46–56. Excerpted in Roger Montgomery and Daniel R. Mandelker, ed's., HousinginAmerica , 2nd ed., Bobbs-Merrill, 1979, pp. 113–115. A "revisionist view that highlights the important fact that productivity with respect to building materials and site labor has risen dramatically," they wrote.

That Was Then, This Is Now

“The technology that carries the promise of mass production too easily turns multiplication into forms of degrading repetition.” – Colin St. John Wilson1

“I wonder, for the future of our profession and society as a whole, what the hell we’re going to be doing in 20 years? We’ll be living in 1,000-square-foot apartments, because that’s all we can afford.” – Chuck Davis2

In the early 1970s, UC Berkeley Professor Richard Bender led a team, of which I was part, that evaluated Operation Breakthrough, an industrialized housing demonstration program of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development HUD under Nixon appointee George Romney, a former CEO of American Motors, a car company. Bender and I concluded that HUD and the various large companies involved in the program misjudged the actual productivity of conventional construction. Despite industry fragmentation and regulatory differences from locale to locale, contractors made effective use of lightweight power tools, and components, materials, and products that were prefabricated to standard dimensions. Building sites were industrialized and their output could be readily tailored to local markets.

Today, after a 45-year hiatus, factory production of housing is enjoying a comeback the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere. National and even global companies are offering modular housing “products,” including volumetric and panelized systems. Crosslaminated timber (CLT) is also in the picture as a component of multistory timber buildings. The high cost of conventional multi-unit

housing construction in the Bay Area’s urban core gives modular housing an edge. As a result, Factory OS, the largest local manufacturer, has succeeded where earlier ventures like Blu Homes and ZETA failed.

For industrialized housing to have long-term viability, it will have to prove its competitiveness on cost, schedule, technical performance, and design quality against conventional construction. In the early 1970s, conventional construction readily beat factory-built systems on each of these measures. The so-called Great Recession of 2008 pummeled the Bay Area’s construction industry, depleting its workforce of experienced people. The overall cost of housing rose, driven by a glacially slow entitlements process, fast-rising land costs, prevailing wage agreements in the urban core (raising the cost of labor), and growing inequality among prospective homebuyers. Factory-built housing is a response to these factors. If they change, will it persist?

Right now, it has an edge on cost, schedule, and technical performance. Its weak point is customization even panel systems are less flexible than conventional construction. But factory-built systems are acceptable now in part because what for-profit and non-profit developers and some tech companies offer are variations on relatively standard solutions, each aimed at a specific price point.

While a downturn in new housing starts is widely expected, that event may prove less significant to regional companies like Factory OS than the situation of housing development in a broader sense. That larger context takes in regulation, technology, lifestyles, and many other factors, known and unknown. As it reshapes the design-build-occupyservice-upgrade trajectory, the landscape could transform disruptively. The distinction we make now between factory-built and conventional construction could be meaningless. An outlier like Katerra, which wants to optimize across that trajectory, may the real model. Or it may have arrived too soon.

US industrialized housing through Operation Breakthrough

Operation Breakthrough followed earlier efforts by the federal government to industrialize housing production. During the Johnson Administration, HUD and New York City’s Urban Development Corporation tried to renovate older apartment buildings with prefabricated units. Two decades earlier, immediately after World War II, the Veterans Emergency Housing Program (or Wyatt Program, for Wilson Wyatt, the Truman Administration “housing czar”), anticipating a shortage of middle-income housing for returning

veterans, set an ambitious goal in 1946 of building 2.7 million new units per year, partly in wartime factories retooled for prefabrication. Had it gone forward, the Wyatt Program would have involved the federal government directly in a mass housing strategy, extending the central planning model adopted by the US Government in World War II.3

Operation Breakthrough and the UDC project reflected the production goal set by the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act a goal similar to the Wyatt Program’s 22 years earlier:

Building or rehabilitating 26 million housing units in 10 years a rate much higher than any previous production level. To achieve this goal, HUD anticipated in 1969 a progressive increase in required construction of housing units over the 10-year period, reaching 2.6 million units in 1973.4

Nixon and Romney sought to enlist the private sector to provide housing at a mass scale. They assumed that if housing could be produced like cars, higher volume would make units cheaper. Harold Finger, who came to HUD from NASA to run Operation Breakthrough, believed that the advent of housing manufacture would disrupt the conventional housing “industry” and cut through the regulatory and labor issues that contributed to its fragmentation and inefficiency.

This optimism was shared by the private sector. Part of it was grounded in the belief that the US Government would be an active partner in housing production.

Most Operation Breakthrough manufacturers anticipated Government housing programs would be a large market for their housing systems. In 1969, HUD estimated that 4 million new housing units would be constructed under Government housing programs during the next decade, an average of 400,000 a year. In the beginning of 1973, the Federal Government suspended its major subsidized housing programs pending a complete reevaluation of the Federal role in housing. … This suspension had a major effect on several Operation Breakthrough manufacturers. In 1974, the national housing construction rate dropped below 1.4 million units a year, about half the construction rate assumed by Operation Breakthrough plans.5

There was also clear initial investor interest in industrialized housing’s potential. These different public and interests converged in Stirling Homex, a publicly listed company in New York that drew headlines when it shipped its volumetric units to Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Camille and proposed to build a factory there with Federal Housing Authority FHA participation.

[On July 2, 1975], the Securities and Exchange Commission accused the bankrupt Stirling Homex Corporation, once one of the nation's leading modular homebuilders, of creating phantom sales, making illegal political contributions, using illegal bugging equipment and making payoffs to union officials. The suit charged in particular that from 1970 through 1972 Stirling Homex materially falsified its records by the fraudulent recording and reporting of fictitious sales. About $12.5 million of sales reported in a 1971 financial report were either fictitious or improperly recorded, the S.E.C. said, including about $8 million of sales from a proposed $15-million project in Mississippi with the Greater Gulf Housing Corporation.6

Stirling Homex went bankrupt and its founders went to jail. Alodex, a Memphis-based modular housing company backed by the founders of Holiday Inn, failed less dramatically. According to Larry Dodge, who consulted with Alodex, it decided to test its concept in a deliberately chosen “hardest case”: scattered site housing in East St. Louis, Illinois. Alodex won the endorsement of the city’s mostly African-American leaders by proposing to open a factory there and build some 2,000 units of scattered-site housing.7

At its peak, around 1970, Alodex had nearly $90 million of construction work in progress and a staff of 250 people. It was operating in 10 states under the leadership of Lloyd Clark, a builder. Alodex's problems became apparent shortly after it was reorganized as a national company rather than a Memphis area operation. In 1969 Mr. Clark, a well-known building contractor, approached [Alodex] with a proposal to merge [their] operations. … As part of the expansion, Alodex stock was offered for sale to the public. Under Mr. Clark, who left Alodex in 1973, the company expanded from single-family residential work to construction of turn-key housing for government agencies and big projects, none of which included provisions to cover cost increases. The company also expanded into … condominiums and multifamily units. Problems appeared in the summer of 1971, a few months after a public offer of Alodex stock. The prospectus did not make clear the large losses suffered by the company on some projects.8

Larry Dodge, an architect with Building Systems Development (BSD), a consultancy founded by UC Berkeley Professor Ezra Ehrenkrantz, consulted with Aerojet General and TRW on a spunglass fiber modular housing concept, which they proposed to apply to an Operation Breakthrough demonstration site in Sacramento. The initial concept was a two-story module spun on a mandrel. Developed at TRW’s R&D campus in Redondo Beach, California, it was housing as imagined by scientists and engineers who worked on NASA and

military aerospace projects. “What’s the minimum size a window can be?” was a typical question. However, TRW’s head marketer rejected the concept, opting for more conventional housing produced using glass-fiber panels enclosing a layer of honeycomb Hexcel insulation.9

The aerospace industry’s interest in manufactured housing reflected its ambition to diversify with a product that could take up slack in its factory production lines. (Boeing was involved in the Townland project in Seattle.) It also reflected a belief in the applicability of the so-called systems approach, first pioneered in World War II, to the challenge of meeting ambitious housing production goals set in 1946 and renewed in 1968. Others involved in the building industry aluminum, glass, steel, and timber companies also participated in these initiatives, hoping to find new outlets for their products and demonstrate how their materials and housing innovations together could deliver superior performance.

One precedent for Operation Breakthrough was the mid-1960s School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) program (above), in which BSD was heavily involved. At the time, California was building public schools in substantial numbers. Legislation allowed districts to band together to bid these projects, which generated interest in industrializing their construction. SCSD proposed a modular, steel-frame system. Inland Steel was an investor, eager to get a foothold in the market. While SCSD failed, one of its components a multi-zone roof-top air-conditioning unit designed by Lennox found a national market in conventionally built school projects. “We enjoyed 15 years of spin-off work,” according to Ted Gilles, who helped develop the product for Lennox. What made it successful was its flexibility: “With flexible ducts, we could jiggle the layout,” he said. Flexibility was one of SCSD’s design criteria for the components, which applied equally to any new school that fell within the standard mid-1960s

typology. This was “why packaged units wound up on the roof,” Gilles added.10

When Richard Bender’s research team looked at conventional tract housing in the Bay Area the kinds of projects that Operation Breakthrough envisioned shifting to factory production it found the consistent use of locally produced prefabricated components like roof joists and handheld tools like nail guns that could be used by small crews to frame and enclose units quickly. Houses produced in this manner used materials and elements that were geared to fast assembly by semi-skilled labor. The only skilled workers on those jobs were the “mud guys” who smoothed over sheetrock imperfections. It resulted in housing that hit its price point, met local codes, and let the developer offer a range of types. Operation Breakthrough’s prototypes, in contrast, were hindered by code fragmentation and undone by their inability to support the kind of mass customization the housing market required.11 Only the kind of captive market that public housing can deliver or a substantial cost difference could have saved them.

Demonstrating the latter on a national basis in the absence of a captive market would have required deep-pocketed investors to accept heavy early losses before achieving full-scale mass production.

From Operation Breakthrough’s demise through 2008

Operation Breakthrough resulted in “model” legislation enabling states to issue permits for modular housing that overrode local inspections.

(California has such a process, focused on volumetric units.) It failed to shift most housing production to factories. Until the “Great Recession” of 2008, conventional construction was the norm for all types of housing except mobile homes and vacation “kit homes.” Yet, across this period, market-rate housing typologies became increasingly standardized, especially in the use of prefab assemblies like window walls and curtain walls, and interior elements like kitchen cabinets. While mass customization continued, the band of customization narrowed while the cost advantages of field construction were eroded by prevailing wage contracts in the urban core and the multiplier effect of general contractors working with subs, each adding their markup.

The “Great Recession” stopped new construction in general in its tracks and flushed skilled construction labor out of urban markets.

Downturns leave some players as the last ones standing. The Great Recession divided the urban housing world between “marketecture,” which emphasizes the residential unit, either by pushing its luxury or subdividing it aggressively, depending on the price point, and

“community” developments that, even if they mix subsidized and market-rate housing, engage communities of neighbors and residents in their planning and design. In general, “community” developments emphasize shared settings, including open space, over residential units. The real estate consultant David Chen, who recently surveyed western European housing, identified projects commissioned by building associations there as having similar traits.12 While it can and has been applied to community projects, factory-built housing is geared to “marketecture,” which lends itself to standard building forms and layouts. (The simplest applications are hotels and serviced apartments that use single modular units without side-wall penetrations.)

Industrialized housing’s revival in the Bay Area and elsewhere

In a 1967 paper, Richard Bender wrote of the building systems that were then being put forward,

These systems make buildings, but they do not make buildings with properties important in relation to the whole problem. … We must avoid the approach that says, “Here are the technologies available to make buildings. Now let’s figure out how to build better buildings with these.” This approach starts from a solution and goes looking for a problem to solve. Creating building systems is not enough. We need a new, more subtle kind of building system which does more than produce buildings. We must produce buildings which will function in the fullest social, human sense.13

In 1973, commenting on the industrialized housing of the Operation Breakthrough era, Bender added,

For those whose picture of modern production is the auto assembly line, building seems far from industrialized. But perhaps it is just this view of industrialization (as only machinery, tools, production lines, and automation) that has been standing in the way of significant advances.14

When Bender and I visited Factory OS’s factory in March 2018, we saw prototype units 6-sided wood-frame boxes that shift conventional construction to an assembly line. This is industrialized housing as George Romney envisioned it half a century ago. David Baker told me later that Factory OS’s 6-sided units are more weatherproof and damage-resistant when shipped by truck than 4-sided units. Locking off the units while the building is finished around them minimizes damage as the trades do their work. That damage can be considerable, he said, requiring a hefty budget for ongoing repairs.15

That Factory OS is successful also reflects the region’s current situation: an acute shortage of skilled construction workers; conventional construction costs that exceed what the housing market can support; a long-term shortfall in new housing construction in the urban core, especially around the rail transit corridors that San Francisco and other cities have prioritized for new development; and the possibility of tapping semi-skilled but unionized construction labor at the region’s edge and bringing it into factories to produce volumetric modules for multifamily housing. Factory OS now serves the West Coast and cities as far east as Denver, with a catalogue of 20 different supportive (ex-homeless), affordable, market-rate “workforce,” and student housing designs, including studios and 1- and 2-bedrooms. The company is producing employee housing for Google. Its designs have width, length, and height constraints, but can support façade articulation. A 2-year Carpenters Union contract keeps wages stable. The company aims to increase its cost savings over conventional from 20% to 30%.16

RAD Urban produces 4-sided steel-frame volumetric units in a factory in Lathrop, CA.17 Z-Modular in Birmingham, AL, owned by a steel foundry, gives away the design and technology of its steel-frame volumetric units to local factories, supplying the steel to fabricate them.18

Katerra, founded by Wolfe Homes entrepreneur Fritz Wolfe, attracted a $2 billion investment from Mayoshi Son’s Vision Fund. Katerra has aggressively acquired talent and manufacturing capacity in its quest to vertically integrate housing production and extend the reach of industrialization from the factory to the building site. Shipping is seen as an extension of the factory floor, which led Katerra to focus on component-based rather than volumetric systems. “Why ship air?” it asks. Katerra sees itself as a technology company that builds “platforms” for developers with enough backlog of new housing projects on flat sites to support large-scale production. Katerra rationalizes designs to meet these constraints, producing “tiers” of housing to meet market and regulatory requirements. A given tier offers the quality and performance expected by the developer’s targeted buyers. Katerra believes that its platforms can deliver better cost-to-value than its competition, with greater customization than is possible with volumetric units. Like the auto industry, it chose California’s residential energy regulations as its standard. This is a higher standard than some other states, and some developers have resisted paying for the higher performance. Katerra’s vertical integration includes manufacturing cross laminated timber

(CLT) components, lighting components, and plumbing fixtures. Prefabricated plumbing walls are “in planning,” I was told in February 2019.19

Although Katerra advertises the design freedom it offers developers, one architecture firm I interviewed said its decisions sometimes prioritized manufacturing by allocating square footage where it wouldn’t generate a return for the developer. A Bay Area developer questioned its track record here and noted that its “closed system” would work against it compared to “open-source” competitors.20

Katerra’s Seattle architecture team pointed to the challenge of working nationally. In California, it ran into problems getting state inspections for its panelized units, as the company that handles them only had experience with volumetric units. They see Katerra as a work in progress, appreciating Katerra’s efforts to optimize housing production by eliminating waste and harnessing technology to bridge between the different steps involved more effectively. What sets it apart from its competitors is its view of housing production as an end-to-end manufacturing process that links factories, shipping, and building sites. Its efforts to vertically integrate are part of this, aimed at reducing costs, limiting waste and unneeded variation, and optimizing cost to value on a tiered basis for quality and performance.21

Other developments in industrialized housing

Ikea recently announced that it will take a modular approach to its numerous products, developing “platforms” for products that previously varied slightly in their dimensions. By standardizing height, width, and depth, Ikea hopes to rationalize manufacture and tailor it to changes in its retail model a consumer preference for smaller in-city stores and for products that are delivered preassembled or put together at the buyer’s residence by Ikea personnel or designated third parties.22

Ikea and Skanska jointly own a company, BoKlok Housing AB, that builds affordable multi-unit housing in Scandinavia and the UK using a volumetric system fitted out by Ikea. Aiming at younger buyers with modest incomes, BoKlok has produced 11,000 units since 1997.23 ByggHouse and Lindbäcks are two Swedish companies involved with industrialized housing. Interest in it there and also in Japan has continued without interruption over the decades when the idea was dormant here. ByggHouse makes components and tools for housing producers, while Lindbäcks Bygg AG produces 2- to 4-story modules for student, family, and senior multi-unit housing of up to 16 stories. According to David Baker, Lindbäcks cranes temporary roofs over its

buildings during construction to deal with bad weather. Its modules hang the floors from the exterior walls to eliminate redundancy in unit floors and ceilings. According to Baker’s colleague Brad Leibin, Lindbäcks’s factories are designed so a person weighing as little as 130 pounds can perform any step the manufacturing process requires. Lindbäcks’s goal is for women to make up at least half of its factory workforce, he added.24

While Japan has had an equally long involvement in prefabricated housing, it faces a shortage of homebuyers owing to its aging, declining population. Two manufacturers, Toyota and Panasonic, are merging their housing businesses as Prime Life Technologies to focus on “town development” and to integrate smart houses with smart cars and other accessories of a younger-generation lifestyle.25 Sekisui House, which claims to be the largest housing producer in Japan, has teamed with Woodside Homes to produce a concept home for Buildermagazine to be unveiled at Summerlin, a planned community near Las Vegas. Sekisui House applies a proprietary metal joint system to its housing projects, which are marketed as healthy and sustainable. Expanding globally is its response to declining sales in Japan.26

Industrialized housing and modularity

Companies that produce panelized and component-based systems are tapping industrialized housing’s longstanding interest in modularity. While construction in general has considerable “default modularity” due to the standard dimensions of its most ubiquitous components, Europe, including the former Soviet Bloc, applied modularity to largescale housing development before World War II and then through the 1980s, initially in the service of postwar reconstruction.

Reinier de Graff recounts part of this history in his 2016 essay, “Architektur ohne Eigenschaften” (“Architecture without Qualities”).27 Building on prewar and wartime experience, East Germany’s DDR evolved panel systems, applied to urban housing development, until its collapse in 1989. In 1999, I saw newly repainted examples in the former East Berlin, strikingly midcentury modern, but Graff writes that by 2014 many were torn down or reconfigured beyond recognition, “an ideological cleansing.”

The East German standardization effort is generally viewed as a radical phenomenon of the past. But how radical was it? It can also be explained as simply the all-out pursuit of a universally available minimum standard. Like communism itself, the whole effort contains a curious paradox. Even though it necessitated “radical” change, its

ultimate goal “normal” conditions for the largest possible number of people was surprisingly mundane.28

Graff describes parallel developments in the Netherlands, noting the French influence on its systems.

The technical adaptation of the French system to suit Dutch building regulations had been made possible by large public subsidies to help solve a pressing housing shortage in the Netherlands such policies being, at least during those years, as common in the west as in the east.29

Following Germany’s reunification, large scale housing was steadily “normalized” to the market. Now, Graff writes, “Normal (East) German workers can barely afford the ‘normalized’ homes.”30

For a while the east and the west, despite their political differences, seem to have run on parallel tracks. Produced in the millions, abundantly applied in both the western and eastern hemispheres, the prefabricated panels are at an almost improbably poetic level an expression of a global bond, a form of consensus in the context of an otherwise deep ideological rift, a universal response to a globally felt urgency.31

This looks back to modernism’s early ambition to provide worker housing of a high standard at mass scale, in contrast to the tenement housing that modern architects regarded as a blight. Modular, panelized systems that could be manufactured locally and erected quickly in different configurations were an accepted solution that government programs and subsidies made possible.

In 1977, I spent three months as a visiting researcher at Stichting Architecten Research (SAR), founded by John Habraken at the Technical University of Eindhoven. SAR was a clearinghouse for research on modular approaches to housing components, buildings, sites, and communities. Its “tissue method” aimed to provide a basis for user participation in multi-unit developments, a goal of specific interest to such architects of that era as Herman Hertzberger, Lucien Kroll, and Frans van der Werf.

SAR developed two related approaches to housing focused on “supports” and on “territories.” This reflected the nature of Dutch postwar Dutch housing, especially in new towns and rebuilt areas row houses of different heights with a uniformity that spoke to cultural aspirations for equality but made for blocks, neighborhoods, and

districts that appeared as “built diagrams.” But SAR also had proposals like Le Corbusier’s Radiant City in mind as it focused on what it called the support and tissue levels.

At the support level, the support plan makes allowances for different materials and construction systems, so that the basic spatial character of a given support can be maintained despite those differences. It also provides opportunities for variations in dwelling arrangement and configuration. At the tissue level, similar allowances are made for the problems of fitting a given tissue model to actual site conditions, and for its elaboration at the support level.32

The tissue level is “a planning level…more specific than a land use plan, but less specific than a support plan in terms of stipulating the characteristics of a given territory.”33 SAR’s tissue method was a later development in its thinking, reflecting its interest in making users active participants in housing’s development and evolving use. This reflects another aspect of Dutch housing at the time: the residents were responsible for more of the interior fit-out for example, for the hardwood floors, which were designed to be demountable than is normal elsewhere. The units were delivered as shells, whether they were to be owned, rented, or held cooperatively (through building societies, for example).

Projects like van der Werf’s Molenvliet Project in Papendrecht and the Lunetten Project near Utrecht applied SAR’s approaches to fairly large developments that, despite their size, “allowed users to have

control over the volume, layout, and façade detailing.” Lunetten extended this to the site plan.34 While not directly informed by SAR’s methodology, Lucien Kroll took its underlying philosophy further. His MéMé (Maison Médicale) Project (left) at the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert campus of UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain) was also inspired by Giancarlo De Carlo and French social theorists. Kroll engaged the faculty and students to create housing that could be radically altered, inside and out. Rafffaella Poletti noted in 2010 that “the years have witnessed a succession of incongruous and disrespectful alterations perpetrated by the university, which has never wanted to accept the value of this architecture.”35

MéMé realized John Habraken’s dream of granting housing’s users a “fine-grained exercise of power.”36

Habraken’s original proposal was that the specifics of the dwelling unit should be left to its occupants, while the specifics of the support (the building housing the dwelling or the block in which the dwellings are situated) should be determined jointly by the dwellers and the community. This argument has now been extended: as the dweller controls the dwelling, so the neighborhood controls the neighborhood, and the district the district. Each exercise of decision-making power at the given level of territorial use involves the interaction of the users of the territory and the users of the broader territory to which that territory belongs. Decisions that are appropriately made by the neighbors themselves are left to them, within the framework of rules about the formation of neighborhoods.37

SAR initially embraced industrialized housing, but with a focus on infill. “SAR’s founders looked forward to the possibility of industrial production of ‘detachable units’ (SAR’s term for those parts of the dwelling under direct control of the household.) These were pictured…as consumer products.”38 An effort “to develop a panel system (for infill) based on SAR’s principles of dimensional and positional coordination…was stymied by…Dutch government standards for residential living spaces” that were “irrational” from SAR’s standpoint but inflexibly enforced, resulting in panels of too many widths.39

We are back to the problem Ikea is trying to resolve: the need to develop platforms of products with standard dimensions to simplify manufacture and still meet consumer demand and regulatory fiat. In developing compatible platforms for a given line of housing, Katerra has the same issue. “Principles of dimensional and positional coordination” are again relevant, and SAR and the East Germans,

among others, laid the groundwork. (The UK’s Building Research Establishment did similar work to support Council Housing.)

Getting housing out of its box

Even a casual survey of contemporary multi-unit housing in the Bay Area reveals the similarities across a range of projects of the same scale. What you find more and more are decorated boxes that reflect their zoning envelope. Kroll’s MéMé is admirable for its effort to break out of the box by playing radically with form. It gave residents the possibility of altering the supports, not just the infill a freedom reflected in its freewheeling façade. Potentially, with UCL cooperation, alterations could have continued indefinitely.

In the Bay Area, the main exceptions to the decorated box are affordable multifamily projects with strong participation by likely residents and neighbors. The work of David Baker Architects includes some of the best of these projects. They standardize repetitive elements dwelling units, hallways, and the housing blocks that enclose them and tailor shared settings to the needs of the community. The repetitive elements are set off by minor but telling variations like color, balconies, and solar shading, while the shared spaces are concentrated so they work together synergistically to give residents collectivelya greater sum than the usual box can provide, effectively extending their personal space. Open spaces are an important part of this, connecting the housing with its neighborhood and supporting activities like urban agriculture that are popular but rarely found in market-rate multi-unit housing.40

In the Bay Area, David Baker Architects’ projects are starting to incorporate factory-built housing. A recent example, The Union Flats, (p. 32) sustains the quality the firm has achieved with conventional construction. The challenge, especially on smaller sites, is the tail-wagsdog nature of volumetric units, for which the box is ideal for fast erection. The Garden Village project by Stanley Saitowitz’s Natoma Studio for RAD Urban in Berkeley (right) uses the units as “building blocks” to create visual interest. RAD Urban’s next project on Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street in Oakland’s Temescal district is less differentiated.

New laws overriding local zoning and a regional sense of a “housing crisis” are leading its cities to approve big boxy schemes, out of scale with neighboring buildings, that they might have rejected in the past.41

Missing Middle Housing seeks to revive prewar multifamily housing typologies that were supplanted by postwar suburban tract housing and garden apartments; and later by “boxes above parking podiums” and residential towers. These typical developer products lack nuance, especially in their ability to fit housing into existing neighborhoods. Cofounders Daniel and Karen Parolek argue for the variety of multifamily housing options that prewar towns and cities offered, given their potential to contribute significant added density. The idea is to minimize the need for dramatic increases in height and bulk by enabling more modest increases in density across the existing fabric.42

The Paroleks view form-based codes as a bulwark against the “big crap” likely to be built as new state laws in California override local control of development through existing zoning.43 Form-based codes specify “street and building types (or mix of types), build-to lines, number of floors, and percentage of built site frontage.”44 SAR anticipated this approach in its 1977 report, DecidingonDensity . 45 A 2014 redevelopment plan for BART Pleasant Hill Station takes a formbased approach. 46 Aside from preserving local communities’ decisionmaking power through zoning, form-based codes encourage a mix of buildings and open spaces that, even at a higher density, produce a richer, more urbane fabric.

California’s new laws put housing production above other factors, which may create a Hobson’s choice between a lack of housing production in the transit-served urban core and a lack of urbanity as developers takes advantage of bonus densities and expedited, statemandated entitlements. Bigger, boxier housing projects could soon be the Bay Area's norm. Is this the price of being housed at all? Graff

might say, “Don’t pay it. Look for an ‘ordinary’ a ‘new normal’ that delivers livability.”

Looking beyond housing to regional livability

“Speeding up housing production” was the starting point of my research. Various factors slow it in the Bay Area, including the growing inequality of would-be buyers and renters of housing. A recent FinancialTimesarticle on housing trends points not only to factorybuilt housing but also to corporate ownership and management of rental housing and potentially of the neighborhoods where it’s located. This is controversial not all tenants are happy, and some cities are wary of the loss of competition and potential for monopoly pricing but both trends relate to a third: the higher energy and ecological demands that governments and consumers impose on housing. They make data more important and dwellers more amenable to smart home systems and third-party digital management. If new housing is Alexa-controlled, then developers like Google-owned Sidewalk Labs hope to extend the concept to districts.47

The new term “modern methods of construction” (MMC) reflects the way the design-build-operate trajectory that defines the building industry is being transformed. Katerra and others are trying to shape this, but their focus is US housing developers. Some European multifamily projects, like Germany’s baugruppen , share the livability of affordable projects here that also engage residents and neighbors as active participants in their planning and design.48 If we want housing to “function in the fullest social, human sense,” as Bender argued in 1967,49 then we have to ask what such livability means in a given urban context. With these place-specific requirements in hand, we also have to ask how a metropolitan region and its communities can achieve it. Focusing on livability frees us from seeing housing in terms of density targets, unit counts, and production targets. They matter, of course, but can blind us to livability’s bigger picture: the opportunities that come with it and the strategies it implies.

Horst Rittel saw housing as a wicked problem intractable and complex, its presenting issues symptoms of larger problems. Our housing problem falls squarely in his definition. With a regional economy the size of the Netherlands, our metropolis is an entrepôt of ideas and innovation. Yet we struggle to house people decently and provide other basic services effectively. Despite our wealth, our public realm is frayed by decades of underinvestment. It is becoming less and less livable.

Singapore is a city-state, so any comparison to the Bay Area is inexact, but it’s worth considering. Singapore's welfare-capitalist mass housing strategy combines ownership through long-term, inheritable leases with the possibility of moving “up, down, and across” the public housing on offer (seen in Chinatown, above). Size, location, and quality are based on family means and preferences, with a consistently high (and rising) minimum standard. Education, healthcare, and transit are part of Singapore’s welfare-capitalist mix. Subsidies are tied to employment, but the children’s social mobility isn’t harmed if their parents don’t earn very much. They get good housing and their kids get a good education. Healthcare is universal. And it accomplishes this without a huge tax burden Singapore levies globally competitive flat taxes on companies and workers.

Can the Bay Area match Singapore’s benchmark? Can we overcome the chronic below-market housing shortages in our transit-served inner core by rethinking how we invest in housing and transit both? How would our doing so impact existing housing in our towns and cities, and open space in the region? Can we have housing andurbanity at the price points we need to sustain healthy growth? I don’t have answers, but these questions are an agenda for the next decades.

Notes

1. Colin St. John Wilson, “Two Letters on the State of Architecture,” 1964 and 1981,” JournalofArchitecturalEducation , XXXV: 1, Fall 1981, p. 10.

2. Transcript of Bay Area architect Chuck Davis in conversation with his former EHDD Partner, the architect Marc L’Italien, Albany, CA, 29 March 2018.

3. Richard Bender and John Parman, “The Factory Without Walls: Industrialization in Residential Construction, CaliforniaManagement Review , XVIII: 3, Spring 1976, pp. 47–48.

4. OperationBreakthrough LessonsLearnedAboutDemonstratingNew Technology , Comptroller General of the United States, 2 November 1976, p. 2.

5. Ibid, p. 18

6. Robert J. Cole, “U.S. Says Stirling Homex Reported Phantom $ales,” NewYorkTimes , 3 July 1975.

7. Notes of a conversation with the architect-planner Larry Dodge, Berkeley, 9 August 2019.

8. Regentald Stuart, “Alodex Millionaires’ Pitfall,” NewYorkTimes , 8 April 8 1976, page 55.

9. Larry Dodge, Berkeley, 9 August 2019.

10. Barbara A. Checket-Hanks: “The 1960s: Heat Pumps, A/C Blast Off,” ACHRNews , 25 April 2001.

11. Richard Bender and John Parman, “The Factory Without Walls: Industrialization in Residential Construction,” Op.Cit.,pp. 46–56.

12. Kriestien Ring and Geoffrey London, “Owner Occupied,” Assemble Papers , 3 March 2017, reprinted from FutureWest , University of Western Australia Faculty of Arts, Business, Law, and Education, Perth.

13. Richard Bender, “Industrialization and Low-Cost Housing,” paper, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, 1968, pp. 3–4.

14. Richard Bender, ACrackintheRear-ViewMirror , Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973, p. 1.

15. Notes of a conversation with David Baker, FAIA, David Baker Architects, San Francisco, 31 January 2019.

16. Notes of a conversation with Andrew Meagher, Design Director, Factory OS, 15 October 2019.

17. Sara Pacelko, AIA, at a SPUR panel on modular housing, Oakland, 13 November 2018 and at an AIA San Francisco panel on modular housing, 18 July 2018. Pacelko is a design director with RAD Urban.

18. Fei Tsen, SPUR panel on housing innovation, 5 June 2018, comment to the author. Tsen is the founder of Windflower Properties, a multifamily housing developer. She was Board President, Treasure Island Development Authority and Real Estate Director, Port of San Francisco.

19. Notes of a phone conversation with Craig Curtis, Michelle Ha, Peter Spruance, and Chester Weir, Katerra, Seattle, 8 February 2019. Curtis is the head of architecture, formerly with Miller-Hull.

20. Katerra phone conversation, 8 February 2019.

21. Conversations with BAR, 5 December 2018 and 22 January 2019; conversations with Fei Tsen, 26 April and 5 June 2019.

22. Richard Milne, “Ikea dismantles tradition to see inspiration from car industry,” FinancialTimes , 2 October 2019.

23. India Block, “Ikea is bringing its low-cost modular units to the UK,” Dezeen , 26 June 2019 https://www.dezeen.com/2019/06/26/ikea-buildlow-cost-housing-uk/; Hilary Osborne, “Ikea gets green light to build affordable homes in UK,” Guardian , 25 June 2019. BoKlok Housing AB website https://www.boklok.com/

24. ByggHouse has an outpost in the US: https://bygghouse.com/; Jack Balderrama Morley, “Production Line: How Sweden is Pioneering Automated, Prefab Construction,” Architizer , https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/industry/swedish-modularhousing/; David Baker, “A Traveler’s Perspective on Housing Affordability,” DavidBakerArchitectsBlog , https://www.dbarchitect.com/us/news_blog/364/A%20Traveler's%20Pers pective%20on%20Housing%20Affordability.html?; notes of a meeting with Brad Leibin and Jonas Weber, David Baker Architects, San Francisco, 1 February 2019; David Baker’s comment on Lindbäcks’s craned-on roof was made in passing during a meeting at his San Francisco office in the summer of 2019.

25. Kyodo Reuters (news service), “Toyota and Panasonic to merge housing units and team up on ‘smart town’ business, JapanTimes , 9 May 2019.

26. John McManus, “Sekisui and Its Woodside Homes Will Team up on BUILDER Chöwa Concept Home for 2020 Unveiling,” Architect , 24 March 2019.

27. Reinier de Graff, “Architektur ohne Eigenschaften,” FourWallsanda Roof , Harvard, 2017, pp. 31–53.

28. Graff, ibid. , p. 53.

29. Graff, ibid. , p. 52.

30. Graff, ibid. , p. 53.

31. Graff, ibid. , p. 53.

32. John Parman, “A Visitor’s Observations,” OpenHouse , Vol 3, No. 1, 1978, p. 37.

33. Parman, Ibid. , p. 37.

34. Parman, Ibid. , p. 39.

35. Rafffaella Poletti, “Lucien Kroll: utopia interrupted, Domus , 30 June 2010.

36. Parman, op.cit. , p. 37.

37. Parman, ibid. , p. 38.

38. Parman, ibid. , p. 37.

39. Parman, ibid. , p. 37. See also SAR73:themethodicalformulationof agreementsconcerningthedirectdwellingenvironment , which sets out these principles for supports and tissue (or fabric).

40. I’m working with David Baker Architects on a book on multi-family housing, and have reviewed its portfolio in detail and discussed it with principals David Baker, Daniel Simons, and Amanda Loper.

41. This reflects my own observations and conversations with Berkeley architect David Trachtenberg.

42. Remarks of Karen Parolek, SPUR San Francisco modular housing panel, 18 July 2019. Missing Middle Housing’s website: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

43. Parolek, ibid.

44. Form-Based Codes Institute, “Form-Based Codes Defined”: https://formbasedcodes.org/definition/

45. DecidingonDensity , SAR, Eindhoven, Netherlands, June 1977.

46. Form-Based Codes Institute, “Pleasant Hill BART Station,” with links to the February 2014 plan https://formbasedcodes.org/codes/pleasant-hillbart-station/.

47. Aleksandra Wisniewska, “How will we live in the 2020s?” FinancialTimes , 12–13 October 2019.

48. Call with Daniel Chen, who made a four-month tour of examples of this work in Germany, Denmark, and elsewhere. Chen was formerly an investment banker with Morgan Stanley focused on real estate. For baugruppen , see Geoffrey London in conversation with Kristien Ring: “Owner Occupied,” AssembledPapers , 3 March 2017.

49. Bender, “Industrialization and Low-Cost Housing,” op.cit. , pp. 3–4.

A paper written in October 2019 while a visiting scholar in architecture, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley.

SAR: A Visitor’s Observations

Since its foundation in 1964, SAR1 has been concerned with the extension of user control over the decision-making processes by which the physical environment is shaped and reshaped and its uses determined. SAR's initial focus was on user control at the dwelling level and user influence (shared jointly with the community) at the "supporting" level (a term meant to embrace those elements of the dwelling environment which fell within community rather than individual control. The word "community" is meant to include both private and public bodies exercising control over territories at a level greater than the individual dwelling).

This interest in user "right of say" has been steadily refined in the dozen years of SAR's existence. As it was first put forward in 1961 by N.J. Habraken, SAR's founding director in DeDragersendeMensen , (SupportsandPeople), the responsibility for decision making about the physical environment was to be shared equally by individuals and the community. Habraken called this balance of responsibilities "the natural relationship," and it runs through much of his writing as a continuing theme.

SAR's development of this theme has taken the form of identifying different levels of territorial use within the physical environment, and developing tools to aid in or make possible an effective and mutually satisfactory (to all participants) process of territorial control. These tools have had two major purposes:

1. To evaluate alternative patterns of use;

2. To communicate the rules of a given use pattern rules which assure the maintenance of the pattern without specifying its detailed elaboration.

The determination of a use pattern at a given level of territorial use, while assuring the realization of certain objectives, also makes it possible to defer decisions about the actual elaboration of the pattern decisions which, if taken at the outset, even by democratic means, would unnecessarily reduce the freedom of those individuals entering the decision-making process at a later point. A use pattern at a given territorial level, then, would be a model, an abstract representation of certain general arrangements of built and spatial elements. Two types of freedom would be afforded by such model:

1. The freedom to adjust it to the situation presented by the site of its application;

2. The freedom to elaborate it in any manner permitted by the rules which govern it.

The two models SAR has developed are not precisely analogous, although they are intended to fit together and mesh with other levels of territorial use. At the support level, the support plan makes allowances for different materials and construction systems, so that the basic spatial character of a given support can be maintained despite these differences. It also provides opportunities for variations in dwelling arrangement and configuration (that is, it leaves open the elaboration of the support at the dwelling level). At the "tissue" level (a planning level more specific than a land-use plan, but less specific than a support plan in terms of stipulating the characteristics of a given territory), similar allowances are made for the problems of fitting a given tissue model to actual site conditions, and for its elaboration at the support level.

Besides developing these tools, SAR has been interested in their application, primarily within multi-unit housing projects. Some of these applications have involved some degree of user participation, ranging from user choice among a limited set of alternatives (i.e., depth of the dwelling, modifications in layout, the addition of certain amenities, etc.)

to user control over internal arrangements, dwelling volume, façade details, and even over siting and other aspects of site planning.

At the time of SAR's establishment, there was widespread interest in building industrialization, and SAR's founders looked forward to the possibility of industrial production of "detachable units" (SAR's term for those parts of the dwelling under the direct control of the household). These were first pictured as consumer products that one could rent or purchase and use to create a dwelling. Something like this was actually developed as a prototype by a Dutch manufacturer. While SAR pursued its efforts toward industrialization, other companies in the Netherlands sought to adapt its methods as the basis for their own housing production, A building firm, Nijhuis, for example, tried to develop a panel system (for infill) based on SAR's principles of dimensional and positional coordination, but this effort was stymied by the need to meet Dutch government standards for residential living spaces standards which presented inconsistencies in dimensioning and had to be met exactly. This required Nijhuis to provide panels in a many more widths that it anticipated, which undermined the usefulness of SAR's approach to coordination for this type of production.

SAR has continued to press its case for dimensional and positional coordination (now incorporated in the new Dutch standard for modular coordination, NEN 2880), and to work for reform in Dutch housing standards. But its interest in industrialization per se has waned. Its major concern today is with the issue of user participation, or, more broadly, with the "democratization" of environmental decision making at all levels. The direction of its thinking can be seen in some of the more recent statements by its past and present directors. Habraken sees SAR's goal as the realization of a "fine-grained exercise in power,"2 while John Carp sees it as "the decentralization of territorial control."3

Carp provides the best summary of SAR's present direction: the principle behind SAR's efforts is "territorial control on the basis of territorial use," and its aim, therefore, is the alteration of existing patterns of territorial control, which Habraken finds overly centralized and which Carp finds lacking in appropriate mechanisms to insure user participation at every level of territorial use. Carp notes that the individual has control over his or her immediate space and, in concert with other household members, over the dwelling itself. But there is a gap between this level of control and the next one in which, in the Netherlands, users participate directly. User participation in environmental decision-making jumps from the level of the individual household to the much more general level of the land use plan. The

involvement of users in determining the character of the block, the neighborhood, or the district is not legally prescribed.

In the Netherlands, this has led to cities like Eindhoven in which it is difficult to distinguish districts and neighborhoods as coherent units. One sees far greater evidence of a preoccupation, at the city government level, with regional markets or the city's importance as a business center than of a concern for the needs of city residents at the district or neighborhood level, for there are no mechanisms at those levels to make such needs felt, nor are there any organizations at that level specifically chartered to respond to them.

In Eindhoven, amenities like swimming pools, parks, recreation areas, playgrounds, etc., are allocated by the city on a demographic basis. The concern is for people served in a statistical sense rather than for meeting the more exact needs of each district and each neighborhood. Facilities like parks and playgrounds which would seem logically to be the province of these more local units have become the responsibility of the city, to whom individual householders must turn in order to alter or improve them.

But the city is precisely the wrong level: it can deal well with generalities, as in, for example, land use planning, where the existence of appropriate mechanisms assures both a democratic process of formulation and an emphasis on function which avoids the more specific elaboration that properly should be determined at a lower level. But (the evidence of Eindhoven suggests) the city is less well-equipped to deal with more specific, lower-level decisions. Confronted by the need to take such decisions, it tends to address the needs of districts and neighborhoods with quantitative solutions (so many parks, so many sports halls) that result in a monotonous overall environment, an environment of generalities.

This is reminiscent of Habraken's attack on mass housing the original point of departure for SAR's work. Habraken's initial proposal was that the specifics of the dwelling unit should be left to its occupants, while the specifics of the support (the building housing the dwelling or the block in which the dwellings are situated) should be determined jointly by the dwellers and the community. This argument has now been extended: as the dweller controls the dwelling so the neighborhood controls the neighborhood, and the district the district. Each exercise of decision-making power at a given level of territorial use involves the interaction of the users of the territory (e.g., "neighbors") and the users of the broader territory to which that territory belongs (e.g., "neighborhoods" or "the district"). Decisions that are

appropriately made by the neighbors themselves are left to them, within the framework of rules about the formation of neighborhoods. Decisions that are collectively made by neighborhoods acting as a district are made at that level, without infringing on the decisionmaking power appropriately delegated to each neighborhood.

One recognizes this as a version of representative democracy, aimed at accommodating change within an ordered society and mindful of the need to preserve that society's basic fabric. That fabric is rooted in individual and collective responsibility, what the Syndicalists referred to as self-management. Society is ordered not through the imposition of order, but through each person taking responsibility for the territory he uses, and each group taking responsibility for the larger territory that supports its immediate activities a series of "nested wholes."

Responding to criticism

SAR has been accused of pursuing its ideas in a vacuum, without any real regard for the actual situation of, for example, the building industry in the Netherlands or the real needs of householders in Dutch cities. It appears to have taken this criticism to heart, at least to the point of abandoning some of its own ideas and methods or modifying them to meet a changing situation. Carp attributes SAR's defensiveness about its work to its own attitude of self­assertion. Such defensiveness has been self-defeating, as has been the attempt to find a scapegoat ("the developer," "mass housing," etc.) for existing environmental problems.

If SAR's aim is to establish a more firmly democratic process, it must be the result of an effort which involves everyone and which evolves naturally, not in terms of a predetermined image of the outcome, particularly when it is actually the interim result of an ongoing process.4

The desire for a more broadly-based effort has led SAR to seek closer ties with other groups sharing similar concerns. These have tended to be counterparts to SAR within other professions, notably planning. The immediate benefit of such exchanges has been the mutual confirmation of problems found and the solutions posed. But some have questioned SAR's main premise, that extending democratic decision-making to those planning levels where it does not now exist will improve their overall quality. Is it true, they ask?

SAR's confidence in its ideas has been strengthened by the successful application of its approach to several recent projects. An example is Molenvliet (above) in Papendrecht, the Netherlands, designed by the Rotterdam architectural firm, Kokon, under the direction of Frans van der Werf. This project made it possible for users to control the volume, layout, and façade detailing of their dwellings. A second project Lunetten, near Utrecht, also designed by Kokon in concert with five other architects extended user participation to the level of decisionmaking about the site plan and its elaboration. Lunetten also made the first use of SAR's tissue method as a tool for participation. (Van der Werf also used it to develop the site plan of Molenvliet, but as a design tool, not as a means for participation.)

In their present form, SAR's methods are not easily grasped by people with no special training in reading the abstractions of architects and planners. (As Appleyard notes, this is a general tendency of these professions5.) It is significant that Van der Werf and his colleagues, in designing Lunetten, directly illustrated site alternatives rather than use the tissue method's abstractions.

But SAR's more important focus appears to be to "convert" these professions to bringing about a major change in their attitude. This extends to government administrators and policymakers, as well. SAR's present "spirit of reconciliation" stems not only from the pragmatic need to cooperate with these groups to achieve change, but also from the recognition that they are also questioning much that they did in the past, and searching for the means to arrive at a more openended decision-making process one which can involve users directly instead of relying on and imposing official guesswork.

In a broader sense, SAR has also been concerned with all the participants in town and city development, if only through its praise so evident in Habraken's writing of the ordinary events of everyday life and the mundane decisions of ordinary people, which Habraken sees as the real building blocks of society. This idea of people taking part in shaping the community, individually and communally, goes to the heart of SAR's interests. When this spirit is understood and infused in a building project by an architect like Frans van der Werf, its creative possibilities and the responsibilities it places on all participants come to fore. But this is like life itself.

Notes

1. Stichting Architecten Research (the Foundation for Architectural Research) at the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I was a Visiting Researcher at SAR from October through December 1977, funded by a Pre-dissertation Fellowship from the Council for European Studies at Columbia University.

2. N.J. Habraken: "The Limits of Professionalism," in Architectural AssociationQuarterly , 8:1; pp. S2-59.

3. John Carp: ShortStatementbyJohnCarp , SAR; presentation at the International Day for Human Ecology Vienna, Austria, May 1977.

4. John Carp: TheSARandtheLessonofSt.Nicholas , presentation at the Conference on Building Industrialization, Technical University of Hannover, Germany, October 1975.

5. Donald Appleyard: "Understanding Professional Media: Issues, Theories and a Research Agenda"; 1977.

Written for SAR's journal OpenHouse , 3:1, 1978, pp. 36–40.

Our Giancarlo de Carlo–inflected Dialogue

Paolo Ceccarelli: This year is the 100th anniversary of Giancarlo De Carlo’s birth. The best way to remember him is to promote the project he started with ILAUD by addressing some central problems. It would be important to have contributions from persons who dealt directly with ILAUD or worked on issues similar to those De Carlo proposed.

Richard Bender: I’ve long admired Giancarlo De Carlo. It has been 70 years since Truman enacted the Fair Deal, and 50 years since the Housing Act of 1968. Across these decades, the focus has shifted from large-scale, top-down solutions to bottom-up ones. Today, we see megacities where the newest and biggest mix with pervasive poverty. Our current housing and social crises would have been as familiar to De Carlo in the 1950s as they were later and are today.

John Parman: De Carlo’s emphasis on the human and communal as missing pieces of the modernist program, and his insistence on the need to read the city-region, as he called it, and to ground development and redevelopment in participation, make him relevant to issues that we’ve discussed and written about under the rubric of Slow Urbanism. De Carlo comes at them from a different angle.

RB: De Carlo was at two of the last CIAM meetings that the Team X group attended. The topic was “habitat” and the split began there. This was around the time I first went to Zurich. I’d met most of the older CIAM people when Sert came to Harvard. As late as 1959, when I spent time with Bakema in Rotterdam while the Dutch group was

preparing for the final CIAM meeting, De Carlo wasn’t visible. Paolo, do you know what his connection was to CIAM? How did it happen?

PC: In 1955, Ernesto Nathan Rogers invited De Carlo despite his criticism of CIAM and of Rogers, too to join a meeting in Le Sarraz to prepare for the 10th CIAM congress in Dubrovnik. On one side were the “oldies” Giedion, Roth, Wogensky, Max Bill, Jacqueline Tirwitt, and Rogers; on the other were the “young Turks” Peter Smithson, Shad Woods, Aulis Blomsted, Reima Pietilä, De Carlo, and others. The newcomers began to share ideas and to criticize the approach of the older establishment. To address an increasingly difficult relationship, it was decided to put the organization of the Dubrovnik congress in the hands of younger members like Bakema, van Eyck, Candilis, Woods, and Alison and Peter Smithson. De Carlo wasn’t at the Dubrovnik congress in 1956 or the next one in Aix-enProvence, but he formed relationships with these younger colleagues and in 1959 participated in the last CIAM congress in Otterloo, where he was attacked by the older members as a traitor to CIAM’s principles. CIAM collapsed in Otterloo and its young members went on to found Team X as a radical alternative.

RB: Between my last year with Sert at the GSD and the years I spent with the Haefeli Moser Steiger office in Zurich, I knew or met most of the Zurich and Rotterdam CIAM people, but it would have taken me months to remember/assemble a list as complete as this! I arrived in Zurich while Dr. Steiger was in Dubrovnik. He spent my first lunch with him venting about it.

JP: Unlike some of the “Young Turks” who followed them like Christopher Alexander and the New Urbanists Team X worked consciously within modernism. They, and De Carlo in particular, sought to redirect modernism rather than supplant it.

RB: De Carlo’s larger cohort Ivan Illich, Metabolists like Maki and Tange, and the British economist and philosopher Barbara Ward, part of C.A. Doxiadis’s circle pointed to the paradox that scarcity lived side by side with abundance. They wanted to restore wholeness. We still face the same paradox. Unequal wealth fractures our cities and our society. As we see in the Bay Area, disproportionate wealth seeks enclaves and remoteness in ways that undermine the richness of everyday life. Housing, increasingly a continuation of work for many

people, trades the drama of shopping and the aromas of the kitchen for things that can be delivered. Life for ordinary people now comes piecemeal ever-smaller fractions of what they need sold to them at a constantly fluctuating market price.

JP: Fifty years on, the surge in the urban homeless reflects the unaffordability of the city’s most basic elements. Illich’s ideas for transcending the cash economy are desperately needed, because so many make so little. If Urbino a town in steep decline when De Carlo arrived is a precedent, then he might tell us, “Start where you are!” as Zen puts it: “These are the city’s conditions.” They confront us, so we have to look beneath the surface, where the fabric of a place remains ripe for revival. In reading it, we discover how.

RB: De Carlo appreciated that cities and their buildings are unfinished. It’s in this sense that they’re alive, but that life depends on communities that learn to work with them over time that are inspired to do this by the fabric itself or by its rediscovery. De Carlo’s emphasis on educating the community is like what the Campus Planning Study Group at Berkeley set out to do to explain the place to a community that, due of its lack of understanding, was in danger of destroying it. Part of that process was to clarify the rules and concepts underlying the campus, so the community could both recognize error when it saw it and imagine better ways to build. But they also learned how to read the place in a larger sense how the buildings and settings interact across a terrain that, while bordered like an urban park, varies from formality to informality as it takes cues from Beaux Arts classicism, European and regional modernism, arts & crafts vernacular, and nature itself.

JP: Peter Carolin of Cambridge University helped organize a largerscale effort, Cambridge Futures, to enable the people of that city-region to understand it in similar terms and then picture how it might grow without losing its intrinsic character and qualities. The question of scaling a fabric to new requirements looms large in the Bay Area, where debates about adding density are constant and highly polarized. This isn’t unique to here, of course. Where cities have removed the past to make room for development at a radically different scale, as in China, there’s invariably a countermovement, however late and ineffectual, to preserve something of what's left. What we lack are successful examples of how to scale up for new growth without crushing the life of the existing city in the process.

RB: Minoru Mori, a lifelong student of Le Corbusier, tried mightily to harmonize the new scale he believed major cities required to compete globally with the old scale that made his own city, Tokyo, so remarkably livable. He foresaw with horror what you and I saw repeated in many of the city’s wards the supplanting of the old fabric by technically proficient towers that are impossible to distinguish from one another. "Generic" means you no longer know where you are.

Roppongi Hills was Mori’s most ambitious effort to define a new scale that maintains a connection to human scale and movement, so it could be transformed much as streets are and fit into the surrounding fabric in ways that feel convivial, as Illich would say, rather than oppressive. It’s a bold prototype that like all such didn't completely succeed.

JP: Roppongi Hills opened around the same time as Shiodome, the redevelopment of Shimbashi Station when Japan Rail was privatized. The financial realities of that transaction resulted in a zero-sum assembly of towers. It also created a wall between the station and the Ginza District when access would be expected. Only the station itself has anything like this, and everything above it frustrates it.

RB: The difference is stark. Mori, a dominant land owner in MinamiAoyama, followed the lead of his patient, site-assembling father. They knew the district intimately, and their aims for it necessitated their engaging the community household-by-household to convince the owners of the ward’s many small parcels to join them and participate in its transformation. Enough were convinced to make it happen. Shiodome, in contrast, is pure expediency wrought at a comparable scale as Roppongi Hills but without any sense of what might hold it together, let alone tie it convincingly to its surroundings. It’s an outlier, heedless of urbanity in the same way that the wonderfully urbane Tokyo Forum was heedless of cost.

JP: When I joined you in Tokyo in May 1989, living in Mejiro, a district that you compared to the Brooklyn of your childhood, I was struck by its remarkably subtle fabric, weaving together a low, dense pattern of nearly-attached houses, narrow lanes, and shrines and temples, placed almost randomly in a given neighborhood as a counterpoint, a moment of respite and beauty. In 1989, we lived in an example of modest neighborhood infill the former house of our friend's grandfather, redeveloped as a three-story condominium building, taller than the adjoining houses but respectful of how they met the street and their

unvarying yet subtly varying appearance. It occurred to me then that if the average height of Tokyo buildings was only 1.3 stories, it could scale up without too much disruption.

RB: The whole question of scale and the related question of how communities engage with the different forces that push them to add density or impose it on them has a long history, and not just in Tokyo. When CIAM and Team X split, one part took a “client-down” view of buildings, typologies, and programs, while the other took a “community-up” view emphasizing site and user needs. The first pushed for “urban-scale” density, while the second was more nuanced and contextual, as De Carlo’s work in Urbino illustrates. But the split also reflected experience in the cities in the developing world. Participation took in the self-help movement, which harnessed local means and traditions to compensate for the lack of financing and as a way to work around authoritarian, aid-fueled, often corrupt regimes bent on applying western or Soviet models.

JP: De Carlo also overlaps Thatcher’s gutting of public housing in the UK and Nixon’s efforts to substitute market solutions, off the government’s books, for federal subsidies of below-market housing.

RB: The self-help movement surfaced here, too. UHAB in the Bronx is an example, very similar to developing world examples and funded by the some of the same philanthropies. It’s also an era when squatters appear in New York, San Francisco, London, and Copenhagen inspired by examples in the south of Europe, in Caracas, and elsewhere. The famous Wall in Hong Kong, public housing gone rogue, is another example. Urbino had a different problem: how to stanch population loss and revive the economy. De Carlo’s work there is relevant to postindustrial cities like Antwerp or Detroit, yet it exemplifies how architects can orchestrate change by engaging and educating a community living with it. It’s an important model in this respect.

JP: Part of its power is that can also be applied to fast-growing cities. Self-help is also very much in the picture when you consider that that growth often results from population surges that quickly overwhelm existing supports and services, with little means to extend them.

RB: “What would Giancarlo do?” is a reasonable starting point for today’s urbanists as they face unprecedented rural-to-urban migration

and the flood of refugees from regional warfare. Tom Friedman noted recently how the first 50 years after World War II were great ones for weaker states. Superpowers used aid to win their affection. Climate change and population growth weren’t problems. Smart phones weren’t ubiquitous, so their negatives weren’t a factor. And China wasn’t in the WTO, so other low-wage countries were still competitive. Soon after that, those advantages disappeared. Meanwhile, the Cold War ended, replacing superpowers and globalization with regional parity and nationalism. Cold War revival may alter this, but right now we have what Friedman calls “zones of disorder” from which masses of people are fleeing. We have tent cities of homeless in our cities, and encampments of refugees at our borders. In China, India, and Nigeria, rural-to-city migrants similarly find shelter where they can. It’s not new when I worked in São Paulo in the sixties, as many people as now live in San Francisco arrived and settled in its outskirts every year. The responses were dictatorship, Brasilia, leftwing and rightwing populism, and pockets of progress, like Jaime Lerner’s Curatiba.

JP: So, what would Giancarlo do?

RB: The Argentinian-American architect and educator Horacio Camino wrote that “We are wrapped up in disciplines that lack social purpose and understanding of human behavior, and we deliver only rhetoric and fail to provide a service to the community.” Education, he added, “should be responsive to life.” De Carlo’s critique of CIAM is very similar. He saw architects as the midwives of community transformation, acknowledging humbly that the community does the work, pregnant with the desire for change and faced with all of its obstacles. To quote Camino again, “they take a broad, fresh look, wherever life is and where the challenges are.”

As De Carlo’s Urbino shows, that fresh look includes reading the place itself, to use his word. Can you read a city the scale of Lagos? I think you can. Maybe it’s another form of self-help, that kind of engagement that lives with a place as terrain, settlement, and movement, that finds and eases the pressure points, finds and cultivates or builds on what works or holds promise. Like De Carlo in Urbino, it’s explaining a city to itself so those who shape it have a starting point, a why. When so many people are from somewhere else, living often at the barest subsistence, this can seem like delay, but it’s not it’s a deliberation that will set a better course. The more that ordinary people

feel they’re part of it, the more readily they will join in, make it their cause.

Written with Richard Bender for GiancarloDeCarloandILAUD:A MovableFrontier , Paolo Ceccarelli, ed., Fondazione OAMI, Milan, 2019.

The Question of Style in Architectural Research

We first took up this question as issue editors of the Journalof ArchitecturalEducation(May 1979). We asked a diverse group of architectural researchers to discuss their styles of research. Asked to define style, we said that it meant "how people do something" or "the way one performs an activity." We also meant for style to be interpreted as the force that animates researchers and influences their choice of methods in carrying out their research. As Albert Einstein wrote, "When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. "1

The state of research

We were involved for several years in evaluating a national research institute doing environmental design research. At each visit, we saw the same thing: much of the work, while methodologically "sound," was of relatively little interest, and some of it was trivial. We saw the same phenomenon in our department: a tendency to confuse the adherence to an "acceptable research methodology" with making a real contribution to the field.

Around the same time, we encountered Paul Feyerabend's Against Method , a book that argues that the methods of science are not substantively different from the methods of any other organized human activity (legislation, for example). Feyerabend says:

The image of 20th century science in the minds of scientists and laymen is determined by technological miracles such as color television, the moon shots, the infra-red oven, as well as by the somewhat vague but still quite influential rumor, or fairy-tale, concerning the manner in which these miracles are produced.

According to the fairy-tale the success of science is the result of a subtle, but carefully balanced combination of inventiveness and control. Scientists have ideas. And they have special methods for improving ideas. The theories of science have passed the test of method. They give a better account of the world than ideas which have not passed the test.

But the fairy-tale is false. There is no special method that guarantees success or makes it probable. Scientists do not solve problems because they possess a magic wand methodology or a theory of rationality but because they have studied a problem a long time, because they know the situation fairly well, because they are not too dumb.2

We wondered if environmental design research had not become overly enamored of methodology and the appearance of scientific rigor, and if this scientism was not choking off a good deal of interesting work and channeling a considerable effort into keeping up appearances rather than pursuing significant lines of thought.

In organizing our issue of the JAE , we enlisted a range of respondents, some of whom were clearly working in research areas most people would categorize as "scientific." Others, however, had abandoned the methods associated with the sciences behavioral or otherwise in favor of more experimental approaches that served them better in getting at the heart of their chosen subject.

What follows is a brief account of the main issues raised by some of our respondents, together with our thoughts about what these issues imply for the organization of environmental design research in an academic setting. For purposes of brevity, we have not quoted from all the articles published as part of this JAEissue, since in some cases more than one article dealt with a similar topic. We have also drawn on three other sets of observations (those of Proshansky, Brill and Vellecco, and Bender) that were not part of the issue.

"Clerical" research

Christopher Arnold notes that "the mass of today's research is not directed toward the pursuit of knowledge but toward its authentication." 3 This leads to what he calls "clerical" research:

Clerical work consists of copying documents containing ideas and information developed by others, providing numerical data, organizing data ·in ways devised by others, and drawing conclusions through the use of precise criteria set at a higher level. The essence of clericalism is the suspension of judgment and its replacement by automatic methods. This is a description of much research: thought is replaced by the accumulation of data. By some paradoxical quirk, the clerical interpretation of numerical data is then hailed as the measure of truth, while insight and judgment are deemed unscientific and suspect.

Authentication becomes problematic in much environmental design research because "the kinds of objective and measurable criteria that are the basis of the natural and physical sciences do not exist in the combined physical, social, cultural, and political context of the environmental world." As a result, "we must be prepared to accept a much broader basis of authentication, and we must, as the practicing

designer does, be prepared to accept that the search is much more important than clerical authentication."

Arnold also argues against the penchant for drawing a distinction between design and research:

It is symptomatic of current attitudes that ProgressiveArchitecture , in attempting to define research for purposes of its awards program, defined research as that which is not design. I think that the poor quality of most environmental research; and the general insecurity and gloom of many of its practitioners, stems from the subliminal realization that the real research is going on in design offices.

Rather than remain fixated on clerical authentication, Arnold suggests that environmental design researchers should search for a more appropriate style of research. From his perspective:

The designer's style is a more fruitful model for environmental research than the process of authentication. The testing and evaluation of design-style research will remain to some extent unsusceptible to numerical objective evaluation qualitative and appropriate only within a particular cultural context. As such, we cannot afford to limit research to value-free evaluation, because the environment is predominantly a qualitative and value-rich field. "Value-free" environmental design research will also tend to be valueless.

Problems communicating

As John Habraken points out,4

In architecture today there is no map we share. We may or may not share certain skills, beliefs and attitudes perhaps even some ideologies and languages, but there is certainly no map of the world that we share. In fact, we are not even sure that we share the same world. A commonly understood and accepted map may never be possible.

For the researcher, "this primitive state has its disadvantages." One of them is isolation not "the isolation of individuals in the sciences who may be so specialized that they can only talk to a few others" but an existential one: "We do not know where we are."

The lack of commonalities creates a distinct problem for the field: clearly the odds are against those who do design research. The field is unknown. There is no commonly accepted ideology to bind supporters, protectors and interactors together. There is no commonly shared body of knowledge to explain what the research is all about and where it can bring us. There is no track record for those who are able to offer support. For the

same reason, those from the profession who could interact with the researchers often find it difficult to do so (and they are usually operating in small scale organizations that don't allow them to spend much time on interactions with no immediate payoff). In short, those who can interact have no tradition to support. Those who create research agendas offer widely different theories, are often removed from the social context to which their work must contribute, and are often not even knowledgeable about each other's work.

The need for an ideology

Habraken also argues that one cannot create a better climate for research in design through research management alone. Rather, this requires "stating a belief, embracing a speculative theory that is broad and convincing enough to make people then concentrate resources and energy on the narrower issue of design." An ideology. he believes, is a prerequisite for making progress in the field:

There must be an outline that allows us to distinguish relevant from irrelevant directions. The ideology allows us to draw the first contours on the world. We put our research in. There is no research without an ideology, just as there is no science without it. We must distinguish between the two and feel free to discuss both. To stay with an ideology without applying it in our own area of knowledge and expertise is ineffective. To stay within our fields without exposing ourselves in the larger context of human concerns, where no one is an authority, is dangerous. Not to know the distinction is perhaps the most objectionable of all.

Evolving a research style

Clare Cooper Marcus suggests that the evolution of a particular researcher's style follows from personal decisions based on intuitions about what is genuinely appropriate to the subject matter being researched.5

Just as my method of investigation differs from earlier work (and from most standard techniques), so do my ways of sampling and analysis. I am no longer interested in statistical, random sampling or quantitative analysis. Not to say they are wrong they are just not right for me in my current state of intellectual/personal development.

What prodded her to alter her approach was the sense that she was "only scratching the surface of what the environment means to people. My research style, as it has evolved, has grown more and more intertwined with what is happening to me personally. To ignore the

connection would be less than honest." The process of hypothesis creation is for her a personal, intuitive process:

If I don't know where to go next with some hypothesis or idea., I let go of it, and stop trying to direct it or conduct it (we speak of "conducting" research!). I let it become itself, lead me, evolve out of its inner being.

I am convinced by now, through my readings in oriental philosophy, that research, just as life in general, must be approached with acceptance, without holding on, letting things flow and evolve in their own good time. To "tease out" a research problem seems as alien to me now as to tease out a personal problem: my belief is that the solution to each will evolve as one lives one's life, and that to worry about a solution will actually block its emergence.

Challenging design preconceptions

For Herbert McLaughlin, principal of the architectural and planning firm of Kaplan/McLaughlin/Diaz, research or inquiry is intended "to challenge commonly held assumptions about design, with special reference to established patterns of solutions for certain building types."6 This research "is guided by a broad set of hypotheses about the nature of architects, their self-images, their predilections, their concern with form rather than function, and the nature of the design process." Mclaughlin sees architects resisting research that seeks to analyze or even discuss their typical range of solutions to various design problems:

Such a discussion might well lead to a serious analysis of the characteristic successes and failures of such prototypes. The prototype which the architect finds most appropriate to his visual preconception may prove to be functionally flawed. Therefore, research which questions the basic validity of different design approaches is seldom encouraged by architects. They prefer research which tinkers with minor refinements to established and visually desirable prototypes.

To counter this tendency, Mclaughlin has developed a research methodology that "emphasizes analysis of general patterns of use and user opinion" and seeks "significant differences in opinion, of satisfaction. " He sees this approach as particularly well-suited to its subject matter:

Compulsory buildings are buildings in which the user has very little choice about whether or not he is going to use, or be affected by, the building. Such buildings include hospitals, public housing, housing for the elderly, jails, and other institutions which frequently are not only compulsory environments,

but have clients who are substantially different in their outlooks and attitudes from the real users.

In this area of research, it is especially important that the architects come to understand the ways in which the users of the building are likely to make use of it. Their challenge is to understand the differences in viewpoint between themselves and the users in a manner that relates to the design process and the architects' need for the right information at the right moment. Mclaughlin says,

We are interested in "practical" results which can be utilized readily in practice. This has affected not only subject matter and techniques, but the personnel assigned to projects. We have placed much emphasis on using practicing architects on research assignments. Almost invariably, our experience has been that when we integrate academics into our research projects, they are unaware of the design issues, techniques, and constraints involved, and unable to define problems and seek solutions efficiently.

Research pluralism arising from practice

Francis Ventre of the National Bureau of Standards maintains that focusing research on the problems of practice has led its Center for Building Technology "to organize research that straddles disciplinary lines," giving rise to "previously untried combinations of disciplines."7 Such "research pluralism" is necessary for a research unit that works with several quite different constituencies,

each of whom functions within a distinctive frame of reference, which in turn assigns technical knowledge a different role, and requires validation of a different kind. Not degree, but kind: knowledge takes different forms in order to be effective within the several institutional frames of reference.

Ventre sees the research style of the Center responding to shifts in demand by shifting itself:

The research style of the future will reflect the knowledge needs of the building enterprise needs which are terribly diffuse. How can they be focused in order to sketch a program of future research? The great focuser of this diffuse industry is, of course, the act of decision making, and the style of future research will be centered on the integrative studies needed to inform decision making as it relates to the built environment. Designers themselves must articulate both what they need to know and how that knowledge should be presented to them and their clients. The design decision whether in the hands of the "form giver" or the community of users is the major,

guiding intelligence of the building industry. If you would ask "what is the future style of building research," the ultimate response lies in the nature of the designer's questions.

Not only pluralism of disciplines, but pluralism of methods and approaches may be the result of this increasing focus on the particular needs of building designers, rather than on the needs of regulators or industrial groups.

Research as an everyday activity

Jan Wampler observes that for him.8

Research is going on all the time, without program or direction -a random, stumbling process, never organized or recorded in any formal way. It is simply observing the built world around me in relationship to an idea if it can really be called an idea. Most of the time, it just seems to be a thought. If any word describes the process, perhaps it is "watching." The built world and the people who build it become both my laboratory and my library. They are the resource and reference for developing a thought, testing it, refining it or, as is the case most of the time, discarding it and starting all over. Slowly, this random process may produce something of an idea that can built on. To set aside a time to do research would be impossible for me.

The researcher as a flâneur

Lars Lerup believes that "in architecture proper, the void created by the passing of behaviorist research will be left empty unless we reassess and redefine the nature of research."9 Behaviorism no longer serves him as a meaningful basis for research or for design:

The reason for the demise of behaviorism is not a change of heart among all researchers most are probably continuing as usual. Rather, it is a realization among a few of us that the basic assumptions of behaviorism are incorrect. What we have come to realize is that the relationship between people and the physical setting is not a natural and inevitable one, but an artificial, socially constructed liaison of considerable complexity. For research, this realization ought to have an important effect: by definition, the behaviorist search is for facts, not for something vague, fluid or invisible. But behaviorist facts are fiction.

Even behaviorists can take advantage of this realization, Lerup says.

One real purpose for seeking facts or fiction, as it may be is to find inspiration and impetus for our creativity. I suspect that we have lost little by this reassignment of facts as fiction. The behaviorists have lost their moral

superiority but simultaneously gained freedom to roam previously prohibited areas. Their research is momentarily freed from its solemn mission to provide the factual substance for the built as a social prophylactic.

With this freedom comes the heady possibility that researchers or architects Lerup makes no real distinction between them will become flâneurs, roamers or wanderers, willing to disregard utilitarian purposes in order to explore other considerations that are ultimately of importance.

The roaming and straying within language and architecture, and particularly outside the concept of buildings as utensils, is both threatening and potentially fruitful. The attitude and concerns of the roamer, the flâneur, are modernist. The flâneur is a disconcerting figure in modern life, particularly to the behaviorists, because he shoots without aiming, wanders without a direct purpose, understanding for no other reason than knowing. This may initially seem incompatible with design defined as purposeful action, but not if we see design within the confines of language on a conceptual level and within architecture proper at a level of design. What we may see in this is that the built is not an envelope that shapes our lives, that human behavior cannot be expressed in built form, that in fact there is an abyss between that which inspires and that which is designed (an abyss that is the key piece in the modernist project). We have come to see that not even made things can be reduced to human dimensions, but must be accepted in their stark otherness. The designed is not a reflection of the world, nor its expression.

Create and then test

Baruch Givoni argues against the customary distinction between the "creative" and "technical" aspects of research, the creative being typically described as the development of new concepts and theories, and the technical as the testing of these concepts and theories.10 "This distinction is artificial and can greatly limit the actual scientific value of research. Moreover, many researchers are equally engaged in both aspects of the research process." He adds:

The research methods of the various subjects I have studied were developed and expanded with time and experience. In many cases, it was found that by combining different approaches, drawn from many different scientific disciplines, it was possible to reach a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomena under study. The diversity of relationships between theoretical work and experimentation have led to the "creative" part of research, and the formulation of new ideas.

Science versus aesthetics

Henry Cowan sees a basic difference between scientific and aesthetic research that is critical in a field like architecture that draws on both.11

One essential feature of scientific research is the repeatability of the results. If one scientist obtains one result, others must get the same answer within a reasonable margin of error. If they fail to do so, the work of the first is invalidated. This characteristic of scientific research does not generally apply to the search for new aesthetic concepts.

Although in architecture, significant advances have resulted from applied scientific research, most are still achieved through the traditional aesthetic approach.

But Cowan observes that: "architects often make decisions on visual grounds that is, they choose a solution because they like the look of it, but then they present a technical reason for their decision because of the great prestige that attaches to science.

This raises the important question of whether integration can be achieved between building science and architectural aesthetics.

Computer analysis may help at least to clarify the practical implications of aesthetic decisions. We are already using mathematical models successfully to analyze vertical transportation and space planning both part of architectural design rather than building science.

However, before aesthetics can be integrated into any scientific framework, it is necessary to define far more precisely what constitutes (at the present time) a beautiful or at least an aesthetically acceptable building. In the Georgian era, the principles of Palladian architecture were so clearly stated that it should be possible to write a computer program to produce drawings for a well-mannered building in the Palladian style. Perhaps no one would consider the effort worthwhile simply to prove a point, but if it can be done for one historical style, it should also be possible for modern architecture. This would enable us to study aesthetic implications of innovations in building science, and the effect of aesthetic decisions on the interior environment of a building.

Finding the right research models

As Harold Proshansky, writing about the Environmental Research Division of the Center for Building Technology,12 points out:

The classical model of basic research that characterizes the physical sciences is almost by definition of very limited utility when applied to problems, issues and events outside the domain of these fields of inquiry.

Basic research with other kinds of research models is a critical necessity when the nature of the phenomena, the kinds of questions that can be asked, and the theoretical-empirical developments in the problem area are significantly different from what is the case in the physical and biological sciences. Engineering, architecture and the behavioral sciences require their own kind of basic research, indeed one that involves conceptualizations and theoretical developments of a far less abstract nature than what is conceived of in classical physics or chemistry.

With an increasing urban technology, the problems of the physical world invariably involve questions of human behavior and experience. The research that is necessary requires not only appropriate theoretical conceptions but methodological innovations that will allow the meaning of these concepts to be preserved in the process of testing their derived empirical generalizations,

In engineering, architecture, planning and the behavioral sciences, the last four decades have established a critical truism: the use of an abstract theoretical paradigm for answering conceptual and empirical questions in these fields has led to a meager and largely isolated set of results which by their nature have had no impact on the major questions, problems and phenomena of these fields.

Research of a non - disciplinary nature

As Michael Brill and Marguerite Villecco point out,13

Because environmental/design research always reassesses the "problem-asgiven," it develops problem statements that do not automatically generate one type of solution, and that are without bias towards a single discipline's normal repertoire of solutions.

They note that many problems within society recur "precisely because they cannot be solved along specific disciplinary lines. Such problems remain unsolved, frequently because they fail to attain 'legitimate' status within a single discipline." If they are to be dealt with, researchers must bring "an extensive repertoire of methods into play, from what we may call hard science, soft science, and the design, planning and engineering disciplines themselves."

Pointing to the problem of communication cited by John Habraken, Brill and Villecco attribute it to the fact that environmental design research is "an endeavor of many disciplines, with a wide range of values; its value base is not as easily known or categorized as those of so-called normative disciplines." It is also "a relatively youthful discipline without a single, accepted theoretical base." To compensate for this, and to achieve a greater degree of mutual understanding

among different researchers within the field, environmental design research,

should make its operating values and assumptions as explicit as possible for each project, so that those who receive its products and act upon them can know the context of their development and assess the range of cases in which the work may be applicable

Research is not design

Brill and Villecco argue that environmental design research "can be distinguished from design and the distinction is critical for those proposing, doing, using, or assessing research." For them,

Design is unique, its products are singular, and its methods less important than its results. Design is product-oriented; it is justified as the solution to a problem and the method need not be replicated for evaluation. Design practice frequently welcomes intuitive leaps as it seeks to resolve the complexity of program and context into a single form. Its values are implicit in its product and its evaluation qualitative as well as quantitative. Environmental design research, on the other hand, is concerned with the frameworks for all the activities that affect design, which allow evaluation and design to take place within a rational context. Research is process- as well as product-oriented. The process must be replicable and its methods documented as a basis for evaluation of each research project's internal validity. It takes a specialized view of the world in order to push at limits and to new levels of understanding. It is exclusive, rather than inclusive, by nature. The purpose of research is to advance the state of the art of design. And while intuitive leaps used to create knowledge are an accepted or even preferred method in design, in research, intuition must be tested for its utility against specific research objectives. Environmental design research is not singular, but concerned with sets of cases and generic application; it must be generalizable to more than a unique situation.

How research is organized has implications

Richard Bender notes that the way research is organized affects both its products and the researchers involved. He has identified four types of research organization: subject/discipline; product-oriented; project/problem; and stage/phase. Each has advantages and disadvantages.14

Subject/discipline research "tends to facilitate communication concerning the work," but is of limited value "in attempting research dealing with complex interdisciplinary topics." Research groups organized by discipline have a tendency to overstate their potential contribution toward a broad

research objective. They look for rewards and status recognition from their peers within their discipline, rather than in terms of their performance in relation to specific research objectives. They have a strong tendency to do research because it interests them, rather than because it has a high probability of yielding important results.

Product-oriented research "brings together people who have what is considered to be the appropriate combination of disciplines and experiences needed to develop results that are the objectives of the research unit." Such groups can address multi-disciplinary problems, and communication within them is fostered by their common focus. Communication within specific disciplines may suffer, however, as the group becomes more important than the backgrounds of its individual members, and it can become hard for individuals to keep up in their fields, although they may be extremely knowledgeable about the product.

Project/problem research is similar in advantages and disadvantages to product-oriented research.

Stage/phase research attempts to organize the research process so that those best at applied research deal with projects at a certain phase, while others involved in basic research are free to pursue the underlying research issues. The problem lies in the ultimate integration of these activities, and the danger is that the results of one activity will be unconnected to and largely useless for another.

Bender argues that "research activity is a process that will become organized by conducting research." As one becomes aware of the drawbacks of a particular organization, those drawbacks will force changes in the organization, and these changes may mitigate the drawbacks and improve the overall situation of the research effort.

Problems and opportunities

The most important theme emerging from these different points of view is the question of methodological breadth or narrowness. Those looking at research from the standpoint of a scientific background emphasize the breadth available within scientific methodology, while others note that the problems of environmental design range beyond the boundaries of scientific research. Cowan in particular makes this point, asking how one can reconcile scientific research with, for example, research on aesthetic grounds.

Those viewing the matter from the standpoint of aesthetics or the human psyche are much more skeptical of the true breadth of the scientific method and its appropriateness as a means for dealing with

important problems of environmental design research (which, Lerup argues, subsumes the problem of design). With Proshansky, they echo Feyerabend's contention.15

It is clear that the idea of a fixed method or of a fixed theory of rationality rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, "objectivity," "truth," it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.

Lerup and Arnold conclude that the problem with much environmental design research is that it represents the misapplication of the methods of science that it is motivated by scientism (a desire to maintain the appearance of being scientific) or a false belief that one has developed a scientifically valid research method. Lerup argues that the realization that one is pursuing a spurious methodology may even be liberating, because it frees one to try other approaches and contend with other problems.

Arnold argues that the reason that so much of environmental design research is trivial is that it is caught up in a desire for authentication (or "clerical research," as he calls it) rather than in the search for new knowledge. Habraken adds that researchers in environmental design must define an ideology that enables them to search effectively for new knowledge. This ideology is something different from a hypothesis that can be refuted at the discovery of the first counter evidence (as Cowan suggests); rather, it is embraced as a guide to action over a period of time, in spite of evidence to the contrary, so the researcher can actually make progress in the work. (This is also Marcus's view, which aligns with Feyerabend's position.)

In a discussion of his work designing the Gossamer Albatross, a human-powered airplane, the inventor Paul MacCready noted the difficulty of doing certain types of research within the structures of larger and smaller research units (i.e., within a large aerospace firm and within his own much smaller research firm). MacCready designed his plane while on vacation, watching birds and paying attention to their turning radius.16 (See Wampler's "watching.")

His experience suggests that ultimately there may not be any prescribed way to organize research in order to reliably produce certain types of insights. In fact, research organizations seem better suited to

develop research findings, apply them to specific problems, and so on. It may be possible to create a "climate" in which such insights may occur certainly, there were circumstances that permitted MacCready to arrive at his, but they come down to having a momentary freedom from other demands, including an organization's demand to produce insights of this nature.

The preceding discussion also argues for "loosening" the sense of what environmental design research is, how it should be organized, and what makes it valid or invalid. Being human, it is difficult for us to cease making judgments. It is equally difficult for institutions to avoid the same habit. But we have to recognize that the nature of the field supports Feyerabend's notion that the widest variety of approaches is appropriate. In tending to limit the range of acceptable approaches, and to prejudge the validity of research, we have tended to ignore a number of issues of major human importance.

One problem is the possibility of fraud, but Arnold points to the example of Sir Cyril Burt and his spurious studies of inherited intelligence to suggest that science itself is hardly immune to this. The benefits outweigh the risk, if any, of a wholesale run on the research marketplace by poseurs and opportunists.

The real purpose of granting this freedom of approach is to free people to approach their research problems in a manner that suits them to develop a style that reflects their particular intelligence and enables them to arrive at answers (or raise deeper questions). This freedom does not negate the need to organize research, to teach research methods, and even to use these methods as valid starting points for different types of problems. It's an important background for research a cultural exposure that may be rejected or disregarded but that remains a useful part of one's training.

Notes

1. William Stockton, quoting Janos Plesch quoting Albert Einstein in "Celebrating Einstein, NewYorkTimes , 18 February 1979.

2. Paul Feyerabend, AgainstMethod , Verso, London, 1978, pp. 300, 302.

3. Christopher Arnold, "The Clerk and the Ignoramus," Journalof ArchitecturalEducation32:2-3, May 1979.

4. N. John Habraken, "Notes of a Traveler," JournalofArchitectural Education(JAE) 32:4-7, May 1979.

5. Clare Cooper Marcus, "How to Solve Problems without Really Trying," JAE32:12-14, May 1979.

6. Herbert McLaughlin, "Notes on Research in Practice," JAE32:15, May 1979.

7. Francis Ventre, "How Institutions Shape a Research Style," JAE32:16-19, May 1979.

8. Jan Wampler, 'Watching," JAE32:20-21, May 1979.

9. Lars Lerup, "Research for Appearance," JAE32:22-25, May 1979.

10. Baruch Givoni, "Creativity and Testing in Research," JAE32:26-27, May 1979.

11. Henry Cowan, ''Aesthetic Concepts and Scientific Research," JAE32:2829, May 1979.

12. Harold M. Proshansky, memorandum on the evaluation of Environmental Design Research Division of the Center for Building Technology, National Bureau of Standards, March 12, 1979.

13. Michael Brill and Marguerite Villecco, "Environmental Design Research: Concepts, Methods, and Values," paper written for the Design Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, February 1981.

14. Richard Bender, "Research and Architecture: Research and the Practice of Architecture," paper written for MBT, San Francisco, 25 April 1973.

15. Paul Feyerabend, op. cit.,p. 28.

16. This account is based on an address by MacCready at the 1981 convention of the American Institute of Architects California Council, Los Angeles, reported to us by Peter Dodge of EHDD, San Francisco. An account of MacCready's process for the Gossamer Albatross also appears in the September/October 1981 issue of IndustrialDesign .

Written with Richard Bender as a chapter in ArchitecturalResearch , James C. Snyder, ed., Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984.

On Minoru Takeyama

Minoru Takeyama’s life has gone through several cycles which have carried him far from Japan and then back again. This progression, although not always very smooth, has left him a very sophisticated observer, but one who's kept his curiosity. It's also given him a unique personal language, Takeyamese, of which my mother-in-law once said “you feel after reading it that you didn’t understand a single sentence, yet somehow you get the general sense of what he's trying to say.”

Although I publish a design quarterly, I've always been as interested in the character of designers as in their work. Sometimes there's a remarkable consonance between the two, so it's impossible really to understand one without the other. Of the architects I know personally, George Homsey and Lars Lerup come to mind in this regard. Other times, there's so much dissonance: the work is good, but the person is so odd or awful, or vice versa. Sometimes the work is not the point. Still other times it's hard to find the personality except in the work.

In Takeyama's case, it's different again: the buildings seem to occur in parallel, the best of them providing a further but not indispensable commentary (that is, he can say it and build it) on what he observed about his clients and their projects. There's always a joking aspect to this, I sense: not mocking them, but looking with curiosity and humor at their situations. This is also a Danish trait, and perhaps explains why Takeyama fit so easily in Copenhagen.

Since I've only visited one of his buildings, my comments on his work are necessarily second hand. Some projects which come to mind are the Hotel Beverly Tom in Tomakomai, the Pepsi Factory in Mikasa, and the Nara Candy Factory.

Hotel Beverly Tom

These quite different buildings all express what we imagine to be their inner life, their reality. The hotel, which my aunt would describe as looking like a microphone, seems to signal its baser possibilities to the passing ships.1 The candy factory appears to be run by a kindly (and wealthy) uncle. He’s grown rich at our expense. but the money’s been put to good use. The Pepsi Factory, on the other hand, must be run by engineers: a celebration of bottling, not the contents. This must have been the year that Pepsi Japan won the Deming Prize.

Pepsi Factory

The Candy Factory's originality lies in his interpretation of what it represents, especially to children, and the care with which he's realized it. Its understated flamboyance is like the Alessi tea kettle, Michael Graves's lighthearted contribution to the English Tea Ceremony.

Takeyama makes use of the potential for creativity during construction inherent in the Japanese tradition to make something of elements like the tilework instead of squandering all that artisanal talent on mere repetition or banality. (Thomas Gordon Smith did this in his Richmond Hill House; some of Christopher Alexander’s work has a similar impulse.) The Candy Factory is an instance of Johan Huizinga’ s notion of serious play, a particular trait of children, making use of the spontaneity latent in the construction process, even here (where along with pleasure, it too often provides income for attorneys).

Nakamura Hospital

The most personal or self-expressive of his buildings may be his Nakamura Brain Surgery Hospital, which grew out of his relationship with the client, the surgeon who operated on his neural aneurysm, an operation in which Takeyama had a one in twenty chance of death, and with whom he later traveled, accompanying the surgeon from museum to museum as he indulged his interest in human feet. Reading an old Dûrrenmatt novel reminded me of this peculiarity and how a sense of the inexorable dwindling of time as one awaits one’s fate puts one on more intimate (perhaps oppressively intimate) terms with space.

For Americans, Takeyama’s most famous buildings are the two nightclubs on the cover of a Charles Jencks book popular when I was a student. I thought these buildings must be enormous. I still haven’t seen them, but I now realize they are relatively diminutive. (Modernism has survived in Tokyo because very few of the buildings are large enough to be oppressive.) I had a similar revelation when I visited Takeyama’s almost oppressively small office in Tokyo.

When I saw the slides of Takeyama’s more expansive studio in Sapporo, I imagined it was a piece of Denmark he’d brought back with him. It has a kind of pre-Rubik’s cube, made of plywood, on the roof.

This I take to be an emblem of architectural transformation, perhaps even a kind of Metabolist gesture. It must be a ruin by now.

Tokyo nightclub tower

The second time I met Takeyama, he was interested in holograms. Was this a reaction to trying to do hinged plywood transformations on a snow-covered roof in Sapporo? This is the same man who wrapped his mother’s house (also in Sapporo) in corrugated metal (long before everyone in Los Angeles plus San Francisco's David Ireland began to do so), so I can only assume he knew what he was doing.

Note

1. Another possible precedent is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial or Genbaku Dome, which the top of the Hotel Beverly Tom eerily resembles. I never heard Takeyama make this connection, however. I only noticed this in August 2023, when the ruined Hiroshima building was published in relation to the film Oppenheimer

Written for a publication of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, marking Takeyama’s Plym Distinguished Professorship (1989–1990) Born in 1935, Takeyama died in 2020. When I told Charles Jencks that I knew him, he replied that “any friend of Takeyama is a friend of mine.” Jencks should have written his obituary, but he died first.

My Postmodernists

Postmodernism is enjoying a modest revival, with a retrospective exhibit at the V&A, a conference in New York, and several new books that reassess its past and present claims. Postmodernism emerged here in the late 1970s as serious competition for the corporate modernism and bay regionalism predominant earlier in that decade, but my personal encounters with postmodernists began slightly earlier. This short essay recounts them.

When postmodernism was defined in the other arts, sciences, and cultural forms, it was understood as “subversion from within” the establishment, using the reigning voice to send a different message. CharlesJencks

My first postmodernist was my Washington University classmate Norman Spatz. We were in the second semester of our third year, in a school dedicated to Corbu. The assignment was to replace the traditional house of one of the professors. “Pretend it’s burned down,” we were told. The house was in one of the gated neighborhoods that adjoined the campus. Spatz opted to replace it with a house in the same idiom, complete with a pair of lions guarding the doorway. His scheme was a riff on tradition, not a replica.

Talk about subversion! The professors rounded on the project like a pair of imams dealing with an apostate. This was early in 1969. My classmate was in the avant-garde.

I tracked him down in Montréal a few months ago, hoping to obtain an image of his project. He had abandoned a career in preservation to become a teacher of English as a second language. After another

classmate photographed his model, he told me, he destroyed it, only to learn that there was no film in the camera.

Postmodernism in architecture is usually thought to have rejected earlier metaphysical efforts in favor of the playful, more or less arbitrary exchange of signifying elements. But this exchange spoke a jargon of its own. Reinhold Martin

My second postmodernist made the cover of the first and second editions of Charles Jencks’s TheLanguageofPost-Modern Architecture(1977) with two versions of a pair of nightclub buildings in Tokyo. I was in graduate school when Minoru Takeyama showed up, visiting Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley on a Fulbright fellowship. As I learned from helping him transliterate a few of his English-language essays from “Takeyamese,” his real interest was in semiotics, derived from Saussure and Barthes. Takeyama argued that each place generates an architectural language that reflects its underlying culture. His work shows the influence of Metabolism and of Bauhaus and Scandinavian modernism (he studied at Harvard and worked in Denmark for six years). It reflects the fact that Rossi, Sottsass, Venturi, perhaps even Hundertwasser are his contemporaries.

“The methods of architecture,” he wrote, “are more opportunistic and subversive than strictly logical.” Part of what makes postmodernism

subversive is its critique of modernism’s bias toward the universal. This is the core of Takeyama’s understanding and use of semiotics, and what makes him an early and enduring postmodernist. “Architecture may appear to have achieved a global syntax,” he wrote. “The truth is that this syntax is filtered through a multitude of cultural screens that differ with each individual community. Unless one is attuned to this, it is easy to misread the signs.” Noting that “many architects are like tourists, projecting their own values and biases onto particular cultures,” he argues that architecture should rather emerge from a “process of understanding and responding to the particularity that we experience, allowing its meaning to enrich our world rather than imposing our world upon it. Otherwise, I fear the universal world will come again.”

I was uncomfortable with the notion of this street, “Strada Novissima,” and the title, “The Presence of the Past.” It may be one of those cases where I thought I didn’t belong, but in the end belonged much more than I thought. Rem Koolhaas

My third postmodernist also participated in the 1980 Venice Biennale, but I first met him in the early 1970s because he sat next to a friend in Joseph Esherick’s graduate architecture studio at UC Berkeley. I believe that his thesis project was modernist, but I can’t swear to it. Thomas Gordon Smith made my map later with his Richmond Hill House, a self-built project in the East Bay to house his growing family.

Smith’s interest in classicism is genuine and of long-standing. Although he was “a key figure in the development of postmodernism,” as Richard John wrote, he subsequently “rejected the ironical approach of Robert Venturi and the decontextualization of Charles Moore to develop an architecture which draws freely on the twenty-five centuries of the classical tradition.” Among his influences, John notes, is Bernard Maybeck, “who fused a wide-ranging knowledge of architectural history and a fascination with modern materials and techniques. Smith has come to pursue a similar synthesis in his own work.”

Smith’s Richmond Hill House pulls off what amounts to the greatest challenge for a young architect without a private income,

which is to infuse a body of thought into a small and dirt-cheap package without having it sink under its own weight. It has always appealed to me as a creative fusion of his growing interest in classicism with the inevitable influences of his education and upbringing his actual time and place.

The historian John Summerson said postmodernism’s original claim was to insist that “modernism could die” when he, like most people, thought it was immortal, and therefore inevitable. Jencks

The real necessity of postmodernism in the late 1970s, here and elsewhere, was modernism’s sclerosis. For me, the motto of that moment was Paul Feyerabend’s “Anything goes,” his farewell to the claims of the scientific method, the existence of which he denied.

Postmodernism freed modernism from its status as the “official corporate style,” freeing it to evolve. The sclerosis from which we suffer most today is public regulation of building design, which has devolved into a drawn-out, case-by-case process that tends to squeeze the life out of design. Most of the time, it’s the opposite of “Anything goes.”

In his introduction to RadicalPost-Modernism , Charles Jencks cites the art historian Anthony Blunt’s assertion that “there are no perfectly and completely Baroque and Rococo buildings because the category is always more capacious and contradictory than any single structure.”

The best late (or post-postmodernist) modernism is like this too. “Its stealth emergence,” Jencks writes, “gives a new take on an old cliché: sometimes history repeats itself better if the architects don’t know it.”

Sources of quotations

Anthony Blunt, Charles Jencks, and Rem Koolhaas: Charles Jencks, “What is Radical Post-Modernism?” in Jencks, Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland, and Sam Jacob, ed’s., RadicalPost-Modernism (ArchitecturalDesign05/2011), Wiley, 2011.

Paul Feyerabend, AgainstMethod , Verso, 1978.

Richard John, ThomasGordonSmithandtheRebirthofClassical Architecture , New Architecture Monograph, Andreas Papadakis, 2001. Reinhold Martin, Utopia’sGhost , Minnesota, 2010.

Minoru Takeyama, “Sources of Meaning,” in Botond Bognar, ed., Minoru Takeyama , Architectural Monographs No. 42, Academy Editions, 1995.

Written for TraceSF , 12 January 2012.

The Classical Imagination

The architect and educator Thomas Gordon Smith lives and practices in South Bend, where he moved from the Bay Area in 1989 to become the School of Architecture Chair at the University of Notre Dame. Through the work of his eponymous firm and such publications as ClassicalArchitecture:Rule&Invention(Gibbs Smith, 1988) and VitruviusonArchitecture(Monacelli, 2003), Smith emerged as one of the leading advocates for classical architecture in the United States.

Smith did his M.Arch. thesis at UC Berkeley with Joseph Esherick, but encountered modernist and regionalist antipathy to his interest in classicism from others on the faculty. He designed the remarkable Richmond Hill house for his family (above) and then, after winning a Rome Prize, participated in "The Presence of the Past" exposition at the 1980 Venice Biennale.

Although "The Presence of the Past" is viewed retrospectively as heralding the arrival of postmodern architecture, Smith's focus was on classical architecture's creative potential. By the late 1970s, postwar modernism now thoroughly absorbed in the US by corporations and corporate tenant-seeking developers was at an impasse.

Postmodernism arrived in part to drive around the blockage, drawing not only on classical forms but also on contemporary movements in art and literature. Colin Rowe's Collage City, the pop art-derived Memphis movement led by Ettore Sottsass, and the nods to classicism made by architects as diverse as Charles Moore, Philip Johnson, and Robert Stern set the tone. Deconstruction slid in, sparking the modernist counter-revolution that became late modernism. Smith withdrew from this mélange, seeing in classicism's "rule and invention" another way forward.

When the editors of RoomOneThousandannounced the theme of "Timeless," I thought of Smith because he illustrates that architecture is always rooted in time, even when it strives to cleave to an honored past or evade the ravages of time on taste and function.

John Parman: Some years ago, you mentioned that you regarded Greek Revival as having untapped creative possibility. Could you elaborate what this has meant in your own work? What have you learned?

Thomas Gordon Smith: I prefer the term "Grecian," used by practitioners in the early 19th century to describe the American approach to incorporating ancient Greek architecture in new buildings and furniture design, based on their enthusiasm for archeological work in Greece that was published in the late 18th century. Books such as TheAntiquitiesofAthens , 1762, by the English architects Stuart & Revett, produced a profound effect on architecture in Britain and the United States, and continue to influence many practitioners, including me. For example, in Chapter III, Plate III, an elevation and section of the Tower of Andronicus in Athens was an inspiration for several early 19th-century civic buildings in the United States. I used it as a starting point for the tower that brings light and ventilation into the living room in the Wilson House in Livermore, California (1972); the tower that houses an office with spectacular views of the surrounding landscape in the Wisconsin House near Spring Green (1998); and in the tower at the highest level of the Cathedral City Civic Center in California (1996).

JP: As a classicist, you're not working in the manner of Quinlan Terry, who seems to be reproducing Palladian forms almost as replicas. How does your idea of classicism differ from his?

TGS: Quinlan Terry's work is very, very tight. Nonetheless, if you look closely, you would never mistake one of his houses for one of Palladio's villas. I am at the other end of the classical spectrum. My work as a classicist has been an effort to integrate a range of ideas about classical architecture, looking at many aspects from over two millennia of examples. There has been a growth of interest in this in recent decades in places like Notre Dame and among members of organizations like the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art.

JP: Nathaniel Kahn's film My Architect notes Louis Kahn's almost archeological interest in ancient buildings. You and I had an exchange after I saw it. I had wondered if this influence on Kahn's work qualified it as classical. You said the work isn't classical because it doesn't follow any canon it's purely, abstractly formal. Kahn is hard to categorize. What's your take on him?

TGS: Kahn is hard to deal with because he is so individual. On the other hand, he's delightfully specific, unlike a number of people who are just playing with this or that. His buildings are so serious; he's not going to deal with silly things.

JP: How did your ideas about classicism versus modernism influence your teaching?

TGS: Typically, I would begin the semester with assignments that required engagement with a pair of contrasting historical approaches, followed by a primary design for the semester of a large-scale building such as a library, museum, or school in which the students could utilize some of the ideas they had developed in warm-up projects. However, I did not make a particular design approach mandatory and encouraged the individual decisions of the students for the main project.

JP: "Timeless" is a word architects like to use. I heard it at SOM, and Christopher Alexander appropriated it polemically as part of his campaign against modernism. Modernism, which you were accused of deserting in graduate school, is now part of history. Is timeless a word you use? Do you see classicism in that light, "the timeless style," or as one possibility among many?

TGS: I prefer to use the word "classical" instead of "timeless." It is broad enough to cover two millennia of approaches to design. The term

classical takes in new paradigms as readily as obscure precedents. My use of the term classicism is based on Vitruvius's advocacy of making buildings that achieve "wholeness" through a simultaneous balance of strength, function, and beauty. A classical building is recognized by this inherent wholeness, not by a selection of ornament, materials, or tectonic elements.

A graduate student in architecture in Berlin contacted me about a presentation he was preparing on the Cathedral City Civic Center. He asked, "What happened to the columns that were in the initial design competition drawings? Was it cost or something else?" In response, I sent him a series of drawings from my sketchbooks about the process of design when it became a commission. It was more crucial to create a large, high paseo, to provide access to the civic functions of the structure with clear entrances to the police and fire departments, than to have a pedimented main entry, and so the columns disappeared! Not essential! Still a classical building! And a modern building!

JP: Some people use "timeless" to mean "enduring," which may be valid, but whenever you design a building, you inevitably place it in that time, in some sense. Do you ever use the term?

TGS: I don't, because "timeless" does not adequately indicate a hierarchy. If I want to read a good book, I look for a "classic," not a "timeless" book. This is my rhetorical preference. As an architect, I have attempted to compete with Borromini and Palladio's best buildings and with the work of many other architects whose buildings I admire. I have aspired to create buildings that balance rule and invention, and that are full of life, with what Vitruvius called "lively mental energy."

JP: When you started out, you were part of a postmodern cohort. I still view Richmond Hill House as one of that movement's most interesting built projects. Graves, Moore, and Stern all struggled to reconcile postmodern impulses with contemporary programs, especially at a larger scale. What was your experience?

TGS: Richmond Hill House is my most widely published building and its owners tell me that many architects make visits. They have maintained it beautifully. It was the last of my postmodern designs. The architectural critic Heinrich Klotz thought it was not postmodern enough! He found it too sedate; he wanted me to add some neon lights!

I thought that Charles Moore's small projects were his most successful postmodernist designs; his eventual larger works lacked cohesion. A good contrast to the Richmond Hill House is my Wisconsin House (bel0w). It is much larger, at about 8,000 square feet, than Richmond Hill House at 1,500 square feet. Wisconsin House has the exuberance of Richmond Hill House, but its design is disciplined by a better understanding of classical principles.

JP: What is your attitude toward postmodernism as a useful term? Does it apply to you?

TGS: Yes, because the postmodernists thought they were very brave and they were! Philip Johnson's partner John Burgee tells a wonderful story about the AT&T Headquarters in Manhattan, how the CEO kept the design totally under wraps until Johnson presented a model. It was greeted with total silence. Then the CEO leaned forward with his elbows on the table and asked, "What do you think of it? I LOVE it!"

I became a postmodernist because I loved using ideas, all together, from Maybeck, Plečnik, and Dientzenhofer, and because Venturi wrote ComplexityandContradictioninArchitectureto give me permission to do so! I was a postmodernist until I learned enough to become a classicist! Part of what I learned was from visits to Le Corbusier's buildings in France. I visited Mies's Villa Tugenhat in Brno, Czech Republic, in 1976 and saw it again, fully restored, in 2014. My work is indelibly influenced by modernist ideas about space and form.

JP: We are, for better or worse, in a postmodern era where it informs the larger discourse. Can you distinguish between postmodernism and classicism?

TGS: One aspect would be the part of postmodernism that's making fun, that we could say, Ha-ha. With classicism, we could get serious about using architectural paradigms.

JP: That's an interesting point. It makes me think of Memphis, which definitely had a spirit of fun, like some of Charles Moore's work, too.

TGS: Charles Moore had a lot of anxiety as well as a spirit of fun and irony. I think that the postmodernists were anxious as to "what can we do?"

JP: When I look at your work, I'm sometimes struck by the sumptuous interiors. Were you ever tempted to shift to hospitality, which has an appetite for sumptuousness?

TGS: I certainly enjoyed designing the freestanding double staircase in the Kalb House in Illinois (1992), based on a beautiful precedent in the Shrewsbury House by Francis Costigan in Madison, Indiana (1846), both definitely sumptuous.

After designing churches inspired by my love of Baroque examples, though, I've reoriented to developing a Romanesque simplicity in new ecclesiastical designs at the request of clients like the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, for a new seminary in Nebraska, and for the Benedictines at Annunciation Abbey at Clear Creek in rural Oklahoma for a new monastery. These major commissions were for clients who were seeking to express in their architectural work a radical return to the roots of Catholic religious practice. Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary (left), completed in 2010, is based on paradigms of Romanesque architecture in Italy. The Benedictine monastery, in construction in phases since 2013, is based on austere French Cistercian models.

Both complexes are built in brick and limestone. The public areas of the interiors of the seminary express a hierarchical sequence comprised of the octagonal Entry, the Refectory, the Library, the AulaMagna , and the Chapel of Saints Peter & Paul through increases in height, spatial complexity, finishes, and decoration. I enjoyed detailing the interiors, on moderate budgets, for buildings that serve as the home for the residents, ranging from several years for seminarians to the remainder of their lifetimes, in the case of the Benedictine monks.

JP: The 19th-century Gesamtkunstwerkideal, which found its way into modernism through the Bauhaus, was surely anticipated by the fusion of arts and crafts in architecture and its settings that long predates it. You painted Roman murals in the rooms of Richmond Hill House, I remember. Is this fusion, if that's the right word for it, a factor in your work? Has it informed the way you've taught?

TGS: Bernard Maybeck's hands-on approach was an early inspiration. I read how he painted the exterior of one of his houses through the device of bucket after bucket of various colors of paint being thrown against the stucco walls until the desired amalgam of colors was achieved! I have not tried that technique, but I was intrigued to experiment with painting Pompeian-style frescoes for Richmond Hill House, Vitruvian House (1990), and Wisconsin House. I have delighted in opportunities to engage sculptors and artists for projects like the Bond Hall School of Architecture and the Cathedral City Civic Center. James Langley was commissioned to paint a depiction of Our Lady of Guadalupe for the seminary in Nebraska that is magnificent. Langley also made beautiful decorative wall paintings for my design for the Classical Galleries in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007). My son, the sculptor Andrew Wilson Smith,

carried out a series of eight heroic-scaled herms for the entablature on the interior octagonal entry in the University Bookstore at California State University, Stanislaus (2008), which depict six California authors and their inspirational predecessors, Homer and Sappho. He also sculpted the historiated capitals and the lintel depicting the 12 apostles on the West Portal of Annunciation Abbey.

This question about the fusion of art and architecture also makes me think of my teachers at Berkeley. Ray Lifchez was my most influential professor there. He insisted that we make models with simple materials, inside and out, to study a project as it was developing. For his assignments, I made model after model, trying to visualize threedimensionally the ideas I was attempting. I had studied painting and sculpture as an undergraduate at Berkeley, but I still had a tremendous amount to learn about how to think three-dimensionally as an architecture student. Later, I found it incredibly hard to motivate my own students to make process-models, so I hold up Ray as an exemplar! And while I'm thinking of exemplars, the librarians at Wurster Hall take the cake for their care in assisting eager students!

JP: When Charles, Prince of Wales, published a polemic against modernism, the editor Peter Buchanan wrote a rejoinder in ArchitecturalReview , arguing that modernism was capable of addressing the issues Charles raised. While finding this persuasive, I also felt sympathy for Charles's critique. Christopher Alexander makes similar points. Of course, Pugin made them against neoclassicism, arguing for neo-Gothic. These aren't really arguments against style, but style ends up being the issue. What's your position? Is it a question of stylistic hegemony, as some of the postmodernists argued?

TGS: The conflict is deeper than style. It is a humanistic issue disguised as an aesthetic one. Architecture is a powerful and public expression of values in society. Some architects neglect the obligation to use their authority to build humanistic architecture, which requires building durable, functional, and beautiful structures. The exterior of a building "speaks" about itself to passersby walking down the street and its interior "conveys" itself to the people using it. The Prince of Wales argues that buildings, as a public art, need to have a much higher quality than they have had, in many cases, especially when he looks at what has been built since World War II. He is trying, and keeps trying, to provide a conscience on this crucial civic topic!

JP: You reviewed several reprinted treatises on classical architecture for DesignBookReview . Where did that lead?

TGS: ClassicalArchitecture:Rule&Invention(1988) was my first attempt at a treatise. The commentary I wrote to accompany a revised translation of Vitruvius, VitruviusonArchitecture(2003) was my second. As chair of the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, I took great pleasure in building up the Rare Book Collection within the School Library, including many 19th-century American pattern books. Because I found such books so useful, I wrote illustrated introductions to new reprints of TheCarpenter'sAssistant by John Hall (1996); TheModernStyleofCabinetWorkExemplified by Thomas King (1995), and TheBuilder'sGuideandPracticeof Architectureby Asher Benjamin (1994). I enjoyed working on these three reprints by Arcanthus Press, Dover Publications, and Da Capo Press, respectively, because these publishers make these works, and many others, widely available.

JP: Has living in the Midwest influenced your work?

TGS: We are here in provincial South Bend, but we have connections and access to all kinds of people and things. I used to brag that I built nothing that wasn't at least 150 miles away; then I designed a series of buildings for Notre Dame the Bond Hall School of Architecture, Carole Sander Hall, and four mausolea for the Cedar Grove Cemetery on campus, so I had to give up that inconsequential distinction of distance! But yes, I have been influenced by the Midwest. Its dire weather requires greater effort to provide durability in construction. Its clients require more sober patience. Its masons are ubiquitous, proud, capable, and enthusiastic to carry out complex and exacting details in brick and stone.

JP: To go back to "timeless," do lineages matter in architecture? Are they unavoidable if you work with someone good who takes an interest in your work? I mean this in both directions, of course.

TGS: Now that I have retired from practice and teaching, it gives me enormous satisfaction to know that the ideas I have shared are being carried out in the work and teaching of many students. My legacy is now in the hands of those I taught in studios and mentored in my architectural office. I am proud of them and appreciate seeing their

work. And I hope my influence will also reside in those who read my books or look at my buildings!

Each of us would like to be a fulcrum between the past and the future in some way, large or small. Vitruvius provided a unique role as a fulcrum by conveying in his TenBooksonArchitectureall that he learned about ancient Greek principles of design from his study of more than 30 Hellenistic treatises that he cites, none of which have survived. His text is the pivot on which our understanding of the thinking of the architects of many ancient temples rests because many of them wrote a treatise after completing a major work.

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I studied Borromini's OpusArchitectonicum , trying to understand how the architect of the jewel-like San Carlo alle Quattro Fontani and the geometric wonder, La Sapienza, could also spend a page describing how he worked out an efficient way for many priests to wash their hands before entering the Refectory at the Oratorio dei Filippini. Yes, lineages matter in both directions and from many places. We are not "timeless" creatures; time is our treasure and our gift, whenever it is endowed with a beautiful image or an enduring word.

The interview, conducted by email, appeared in RoomOneThousand5, 2017. Born on 23 February 1948, Smith died on 23 June 2021. I first met him in 1975. This is from his obituary in Architect , by Madeleine D’Angelo, 29 June 2021.

"For many postmodernists, classicism was mainly of visual interest, but Thomas Gordon Smith was genuinely interested in classicism as 'theory and invention,' pursuing it with eye and hand; accurately taking its measure; and absorbing its treatises, to which he added his own," John J. Parman, a visiting scholar in architecture at UC Berkeley and contributor to a forthcoming collection of Smith's extensive drawings, wrote to Architect "His most interesting work is eclectic, exploring classicism's remarkable use of art, light, and volume in the service especially of contemporary domestic life. But he also drew attention to early 19th-century 'Grecian' architecture in the US that he felt had untapped potential. He admired the postmodernists in the same way that Marx admired the bourgeoisie: freeing themselves of the dead hand of corporate modernism, they cleared the way for late modernism and much else, but for Smith, they confirmed a quite early instinct that architecture occupies something like Walter Benjamin's idea that we sense the presence of the past within a pregnant now-time."

Misconstruing Modernism

In his article, “Ratzinger, Beauty, and the Church,”1 Vincent Twomey cites Roger Scruton’s backhanded compliment to Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp (above), acknowledging its “magnificence” but calling it “an expression of private originality” (in his gloss). Following Scruton, he rules out modernism’s appropriateness for sacred architecture: “by its very nature as modernist, [it is] corrosive of community.” Citing Scruton, he adds that “it cannot produce a modern monumental style that can be shared by others” since it “rejects the notion of common style or form rooted in tradition,” concluding that “without such an agreed style, it is impossible to create the kind of civic space where people can feel at home.”

The attempt by conservative traditionalists here to secure the Trump administration’s blessing of its “agreed style” as the official one for federal buildings a hegemony they deplore about modernism is symptomatic of wider debates about issues like abortion for which, in the eyes of their often-horrified secular critics, traditionalists seek to impose their sectarian views on others who profoundly disagree.

The public debate this engendered revealed the essential hubris of its advocates, running far ahead of public opinion. Efforts to ban abortion entirely after Roe vs. Wade was turned back by a Trump-contorted Supreme Court have similarly encountered substantial blowback. The Midterms, advertised as a Republican triumph, foundered on popular distaste for the party’s overreach.

The modernism Scruton abhorred was always a straw man of his own creation. Modernism’s moments of apparent hegemony generally coincided with a lapse into sclerosis. Corporate modernism in the late

1970s exhibits some of “the charm of the fridge” Twomey mentions, but this led quickly to postmodernism, a concerted effort to break through the impasse that bravely if often superficially looked to the past for inspiration.

My long friendship with Thomas Gordon Smith, begun at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design in the mid-1970s, coincides with this transition. His Richmond Hill House in Richmond, California is one of the high points of postmodernism, but as Rem Koolhaas, visiting Paolo Portoghesi’s PresenceofthePastexhibit at the Venice Biennale, another postmodernist high point, noted at the time Smith alone, of the participating architects, was actually engaging seriously and creatively with classicism.2

In discussing his work in 2017, Smith asserted that he should be seen as a modern architect. His radicalism as a postmodernist was to take classicism seriously as the ground of his own creativity. To that end, he threw himself into understanding classicism reading the treatises, seeing the buildings, and most of all immersing himself, often by clambering around them to work out how his great predecessors achieved specific effects, especially with natural light. (Smith’s oratorio project, carried out as an American Academy of Rome Fellow, is one example of how he applied this research.3) But he also recounted how he visited the great monuments of European modernism, including Ronchamp, and how much he learned from them. He saw that an architect like Louis Kahn, while no classicist, was completely serious, a master in his own way.

Smith lived and died a devout Roman Catholic. I have the program of his funeral, with his marvelous drawings. Much of his work had Church patrons, like the churches of Bernini and Borromini against which he measured it. Yet it was within our here and now that Smith taught and practiced. He wasn’t an ideologue, but more in the lineage of a pluralist like Isaiah Berlin or a poet like the Eliot of the Four Quartets , modern within a tradition that took in and transcended the present, that most of all tried to avoid the aspic of a settled view. His Rural Wisconsin House (below), a later work, revisits Richmond Hill House’s postmodern impulse.

Although these are residential, not religious projects, and Smith’s religious work was consistently classical, I don’t think Smith would agree with Scruton’s contention, echoed by Twomey, that modern architecture lacks a sacred dimension and is inherently private rather than communal.4 His goal was to recover the past as a creative field for architecture, not to exclude modernism as apostasy. The assertion of a

“common style or form” is itself specious, disproven by the example of Pugin, who railed against classicism in favor of the Gothic in terms very similar to the postmodern critique of modernism. Mitchell Schwarzer also argues convincingly that in 19th-century Germany, several styles vied unsuccessfully for prominence.5

The word “modern” has lost its equivalence to “contemporary” for younger scholars, who see it as a historical period, now supplanted. I haven’t made this transition, because I take Smith’s point about modernism that it is inherently expansive, with methods of thinking and working that range past style or aesthetics, mere functionality, or a fetish for “beauty” that imagines certain motifs imbue it. I think it’s misconstrued by conservative traditionalists, who would benefit from Smith’s more catholic attitude.

Notes

1. D. Vincent Twomey, S.V.D., "Ratzinger, Beauty, and the Church," Sacred Architecture43, 2023, pp. 20–23

2. Richard John, ThomasGordonSmithandtheRebirthofClassical Architecture , Andreas Papadakis, 2001.

3. I wrote an introduction to an archive of Smith’s drawings that Marika Wilson Smith has put together, envisioning a catalogue raisonné.

4. My sister, Alice Parman, wrote to me that when she visited Ronchamp in 1963, “it was pouring and a sea of mud, but still beautiful. Full of pilgrims.”

5. Mitchell Schwarzer, GermanArchitecturalTheoryandtheSearchfor ModernIdentity , Cambridge, 1995.

Posted on Mediumon 14 May 2023.

Another Line of Practice

"Knowledge itself is a massive heavy object, with enormous foundations and a reliance on gravity. Religions, monarchies, systems of law, corporations these historical patrons of architecture have provided us with the objects upon which minor architects can write their objections."

Jill Stoner

A review of Jill Stoner’s TowardaMinorArchitecture , MIT, 2012.

Among the themes of this short, provocatively discursive book is that the taint of capital runs through and distorts architecture, giving rise to celebrity practitioners and to signature buildings that, in Stoner's view, are indecipherable. She traces back to Louis Kahn another line of practice in which architects self-effacingly served their communities, taking for granted the beneficent nature of their civic institutions. She contrasts this with Foucault, for whom these same institutions were "mechanisms of exclusion, segregation and control" that gave rise to a dissenting minority.

Stoner's minor architecture riffs on the minor literature of Deleuze and Guattari: "that which a minority constructs within a major language," as they put it. "They locate 'minor' and 'minority' as conditions that exist at the bottom of power structures, yet hold an extraordinary potential for power," she adds. This is the territory of Occupy, Marx, and Jesus, but Stoner cites Kafka: he saw it as the closed world of institutions in Foucault's sense, in which the buildings double back on themselves, and the powerful post guards at every gateway.

Part of the attraction of the book is its constant reference to novels and short stories like Cheever's "The Swimmer" that view a conventional "major" landscape, like the backyards of suburban enclaves north of New York City, from the "minor" standpoint of a man who is sinking, even drowning, in their midst.

How we relate to nature and how we integrate it is one of Stoner's leitmotifs. In "The Swimmer," the protagonist attempts to traverse his neighbors' swimming pools, likening them to a creek running through their town. Reality proves otherwise. Noting how peregrine falcons in Manhattan perch on the ledges of older skyscrapers, Stoner says that nature "is both celebrated and excluded" in today's green buildings. Accommodating the falcons that might perch on them wins no LEED points for their owners.

Is this a guide to becoming a minor architect? Occasionally, the book plays with that possibility by suggesting that what's being discussed is

applicable to the mainstream. The real question is why anyone would want to become a minor architect. Burnham's "make no little plans" comes to mind, but then big plans so often disregard the vitality of communities along with the intimacy and immediacy of neighborhoods. If Kafka described the landscapes to which a bent and evil bureaucracy gave rise, Jane Jacobs took on the brave new world envisioned by planners like Edmund Bacon and Robert Moses not quite the landscape of terror and incarceration Stoner invokes, quoting Ballard and Timerman, but sufficiently dystopian to warrant resisting and overcoming.

This is the minor architect's creative space. Stoner illustrates it with Corviale, a public housing ground-scraper that opened outside Rome in 1982, the year when Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was razed. The fifth level of this 8,000-person complex was left open, a gesture toward Le Corbusier and the Marseilles Block roof. Squatters took it over almost immediately. Today, when the large, fixed apartments intended for families are sparsely occupied by the aged, the fifth level retains its vitality and potential for reinvention.

This is what Stoner is getting at when she says, early in the book:

The overwhelming weight of an architectural object is its ability to resist change. Frozen in that illusion of being complete and remaining complete, buildings produce an ironic and subliminal longing for their different futures.

An architect of my acquaintance put it more succinctly. "After 30 years, we want them to go away. Yet we persist in building for 100 years." So, while commercial office buildings can accommodate a changing workforce, they aren't designed to be taken down after a generation or two of use, their pieces and parts recycled and reused. Buildings provide a framework for infill, but an imperfect one. We long for a framework that's good for millennia or, if not, is designed as infill too, with the city around it providing the long-lived frame.

Most of the time, the minor architecture Stoner posits is done piecemeal, appropriating the cityscape for new, often momentary purposes. Vacant buildings are invitations to squat. Unused land invites the favela . In her own work, nothing ever looks finished.

Works assumed to be are cast back into a state of becoming. Authorship is put into reverse, and the design process becomes editorial, reflecting a composite of a blurred identities. It is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. In architecture as in literature, this is language purified of style, language stripped bare.

That it's not all chaos is implied by that word "editorial." It suggests an editor, but that's not how cities work. A relevant theorist here is Hayek, who argued that our social institutions are products of evolution, not design. If cities provide a frame for a mostly anonymous process of building and rebuilding, it's because they are rooted in tradition. When an urban economy collapses, in whole or in part, the minority artists, artisans, filmmakers, and writers among them provide the first signs of revival. Tradition hands them back a frame that they can appropriate and transform.

Stoner gives examples of urban towers, vacant or abandoned, that have undergone this process. There's no real limit to the size of the frame, she implies, but she has a constant revival through myriad minor acts in mind. The fast-growing megacities of China and the Gulf depart massively from the traditions that make this possible. That hubris may leave them, like the dinosaurs, short of the deeper resilience that the future is likely to demand of us.

Written for ARCADE30.4, Fall 2012.

The Architecture Critic as Activist

When Allan Temko (above left) started writing for the SanFrancisco Chroniclein the early 1960s, he didn’t see himself as a regional critic. The city was a fast-growing metropolis, the Golden State’s financial capital, but Temko hardly limited his writings to the region. He wrote a book on Eero Saarinen and countless articles for ArchitecturalForum (as its West Coast editor), Horizon , and other magazines. Still, Temko was best known as an activist who unhesitatingly took on anything that threatened the Bay Area’s soul the first designs for the San Mateo Bridge, for example, and the horrendous plan to criss-cross San Francisco with freeways. Without his voice, the Bay Area would be markedly different, and decidedly less beautiful, today. Despite his reputation for making enemies, he was admired, even by his targets, for his ability to place design in a cultural context he so clearly loved.

John Parman: How did you become a critic?

Allan Temko: When I left Columbia University in 1947, my professors helped me get an American Lectureship at the Sorbonne. I was in France, teaching American literature, for seven years. Most of this time, I looked at Gothic churches, which to me had everything rational structure and daring new forms to suit new conditions. But I also saw modern architecture, like Le Corbusier’s. Because there was no good book in English on Notre Dame, I wrote one. Lewis Mumford edited it. When I returned to the US, he suggested I do what he was doing at

TheNewYorkerfor a newspaper. I knew the executive editor of the Chronicle , Scott Newhall, so I went there.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, people talked about painters, sculptors, and politics. Now they talk about buildings, spaces, and important environmental problems. The need for good criticism has never been greater, but if you look around, it seems mighty sparse. There are some outstanding critics, like Blair Kamin of the ChicagoTribune , but not many today understand activist criticism the need to get out there and fight with fang and claw. With a big metropolitan paper, you can accomplish a good deal. Looking back, we were much better at stopping bad things than creating good things, but we were far ahead of other metropolitan areas, especially when you consider our resources. One big difference between being the critic of the Chronicleand being one for a great newspaper like TheNewYorkTimesis that New York is really unmanageable. Here, it was possible to have an effect to stop the freeways and keep Fort Mason and the Presidio from being ruined.

JP: How were you edited at the Chronicle?

AT: Newhall read my things. So did the city guys, the assistant managing editors, and if they couldn’t understand something, I’d rewrite it. They were good stand-ins for the public. Newhall encouraged me to be controversial and shielded me from the owners. When the architect of Pier 39, Sandy Walker, sued me for $2 million, the Chronicledefended me. Actually, Bill German, then the executive editor, told me that if I lost, the paper would pay half! The suit was thrown out, but Walker appealed. When I learned that the case was back in court, I asked Chronicleexecutive Phelps Dewey why I hadn’t been told. "We want to win this thing," he replied. When you’re trying to stop something, you have to go straight for the jugular. Most critics today don’t have that instinct but neither do their papers. I’m vain enough to think that I could have stopped the whole Bay Bridge fiasco if I hadn’t been ill.

JP: What influenced you as a critic?

AT: My years in France led me to see art and architecture as expressions of great civilizations. I always cared about heightening the public’s sensibility. I wrote for the educated public, but I wanted everyone else to be able to understand my articles and enjoy them. I saw my role as achieving better design for the whole region. I might have

been the only architecture critic in this period who looked at cities at a larger scale even as large as, say, the Bay Area’s seashore, which became a national park. Today, you can walk on public land along the ocean for 50 miles north and south of San Francisco. That wouldn’t have happened without people fighting for it, and stopping things like the nuclear reactor that PG&E wanted to put on Bodega Head. I played a big part in these initiatives, writing articles and then getting the Chroniclebehind them. They were great victories. But I took on causes that ran the gamut protecting Frank Lloyd Wright’s store on Maiden Lane from retrofitting, sparing Market Street the mediocrity of the early design for San Francisco Center, taking Silicon Valley seriously, helping make the Presidio a national park. That’s an appropriate range for a critic.

JP: Did you make enemies?

AT: Sometimes I was a bit harsh. People say I was brave, but that wasn’t the point. It sold newspapers. It still would today but, despite media’s resources, there’s still not enough serious coverage of architecture and planning. One big difference is that when I was writing, I was often speaking for the paper as an institution. I would write a critical piece and then I would write an unsigned editorial for the Chroniclethat supported my stance. Without that endorsement, there’s no way I could have accomplished what I did.

JP: What do you think of today's critics?

AT: Very few people are writing things that you’d remember the next day. Part of our purpose, after all, is to be entertaining. Architecture is like tennis there’s a small group playing at Wimbledon, and the rest are playing on the neighborhood courts. Which is not to say that the small courts don’t have big players. When I started as a critic, San Francisco was a magnet for good architects. Richard Rogers was among them he appeared on my doorstep one summer, saying, "Lewis Mumford sent me" and I got Chuck Bassett to sign him on at SOM. That influx of talent gave us Bassett in my generation and Stanley Saitowitz in the next, architects whose work is original and unique but which also reflects what they found here.

A contribution to "On Criticism," organized by Cathy Lang Ho, founding editor of Architect'sNewspaper , published there on 16 November 2005.

Sally B. Woodbridge: An Appreciation

In the era of Google Maps and Wikipedia, that print was once how architecture news and criticism circulated has mostly been forgotten. The death in late November 2019 of architectural historian and journalist Sally Byrne Woodbridge (above left, with Charles Moore) went unnoticed even in the SanFranciscoChronicle . As a longtime correspondent of ProgressiveArchitecture , Woodbridge kept the Bay Area's architects visible nationally, exposing its readers to a broader slice of work than usually made New York City-centric editors’ maps. As the main curator–compiler of a series of guides to its architecture, she explained the region to itself. Her books on Bernard Maybeck, John Galen Howard, and Bay Area houses gave depth to that broad and discerning overview.

Sally Byrne was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1930 and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. She studied art history at Duke, graduating in 1951, then went to the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Scholar. While in Paris, she met John Marshall Woodbridge, returning with him to Princeton and working at the art library while he finished graduate school. Sally and John’s circle at Princeton included Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, and William Turnbull who went on to found MLTW, of Sea Ranch fame and Hugh Hardy and Norval White. They were lifelong friends of Pamela and James Morton. As Dean of St. John the Divine Cathedral, James Morton restarted its construction and initiated its art program, among many other achievements.

Sally and John married in 1954. John finished at Princeton in 1956. Moving to San Francisco, John worked for the architect John Funk.

They became friends with his colleague Albert Lanier and his wife, the artist Ruth Asawa, who introduced Sally to the photographer Imogen Cunningham. Moving to Berkeley, they raised a family in the 1912 house that John Galen Howard, UC Berkeley’s first campus architect, designed for himself. John worked as an architect and planner for SOM in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and Sally began her career as a journalist, critic, and historian.

Although they divorced, Sally and John remained good friends and writing partners. In 1985, John married the poet Carolyn Kizer, winner of a Pulitzer Prize. Sally never remarried, living on Vine Street in North Berkeley with her daughter Pamela Woodbridge, her son-in-law, the cinematographer Elliott Davis, and their children as neighbors.

The final edition of their guide, SanFranciscoArchitecture , designed by Chuck Byrne, appeared in 2005. BayAreaHouses , which Sally edited and coauthored, came out in 1976. Monographs on Bernard Maybeck (1992) and John Galen Howard (2002), two giants of early 20th-century architecture in the Bay Area, followed. She also participated in the Historical American Buildings Survey in California and organized exhibits on architecture.

Writing for ProgressiveArchitecture , Sally covered the region’s architecture with critical and historical awareness. Coming of age in Paris and Princeton, hers was a cosmopolitan, even existentialist sensibility that saw how the best work here reflected the wider world, including the vernacular modernism of Finland and Japan work attuned to such attributes of place as terrain, climate, light, view, fabric, and pattern. Modernism here varied across a wide spectrum, as Pierluigi Serraino noted in NorCalMod . Lewis Mumford’s “region apart” was never really true, nor was the idea of “critical regionalism” quite accurate. Some architects here agreed, but others were wary of a label that implied provinciality.

She dealt with the region by considering its history Maybeck and Howard were products of the Beaux-Arts system, but both designed buildings here that looked back to Arts & Crafts and picked up on the Bay Area's artisan tradition. She also stayed open to everything that arose here. The countermovement around Archetype , with work by Andrew Batey, Mark Mack, Steven Holl, and Jim Jennings, and the postmodern, anticipatory classicism of Thomas Gordon Smith, rebelled against a too-narrow view of the region's architecture. A close friend of Charles Moore, Sally saw him embrace developments like Pop Art, Bobbie Stauffacher’s super-graphics, and Larry Halprin's art–environmentalism. As she wrote, the region was in constant ferment, viewed from within.

Sally Woodbridge (below, in front of her Vine Street house) also leaves her son Lawrence and four grandchildren. Her daughter Diana, who worked with the San Francisco architect Jeremy Kotas, died in 2002. John Woodbridge died in 2014.

Written for Architect'sNewspaper , 28 April 2020. Woodbridge lived around the corner from me for decades. Her daughter Pamela lives in the next block.

Reading Between the Alines

The “match” in Eva Hagberg’sWhenEeroMetHisMatch , is Aline Louchheim Saarinen.1 One focus of this important book is Louchheim’s personal and professional relationship with Eero Saarinen. Hagberg credits her with making her husband world famous by adroitly handling his relationships with magazine and newspaper editors, managing profiles of him and publicity around such projects as his TWA Terminal for maximum effect. Drawing on archives and other evidence, Hagberg convincingly makes her case.

In between the chapters recounting her subject and this history, Hagberg tells a second story of her own career as an architecture critic, journalist, and publicist as it unfolded amid graduate studies, episodic illness, marriage, divorce, and other things mentioned and unmentioned. Among the latter was a memorable episode in which Hagberg, stonewalled by administrators at UC Berkeley while she was in a lawsuit prompted by a predatory advisor, wrote a front-page article2 for the NYT“Style” section on how to dress when one testifies in court. This master-class demonstration of the power a publicist like her can wield led them to return her calls.

Aline Louchheim, her byline at the NYT , is accurately portrayed by Hagberg as a product of a moment when the role of public relations in architecture wasn’t taken for granted, even by practitioners. The AIA forbade advertising, and despite architect self-publicists like Le Corbusier, Philip Johnson, and Charles Luckman it was still assumed that the buildings did the talking. Yet architecture critics in this period, like Allan Temko, were involved with firms they favored, like SOM, in ways that cross what we think of now as ethical lines. As the spokesperson for “The Saarinen Office,” Louchheim used her inside

knowledge of the national press and architecture magazines to shape and influence how Saarinen was seen, and ensure that his projects were covered as major events.

Louchheim defined a role for herself in relation to Saarinen that both deferred to him and established her power as his gatekeeper and, for those she favored, a crucial facilitator for a man who was subsumed by his work. She quoted him as seeing journalists stuck in “rabbit time” while architects had to think like elephants. Hagberg’s account reflects voluminous correspondence, touching on the arc of their marriage the second for both of them as well as the nuances of how they dealt with the press. They weren’t always on the same page; seven years in, Louchheim appeared to be done with her project. Saarinen was world famous, and she wanted to get back to her own work. And then, bang! Saarinen died in two weeks of brain cancer at the age of 51.

Hagberg takes us through these events and into Louchheim’s role as Saarinen’s widow, keeping his office alive and writing a valedictory overview of his accomplishments a book she tried to duck when asked before his death to write what would have been a mid-career summation. That she did this in the wake of her husband’s sudden death is quite remarkable, but Louchheim was a pro who clearly had no use for magical thinking.

But back to the other story. The hinge is Hagberg’s scene-setting account of women in architecture, which both looks back to the postwar decades when Louchheim was active and forward to the decade roughly when Hagberg was living in New York City and working as a critic, writer, and yes, as a publicist, eyes open. That story continues, describing her West Coast clients, the hunger for fame, and what motivates it a brilliant chapter that captures how the sacred and the profane figure, how it’s money and ego and yet more than that. Indirectly, she makes the point that you have to admire your clients and their work genuinely to be effective in some sense to love them, so when they die on you, you’re affected. And if admiration wears off, you’re affected.

This circles back to Aline Louchheim, who fell in love with Eero Saarinen, and he with her. Hagberg set out her own PR plan for two clients, a father and his son, that parallels what Louchheim did for Saarinen. Both plans succeeded. How in retrospect do we sort out the nature of their respective contributions? Architecture, that elephantine creation, still has an aura of permanence, while publicity is as rabbity as it gets.

Yet this is a false dichotomy. Reading Louchheim’s summary to the Deere CEO of a building’s four publicity-worthy events, nothing has changed. Hers is the classic take. Meanwhile, our cities are elephant graveyards, along with their architects’ reputations. That Louchheim’s take on Saarinen is still the received narrative puts her on a par with, say, Nathaniel Kahn’s heartfelt narrative of his father. Compare the fate of Gordon Bunshaft, so admired by Saarinen, who let his buildings speak for themselves and was then mauled posthumously3 by Martin Filler not just the architecture, but the paintings, the dinner parties, the marriage. It matters. The work Louchheim did put Saarinen across as a man, a philosopher among architects, as Hagberg notes. We can guess that Bunshaft struck Saarinen similarly, a serious and thoughtful architect, but no one got the word out.4 We’re left with Michael Sorkin’s funny anecdotes and the bitterness of people who collided with him at Skids. That Hagberg’s PR firm did so well when she ran it speaks to her abilities in business, too. Like Louchheim, she took quite naturally to being “the office,” but she wonders if this was a good thing. The late Art Gensler, who established his firm’s in-house public relations group at

the same time as its finance group, got around the advertising ban by sponsoring the local public TV channel, KQED, and hired an editor, Barbara McCarthy, from ProgressiveArchitectureto manage how the firm presented itself. Gensler grasped that architecture is whatever clients think it is, so he pushed that envelope and worked hard to make the firm visible. He knew that buildings don’t speak, people and firms do and the media is their megaphone.

Publicists shape that discourse. The best ones like Louchheim and Hagberg have architecture in their blood. They know intuitively who’s for real, what work is worthy, and how to bring it to public attention. They’re also intellectuals who can hold their own with a client, arguing it out and getting to a narrative that goes well beyond what the client alone was thinking. No serious architect, or her firm, should be without one.

Notes

1. Aline is pronounced “Aleen,” but I couldn’t resist the visual pun.

2. Eva Hagberg Fisher: “How I Learned to Look Believable,” NewYork Times , 3 January 2018.

3. Martin Filler, “Modernism, Inc.,” TheNewYorkReview , 23 April 2020.

4. In his 1962 book on Saarinen, Allan Temko wrote that Bunshaft was “one of the few contemporaries whose architecture he valued and with whom he had long collaborated as a penetrating critic-consultant for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Air Academy.” He described their joint involvement with Lincoln Center: “together, they produced a vigorously boned concrete structure in which there is not the slightest evidence of a clash of wills.” (Temko, EeroSaarinen , George Braziller, 1962, p. 118)

This review of Eva Hagberg, WhenEeroMetHisMatch , Princeton, 2022 appeared as a journal post in ARCADE , 12 September 2022.

The Pursuit of the Ordinary

Although Joe Esherick (above left, with George Homsey) worked with Gardner Dailey before the war, his office Esherick, Homsey, Dodge and Davis (later, EHDD) is in many ways an heir to the legacy of William Wurster, perhaps the prime mover of the school of ordinariness to which the office belongs.

The progression of the office's work has been evolutionary, with minimal polemics. We published no magazine, put forward no manifestos, in general avoiding any effort to inaugurate the millennium. Nor did we build anything that went beyond what we could reasonably do the work is incremental, and we have sometimes returned to ideas that were momentarily abandoned, since in many cases you don't really see what's good about an idea until you give it up.

The office is known for its willingness to teach (almost a necessity nowadays, although there is much to be learned from students with their good backgrounds in energy and computers). Part of its "glue" is the commonality of values. This is partly due to the long ties of the partners, spanning over 20 or 30 years. George Homsey and Peter Dodge joined the firm in the early 1950s; Charles Davis in the early 1960s. It is also because of the lengthy collaboration of the main staff, most of whom have been with the office for at least five years, and because the office stands for a particular approach to architecture, a certain attitude, and is known to take this position. It therefore attracts people who find this position of interest, sharing at least the outlines of the same value system, and being willing to contribute to its evolution in response to the pressures of a changing world. When we reflect on the work of the firm, it seems to have moved through three stages. Describing these stages, and the work that attaches to them, may be a

good way to describe the office. After we do this, we will turn more specifically to ordinariness, and what it meant to us.

The work

In the early 1950s, we began getting clients with very specific, highly pictorial images of what they wanted images almost too specific to be really appropriate. This was the same period when, like a lot of people, we believed that some form of prefabrication was in the cards. We were working with very simple volumes the same volumes our clients were picturing and experimenting with modularity in an effort to prepare ourselves for industrialization. This was something like the Israeli space-packing ideas very complex spatial arrangements packed into a box, in the Corbu tradition. We were interested in a very plastic way of handling the space in a manner which was rectilinear, but at the same time not rectilinear at all. The light in these houses moves around with you as you move around within them, producing elusive, sculptural interior spaces. The Campbell House in Sacramento, the Det Brown House in Stockton, the Wieser House, the Esherick–Wood House (designed with Becky Wood Watkin) in Kentfield, and the Metcalf House in Lake Tahoe are examples of the genre.

There was also a series of houses in this phase in which within the context of the space-packing exercise we were interested in achieving an airiness and height of almost Victorian proportions. These houses were frankly influenced by the Victorians that dominate some of San Francisco's neighborhoods, and which are also particularly good solutions to the space-packing problem. Examples of this include the Goldman House, the Burt Summers, the Lyon (a somewhat garbled house), and, in certain respects, even Wurster Hall at the University of California, Berkeley especially looking west in the courtyard where you can see some of these formal characteristics and proportions.

Finally, and this brings us to the later 1950s we tried to blend these two sets of ideas in a persistent effort to get a strong modular character into the building, establishing an order by establishing a module. The Kibbey House in Sacramento is an example.

Soon thereafter, we shifted metaphorically into reverse. The McIntyre House was a result of this a house whose different elements were first identified and then allowed to stand on their own. The result is idiosyncratic, and achieving it took a particular sort of client. The McIntyre House was important in that it broke a set of rules to which we had faithfully adhered for nearly 15 years. It led to the Cary House (below), a much more "ordinary" building as we have come to use the

term. Cary is the result of a more deliberate effort to break down the sense of order by purposefully avoiding taking the regularity and consistency of the building and using these qualities to put people at ease. Instead, the building exposes people to the passing of the day, using light rather than form as the main medium of the design, and refusing to allow form to predominate. It is the beginning of a series of buildings which get away from form as something to see.

Buildings like the Cary House are intentionally anti-material and anti-focal. This quality comes through most clearly in the houses Cary, Romano, the Sea Ranch Houses, and Culebra Terrace.

The Cannery is probably the best example of these ideas on a larger scale. Charles Davis's Monterey Bay Aquarium is its lineal successor a building that also owes something to our most ordinary building, the Long Coastal Marine Laboratory, which no one wanted to do. This was a remarkably inexpensive complex of barn-like buildings on a very sensitive coastal site north of Santa Cruz. The problem was to accommodate the needs of a marine research aquarium and laboratory without "wantonly disregarding" the coastline. People tend to deprecate the controls California has clamped on its coast, and of course there have been problems with the process, both in terms of regulatory overkill and occasional lapses of responsibility. But when you look at the often-suburbanized coastline north of San Francisco, you see how screwed up things can get when development proceeds thoughtlessly. Readers are referred to Moore/Lyndon/Allen's Placeof Housesfor some horrible examples of this phenomenon.

Like the Demonstration Houses at the Sea Ranch, the Coastal Marine Laboratory paid particular attention to siting and took a straightforward approach to the design of the buildings, which are really just big sheds, similar to hundreds of other sheds you find up and down the coast. The results are simple and unobtrusive, and provide the right kind of space (big and flexible) for a laboratory with a variety of research programs and needs.

Monterey Bay Aquarium (above) was designed for a far more sensitive and sophisticated site. The building sits out over Monterey Bay and also occupies street frontage on Cannery Row, where no new development had been permitted for something like 15 years. The building is appropriately derived from the existing warehouse and canning factory buildings in the area, refining key elements of the old cannery on the site and adjusting itself with minimal impact on the bay. The deliberate ordinariness of the design lends itself to the aquarium's need for flexibility, so that this is one of the few aquariums in the world capable of accommodating major changes in its largest exhibits. Perhaps it was the client's image of the aquarium being genuinely a place to learn about the ecology of Monterey Bay, and not a place for mass entertainment, that made it possible for us to break so many of the rules of this kind of building, allowing it to become what it needs to be to be useful to the aquarium and its visitors.

The Cannery, on the other hand, was an exercise in infill within the scooped-out shell of an existing building. The problem was to create something which suited that context and also worked programmatically. This second requirement was especially challenging, there being very few prototypes for a multi-story retail/entertainment

complex as compact as the Cannery, which differs substantially from Ghirardelli Square (which slightly predates it). Ghirardelli is large enough that you can stand back and see the upper levels. In the Cannery, the problem was to lure people upstairs, and we did this by using the circulation system as a dominant element in the design, trying to turn the building itself into a sign that invites people to explore.

George Homsey's seven Bay Area Rapid Transit stations have a similar characteristic, in that their stairs, elevators, and escalators and other key elements, like ticketing play a major role in the design, the buildings expressing themselves primarily through them. This approach was necessary given the degree to which the building's major characteristics were fixed by track locations and other factors. It was also thoroughly justified by the nature of the buildings, which you move through quickly on your way somewhere else. What you want to experience in these buildings are the key things that get you where you want to go. Everything else is dispensable, and we therefore dispensed with them.

The idea of ordinariness

These are not hero buildings. Ordinary buildings are commonsense buildings, in the tradition of Steilberg and Wurster, rooted in "first principles." They use conventional materials and methods as their palette to achieve results which, at their most successful, are often unconventional, responding to the particularities of site and client, as well as to the artistic impulses alive in the architect at that moment.

It is also a question of motive. Ordinary buildings are in a certain way unforced, because the designer is not out for an effect, but to do something which suits his and his client's purposes. Frank Gehry's famous house would probably qualify as an ordinary building by this definition, since it clearly grows out of a set of purposes, not the least of which is an economy of means and the desire for a degree of spatial plenitude. From this perspective, it makes sense in a way that its subsequent replications may not.

Ordinary buildings grow out of an intelligent, regional approach, usually in the face of all sorts of forces set against regionalism: worldwide industries, the homogenization of materials, the standardization of approaches, and magazines preoccupied with selling a product. Architects are bombarded with all of this, and if they take it seriously, it makes regionalism and the achievement of ordinary buildings very difficult.

There is a strong connection between ordinariness and regionalism too strong, perhaps, to allow us to think of an architecture of ordinariness somehow disconnected from its particular region. (Gehry's house, for example, is regional an example of regionalism of the Los Angeles variety.) It is like cooking and the growth of a regional cuisine. Particularly for outsiders, a region's ordinary fare expresses in its nuances the region's uniqueness. This regionalism is unconscious and by no means parochial in attitude. In fact, a measure of a region's strength and inherent sense of identity is its ability to assimilate imports a new foodstuff, a foreign cuisine, or a cook who reinterprets the old standbys, causing temporary havoc, but in the end expanding and enlivening the regional palate.

Another feature of ordinary buildings is that they don't ask you to focus on them. Buildings which do which capture your attention have their place (the Lincoln Memorial is an example), but too many focal points in close proximity can cause defensive myopia: things go conveniently grey. Inappropriately self-important buildings, schmaltzed up in inverse proportion to their actual importance, give rise to a kind of environmental discounting, like the value-juggling which accompanies rampant inflation. Our everyday lives are mostly spent in very ordinary environments. Shops are only rarely extraordinary, for example, yet we do very well with their ordinariness. The pursuit of ordinariness in architecture means a deliberate choice to make these everyday settings the object of one's attention not to transform them into a motif or some kind of new monument, but make them work better.

The notion of an ordinary building being anti-focal or anti-material means that the building qua building is not really the point. The building is part of something larger and quite seamless, so that what one wants to preserve is the logic of its context, wherein the building itself plays a supporting role.

Ordinary buildings express themselves in an ordinary way, drawing on things which are commonplace and therefore widely understood. In this sense, they emerge from and belong to a "commonality." Ordinary buildings will be right no matter where you live. You see this, for example, in George Homsey's Garfield School a project designed for the site of a reasonably venerable elementary school, scrapped for reasons of seismic safety. Homsey took the elements of the old school and restated them in a way which expressed some new ideas about the relationship between the schoolyard and the neighborhood; about light, air, and views; about the cadence of the surrounding houses as they step down Telegraph Hill; and even the memories we might carry

about a school called Garfield, whether in San Francisco or some other American city. Some people mistakenly believe that Garfield School is a renovation, not a new building. That stems from their sense of the building being rooted in its particular context in a way that most modern buildings are not. Part of this context is intangible: the architect's own experience of elementary schools, while growing up in San Francisco. This is woven into the building in a very natural way infused, you might say. One feels it in the large white windows and the appropriately emblematic use of a rusticated arch around the school's administrative portal.

"Fit" is an important element of the pursuit of ordinariness, and Garfield School demonstrates that fit also has its metaphysical side. The building refers to archetypes alive in the unconscious of the architect which he, as a native San Franciscan, shares with others. It's an exercise in drawing from a common wellspring of experience, and not from more arcane sources. To put this another way, it is not necessary to be an architectural historian to understand the imagery to which Garfield School refers. We can see why the architect has made the references he made they are appropriate to the building and its purposes, and help root it firmly in the neighborhood, the school system, and the city.

It is therefore not surprising to find that architects of ordinary buildings are also concerned with landscape, with the connection between the building and landscape. Consider George Howe's work: you see there a wonderful attachment to the setting, to landscape in the broadest sense. It was not his intention to intervene in the existing landscape, but to reveal it for what it is. It never occurred to him to change it, but to fit within it in the most subtle and benign way possible, letting it flow into and through the building, rather than regarding the building as "the place where the landscape stops."

In his ElementsofDrawing , Ruskin makes the point that the lines one puts on a piece of paper have no correspondence with the lines one sees in nature. For this reason, the draftsman has to resort to other, more authentic ways of rendering them.

To continue simply to draw lines is to admit that you fail to see, or that you see but can't render what you see accurately. In similar fashion, the ordinary building and ordinary landscape are provoked by a desire to be faithful to your observations.

Written with Joseph Esherick for Space&Society , June 1983, pp. 50–61.

Preface to DinnerswithChuck

“I want to make sure that the idea of successful teaming and fighting like hell to do what was proper for the client comes through, rather than the common architects’ view that design ideology is the most important thing. One thing that was so difficult for the critics of EHDD was our lack of stylistic consistency. That was almost purposeful in that it was held so strongly by the four of us. The architecture came out of solving the issues rather than a solution that was imposed on the problem and then the client had to fit within it.” Chuck Davis

This account of Chuck Davis's work and life joins two others that, through the eyes of three of its founding partners, document the evolution of the San Francisco firm that AIA Gold Medalist Joseph Esherick founded in 1946. Davis was the youngest of the four partners who created Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis (EHDD) on 3 January 1972. Joe had spent 1971 in Portugal working on a resort project whose developer stiffed the firm not an auspicious start. Reorganized as a team practice, the firm grew in reputation and in the scale of its work. Chuck, as the lead architect of Monterey Bay Aquarium starting in 1978, did much to make that happen.

The lineage of EHDD, one of the Bay Area's teaching offices, draws on architects as diverse as Bernard Maybeck, William Wurster, Gardner Dailey, and Louis Kahn and equally on landscape architects like Thomas Church, Don Emmons, and Lawrence Halprin, and structural engineers like Constantine Chekene, John Rutherford, Bill Holmes, and Hal Davis, Chuck’s brother. Chuck Davis is a pivotal figure for the next generation of architects in this same lineage. His near-contemporary, the late William Turnbull, could be seen similarly.

In his admonition above, Davis notes his firm’s commitment to design solutions that arise from the issues the architects confront. Part of that is the place itself how it influences what’s added, how the architects work with others, landscape architects in particular, to let inside and outside flow to support the unfolding of life therein. In the foreword to a monograph on their eponymous firm, Laura Hartman’s partner Richard Fernau outlines an approach to architecture that centers on sparking a dialogue with and about place. Like a shaman, the architect mediates between the client and the physical setting, seeking to give place a voice, a tangible influence. When he met with his clients to design their houses, Joseph Esherick famously brought a roll of blank paper and a pencil. Fernau camps at the site with his clients.

This is what Zen calls the beginner's mind, attending to what's right there.

This may help to explain why the Bay Area has always been an outlier, closer to the Arts & Crafts movement that’s one of modern architecture’s forebears. Early modernism drew on the oftenanonymous mills, factories, railroad trestles, and bridges that married engineering and construction knowledge to the artistic, artisanal, and vernacular traditions that the Arts & Crafts drew on. Late modernism, absorbing systems thinking and algorithms, recast architects as the generators of formal solutions all those small models of towers for distant cities and as mass-customizers. But Davis comes from a lineage that believes that the client, the site, and its environs will tell you what’s required. There’s no formula, but there are ways to build that come along with a place. His best-known work faced daunting technical challenges that were very much part of what the situation demanded. That he addressed them while preserving the spirit of the place is his architectural achievement, his genius.

Esherick and his partners favored teamwork over the Great Man Theory of architecture. It isn’t leaderless, but collaboration is there from the start. Davis sees it as an open-ended process, recognizing that people gain mastery and self-confidence when they're entrusted to do the work. It’s clear that he’s a mentor’s mentor, one of those great teachers that know that you only gain as much as you give. And he got this from his mother!

The lineage has an innate modesty that acknowledges nature as a constant and defining presence. Others may think they’ve put nature in its place, but writing this in the midst of a pandemic, when buildings are “shelters in place” and nature is a saving grace, the balance that Chuck Davis struck in his work and life seems absolutely right.

Written for Helen Degenhardt, Karen Fiene, Laura Hartman, and John Parman, ed's., DinnerswithChuck:CharlesMedleyDavis,Architect , 2022.

The Rogue Element

Richard Fernau

As I read a New York City architect's review of Improvisationsonthe Land , the famous NewYorkercover, "View of the World from 9th Avenue," came to mind. I pictured the map's solipsistic, Manhattancentered geography as the architect breezily dismissed Richard Fernau's book and the built work it discusses. There's a long history of East Coast critics getting the West Coast wrong, trusting an internal map that's lamentably at odds with reality. The Los Angeles-based writer Alissa Walker uses the hashtag #lahaters to call out such distortions. Except for its cuisine, which East Coast critics generally praise, the Bay Area has it even worse than LA.

The term "regional," first invoked by Lewis Mumford and then reinforced (as "critical regionalism") by Kenneth Frampton and by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, attaches to Bay Area architecture. Richard Fernau rejects the label, pointing to Eudora Welty's contention that "regional" is an outsider's term. Fernau and Laura Hartman's eponymous firm is part of a lineage that gathers up its senses of the place, values openness and flow, and is wary of the overly predetermined. Living here on the Pacific Rim, you're immersed in it yet ever aware of what's beyond you and behind you.

The heart of this monograph on the firm's houses is Fernau's lead essay, which could serve as a tutorial on how to practice architecture as he and Hartman see it with place and improvisation providing valid, potent bases for design. The pioneering Berkeley-based wine dealer

“The willingness to take a chance and depart from the script is the quality we most admire in vernacular architecture."

Kermit Lynch shares their view of the role of place in creative practice. According to Lynch, author of AdventuresontheWineRoute , viniculture and winemaking combine art, craft, and science with nature: the grapes, soil, and climate matter, but the rest is human and improvisational skill, experience, nose, and luck.

Fernau compares their design process to modern dance, another improvisational and collaborative art. He compares their houses to collage in their use of materials, their fabrication, and the way they incorporate the "rogue elements" that place itself provides. And he points to the vernacular as evidence of how people adapt to a place as it changes and they change with it (and vice versa). This reminds me of William Morris's anti-scrape movement, which saw places of human habitation as evolving records to which successive dwellers contribute. Fernau mentions the architect Joseph Esherick's "ordinary" like William Wurster punching a window "randomly" in a façade to frame a view, ignoring any imposed order. ("We don't hang windows from a clothesline," Esherick told Chuck Davis.) His uncle Wharton used to ask him, "What would a farmer do?" It led Esherick to see hedgerow windbreaks and old coastal barns as precedents for his Sea Ranch demonstration houses.

Fernau and Hartman started their firm in a garage near Bernard Maybeck's house and studio in the Berkeley hills. Fernau notes his influence. What struck him was the way that Maybeck played with spaces to achieve what Peter Buchanan calls a "loose fit" suited to a casual, open, unfolding existence that's set in a place, not against it. When the weather was good, Maybeck worked outdoors under a canvas canopy and slept on a porch.

Fernau + Hartman's houses have the variety and maturation you would expect from a decades-old firm. The houses take the settings seriously. Fernau describes living there with his clients, their shared experience of it giving each house its specificity. Yet the process he describes continues long after a house is finished and occupied. The unfolding experience of a house in its setting gives it added depth and character. Such subtlety may be harder to see at a distance.

Theirs is a teaching office, another Bay Area tradition. An elaborate list of the houses' teams both shares the credit and makes it clear how many young designers benefited from the collaboration, starting their own practices or rising to prominence in other firms.

A review of Richard Fernau's ImprovisationsontheLand:HousesofFernau +Hartman , Monacelli, 2015, written for ARCADE34:1, 2016.

The Bay Area Reconsidered

In ModernArchitecture , Kenneth Frampton distinguishes critical regionalism from regionalism as “a spontaneously produced” vernacular. Critical regionalism is intended “to identify those recent regional ‘schools’ whose primary aim has been to reflect and serve the limited constituencies in which they are grounded.” It depends on “a certain prosperity,” Frampton writes, as well as “some kind of anti-centrist consensus, an aspiration at least to some form of cultural, economic, and political independence.” Like Lewis Mumford before him, Frampton counts San Francisco as such a school. Architect and critic Pierluigi Serraino challenges this view.

Interested in California’s mid-20th-century modernism and prompted by a suggestion from Elaine Jones to look at the Bay Area, “considered a hotbed of modern architecture in the fifties,” Serraino has written a revisionist history of its postwar period, NorCalMod . Along the way, he also discusses the role of architectural photographers and the design press in drawing attention to architects at the periphery of their editorial vision.

Rethinking Bay Area regionalism

Serraino argues that the received history of postwar Bay Area regionalism distorts the facts by consciously excluding modernism and its Bay Area exponents. In his view, “the evidence reveals an incohesive chorus of voices, if not an atomized design aesthetic, among Northern California architects during this time.” He concludes that,

When all these dots are connected, the picture that emerges is rather different, indeed more comprehensive and richer in design vocabulary than one might expect: Northern California was an unrestrained laboratory for modern architecture, propelled by the explosion of the national economy. Regionalists and modernists alike promoted an economy of design, but through profoundly different architectural expressions.

In the early 1980s, I worked with Joseph Esherick on an article in Space&Societyon the evolution of his work. In one of our conversations, he said to me that he felt that the steady stream of national and international design magazines made it impossible for architects here to avoid the contamination of larger movements, whatever they might be. Does his comment exemplify the anti-centrism that Frampton believes is characteristic of regional schools? Possibly, and yet the “regional” architect who said it shares the status of an

outsider with Bernard Maybeck, Chuck Bassett, and Stanley Saitowitz to name three other of the Bay Area’s leading lights. All four arrived here trained in a larger tradition, and then absorbed what they found here its history and most of all its sense of place. Esherick was the most directly influenced by older bay regional architects, but the work that he and his EHDD collaborators produced was as eclectic as Serraino posits. Among their influences: Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn (through Esherick), and Also Rossi and MLTW (through his gifted partner George Homsey, a fifth Beatle to MLTW whose Rubin House in Albany influenced them in turn.

In a recent interview in AIA San Francisco’s _line , architect and publisher Bill Stout notes ruefully that Allan Temko, bay regional modernism’s main polemicist, paid no attention to houses. That omission left William Wurster free to frame the region’s story in his own image. San Francisco modernism was the province of SOM something imported. (It’s interesting that Wurster’s contribution to the Bank of America Tower was to look back to Timothy Pflueger for inspiration.) Not every modernist here fell off the East Coast’s radar, but the story definitely got around.

Architecture and the media

A practicing architect and independent scholar, Serraino teamed up with Julius Shulman on an earlier book on the work of this iconic photographer of mid-century modernism in Southern California. Not surprisingly, this beautifully illustrated new book is also an excellent primer for architects on how to document their work so historians can find it. This reflects Serraino’s view that only “that which is photographed, reported, and generations later still retrievable can continue to exist in architectural history.” In a maxim worthy of Goethe, he takes this thought a measure further:

Architecture without photographs is like a traveler without a passport: it has no identity as far as the media is concerned. Photography makes architecture noticeable. Also, photography is the oxygen of architecture. It keeps its sister field alive in the present and in the future.

His maxim refers to architects as well as architecture. Indeed, his best example is David Thorne. After designing a widely published modernist house in the Oakland hills for Dave Brubeck, Thorne felt pressured by the resulting media coverage and deliberately slipped under the radar, using a different first name and assiduously keeping

himself and his work out of the press. As a result, both “disappeared” until Serraino rediscovered them.

So, is it “publish or perish”? Serraino is right that it’s important to document and that the photographer is a factor in getting coverage. That has its limits, though. The design press is a distorting mirror, both in how it values and reports on contemporary work and the way it credits who did what. It’s also ephemeral in terms of public consciousness. A house is rarely the Parthenon, but it is sturdier than magazines and has owners. There’s a natural curiosity about its provenance, and of course in the Bay Area's inflated housing market, provenance has value. Roger Lee may not be widely known outside the region, but his name still has cachet with realtors in the East Bay.

Seeing the work with new eyes

The rise of Dwelland the new importance of mid-century modernist houses make a book like Serraino’s, reassessing the work of earlier decades in light of current tastes, almost inevitable. Today, it's easier to see how bay regional modernism differs from and builds imaginatively on its antecedents. Back then, East Coast editors often saw it as derivative. LA modernists, using photographers like Shulman who made their work so sexy, got more attention.

What set modernism here apart was the place itself its dramatic sites and remarkable light and climate. A sense of place links such followers of European modernism as Donald Olsen to architects like Roger Lee who are much closer to the ranch house style that was the region's vernacular. The book shows this vividly, drawing on the region’s best postwar architectural photographers. Serraino’s tenacity in getting their photos into print makes the book an archive of one of the region’s high points. It's a kind of love letter from that past to a new generation, with Serraino as its messenger.

A review of Pierluigi Serraino's NorCalMod , IconsofNorthernCalifornia Modernism , Chronicle Books, 2006, written for arcCA06.04, 2006.

Art Gensler's Treatise on the Firm

The recent death of Art Gensler (1935–2021) led me to look again at Art'sPrinciples , his 2015 primer on architecture firm-building and architects’ careers. I was hired by Gensler late in 1997 and worked closely with him and his successors in an editorial capacity for the next 22 years a good vantage point from which to see how his principles played out in practice. Gensler was no theoretician, yet he arrived at an idea of the firm based on his understanding of architecture as it unfolds in the real world of clients and markets. The following pocket treatise distills it and draws on my own observations.

1. Architecture is best understood in a total design sense

Art preferred "design" to "architecture" in describing the open-ended nature of his firm. He saw every attempt to put the firm into professional, disciplinary, practice, or project buckets as misguided, given the fluidity of markets and the humanity that drives them. A design firm exists to deliver desired outcomes and support clients from strategy to strategy within close working relationships. Whatever is needed has to be found, whether it exists within the firm or is tapped through collaboration. This evolving totality is design as a professional activity, and architects are an integral part of it, but only one, and honor-bound to collaborate with the rest.

2. To be a business, a design firm has to be run as one. This has two implications. First, it means situating the firm in the marketplace. Second, it means acknowledging that what you’re running is a design business, which requires a constant search for balance and synergy between designers and clients so that both are attracted. This dilemma isn’t unique to design firms. Higher education, for example, faces something like it. To be a business means to deal rigorously with the issues every business faces. How well they’re dealt with is the

difference between a business that thrives, stagnates, or fails. How well design is dealt with means everything for its reputation, its influence, and its ability to attract talent and clients. To succeed, a design business has to navigate these twin challenges. To do this well, its culture has to be steeped in awareness of them, framing actions and outcomes in light of this.

3. That culture benefits from broad ownership and transparency

As Arie de Geus has argued, companies that endure are "living communities" that transcend successive generations of leaders and workers. Art made everyone an owner, directly or indirectly, in the design firm he founded. Since everyone was an owner, the firm shared financial details with them. It made ownership a financial advantage, with a substantial part of compensation long-term and tax-sheltered, topped off by firm contributions that reflected its performance and its leaders’ bullish or bearish sense of its prospects.

4. Relationships, not projects, are the heart of a design business

This means, first, that constant engagement is sought both with individual clients and the larger collectivity to which they belong or identify, with which they share issues and experiences. The goal is to expand the relationship, not simply to land the next project. Second, it means that mutual trust is crucial, as a relationship brings such responsibilities as the need to advise against a project not in the client’s interest. Within the design firm’s own culture, it means that personal and collective integrity matters. To thrive, the culture delegates responsibility on the basis of trust and individual initiative, but the ruling context is the collaborative teams that include and serve the clients and their clients. It’s within ongoing collaboration that both of these relationships are forged, built, and evolved.

5. A design business is organized to absorb shocks, yet evolve

Most of all, this means being disciplined about the core activities that keep ongoing operations humming, while scanning the horizon for new opportunities and threats. The danger of focusing on any set of relationships is myopia, banking on continuity and failing to anticipate disruption. Growth means changes in scale, each of which strains the core activities in their existing state, so part of the discipline needed is to ask regularly what the future demands. Some of this will come from clients, but the firm also has to look ahead and make its own decisions. It doesn’t have to be the first out of the gate, but should know its

options and be ready to act and invest. One big advantage of a strong balance sheet is that piloting new initiatives is much easier against the background of consistently profitable ongoing operations. Such initiatives are a firm's investments in the future.

6. A design business is organized to grow and sustain its growth

It's agnostic about its offer and the markets that take it up, knowing that the scale of the take up involves time as well as space. Especially when assignments are singular and huge, it looks for points of entry and roles that don’t leave its teams hanging when the assignment ends. If, to break into a market, it takes risks, it weighs them in light of the potential opportunities, viewing any losses as learning curve investments. But it tracks those assumptions against reality. It learns as much from mistakes as from successes.

7. A design business needs a talent pipeline and a succession plan

A thriving design business gives its co-owners the possibility of career longevity. This means not only giving them opportunities to contribute, but actively investing in their careers in mutually beneficial ways. Advancement reflects performance, with allowances made for life events and reversals beyond anyone’s reasonable control. Making strong performance possible is the goal of career investment, with an emphasis on the most-promising performers, but also with a conscious effort to raise all boats. Yet the standards of performance evolve. Career longevity doesn’t mean tenure; it means rewarding constant, meaningful contribution. Those who fail to deliver, despite career support, are let go, while outside talent is recruited. An effective succession plan simplifies the transition from one generation of leaders to another. Term limits, especially for upper- and midlevel leadership roles, make room for new blood.

8. A design business builds its future; it doesn't borrow against it

Financial solidity requires the business to perform well, even when market conditions are adverse. It prepares for what it can anticipate and for the unforeseen as an operational and a cultural imperative. Yet in its dealings with its co-owners, humanity and integrity guide its actions, knowing that those who leave will reappear as industry colleagues and often as clients. Coming back after a productive stint away is culturally acceptable, even desirable.

Written (as "The Principles of Art Gensler") for CommonEdge , 17 May 2021.

Aphorisms for Architects

A half-century spent working for architecture firms S, M, L, and XL makes me want to share some insights. I’ve written them as aphorisms, which boil experience down to a few lines.

01: Healthy firms have a rhythm like the beating of the heart. A push is followed by a rest that lets the heart consolidate itself for the next one. An arrhythmic heart skips a beat or pauses too long.

02: The issues faced by small firms are essentially the same as those faced by large ones. They face the same existential threats and the same internal and external pressures to evolve.

03: It’s a myth that the size of the firm makes it more or less interesting. What’s interesting are the opportunities it has and what it does with them assuming those same opportunities interest you.

04: Working effectively across a network is the most important skill a firm can develop. Leaders who thrive across networks are diplomats, facilitators, and cultivators of budding talent.

05: Command-and-control doesn’t work. Hierarchy is pointless except in the most minimal sense. Focus on the task at hand, and every conversation will go better. Meet, but don’t overdo it.

06: Every firm has pluses and minuses. The idea of a firm is often better than its execution. What matters is that you share its ambitions, it supports you, and you’re both making headway.

07: Firms need to forge new relationships and grow existing ones. The latter responsibility should be delegated to those who do the work; the former is the main responsibility of the ownership.

08: Consciously growing a firm means confronting the fact that it will outgrow some of its staff. Handle this well they may work for your clients or your competitors, or acquire new skills and return.

09: If your goal is to work with dynamic leaders, then it's best to be a half-generation older or a full generation younger than them. If your goal is to succeed them, then join early and force them to retire.

10: A firm’s commitment to diversity is reflected in whom it hires and promotes. It takes time to gauge how committed a firm really is, but there are early indicators and, sometimes, red flags.

11: Don’t waste much time working for an idiot unless the firm realizes its mistake and quickly sees him off. Toleration of idiots is a sure sign of a firm’s decline. Keep your eyes open and your CV updated.

12: Senior lateral hires work only if a top leader is prepared to make it work. It has to be a personal, mutual commitment, a trust-based relationship that gets them through the inevitable rough patch.

13: Bespoke, problem-solving, prototyping and form-giving, and mass customization: these are the main categories in which firms fall. They overlap, but emphasizing one may preclude others.

14: To be seen as innovative, a firm has to do something stunning often enough that people take notice. This requires time, investment, courage, realism, and luck. Imagination is the least of it.

Written (as "The Nature of Design Firms from a Five-Decade Veteran") for CommonEdge , 29 October 2020.

Is Architectural Licensing Necessary?

Mónica Ponce de León, dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture, recently called for allowing graduates of accredited professional programs like hers to take the licensing exams without having to meet any experience requirement. That requirement, she argues, is “an exclusionary tactic … structured to perpetuate discrimination and inequity.”1

In ArchitectureandLabor(Routledge, 2020), Yale’s Peggy Deamer goes a step further, suggesting that architects decouple their profession from state registration entirely. Her call to “deprofessionalize” architecture that is, to deregulate it may strike architects as farfetched, but here’s some breaking news: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, aka “the mini-Trump,” just stripped landscape architects, among other professions, of state protection of their titles and practices. Deamer, a co-founder of The Architecture Lobby, is focused on architects as workers and on the broader situation of architecture in the late-capitalist, Trump-inflected US. Issues of equity and diversity are high on her agenda. Those issues are salient to any discussion of state regulation.

Architecture came into its own as a profession in the 19th century. As Deamer explains, it joined other “learned” professions in seeking to distance itself from commerce. State regulation of architects in the US began with Illinois in 1897. Hoping to distinguish the profession from others involved with building design and construction, proponents of registration aimed both to protect clients from unqualified practitioners and to raise the profession’s status. In 1920, as part of an effort to coordinate the licensing process across the state boards, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) instituted the first standard licensing exams.3

As a learned profession, architecture was exempt from US antitrust laws until 1972, when the American Institute of Architects (AIA)

dropped its fee schedule to settle a lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice. A second consent agreement in 1990 affirmed price competition and made any discussion of fees by architect bidders a felony. (German architects retain a fee schedule, Deamer notes, despite European Union [EU] rules to the contrary.) While billed as “consumer protection,” the US Department of Justice’s actions, taken initially against civil and structural engineers, were pushed by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US General Services Administration to reduce the cost of those professions’ services.

In 1979, California Governor Jerry Brown (above) proposed to “sunset” the state regulation of architects, among other professions (law, medicine, and engineering were exempted). The organized profession and its registration board fought Brown, arguing by analogy to civil and structural engineers that public health, safety, and welfare were protected by their regulation. The board also substituted its own licensing exams for NCARB’s, emphasizing seismic and energy issues. In the end, Brown’s effort failed; none of the targeted professions was deregulated.

Architectural regulation varies widely, as Deamer’s book and a 2012 study of women in architecture in Australia and Sweden by University of Queensland’s Amanda Roan and Monash’s Naomi Stead4 show. The US and Australia follow the Anglo-American model that ties licensing to a combination of education, experience, and exams. In France, Germany, and Sweden, education and experience suffice. Licensing exams (and their associated fees), not experience, is the main difference between the two models.

In Sweden, architects’ title and practice are not regulated by the state. Anyone can call herself an architect and practice as one. From

their first student days, though, most architects join the Swedish Association of Architects (or Architects Sweden), “the professional association, union and interest group for Sweden’s architects, interior architects, landscape architects and spatial planners.”5 Graduation from an accredited program and two years of experience with EU firms allow practitioners to be recognized by Architects Sweden as qualified in one or another of the related fields it covers.

Roan and Stead’s 2012 study focused on “women’s position in architecture” in Australia and Sweden. It benefits from substantial data about the diversity of the architectural profession in the two countries. In an interview, Ponce de León decried the lack of data here: “Why has the AIA, NCARB, the NAAB, and even the ACSA, made it so difficult to find demographic data?” she asks, questioning if diversity is really their priority.6

Roan and Stead's 2012 study concluded that Sweden wasn’t Nirvana for women architects, despite a “context of strong social and political support for women and a loose regulatory framework in architecture.” In 2012, 51 percent of the members of Architects Sweden were women, and women and men architects’ salaries were “on par for the first ten years.” But pay diverged thereafter as more senior positions went to men and fewer women started their own practices. Some of the fields covered by Architects Sweden attract more women than men, potentially a factor in their higher numbers. Still, the growth of women studying architecture in Sweden suggests they will be the majority of architects in the future.

Australian architects are registered by state boards overseen by the Architects Accreditation Council of Australia, which coordinates reciprocity with other countries and shares architecture school accreditation with the Australian Institute of Architects and the state boards. In 2012, women made up 26 percent of Australian Institute of Architects members, half their proportion in Sweden. The title “architect” is protected, but non-architects can provide architectural services. In 1996, Susan Shannon argued that the current process of architectural licensure in Australia made it less likely that women architecture graduates would find suitable employment to gain needed experience or see the necessity to be registered. Instead, they are “more likely to see it as oppressive or restrictive.”7

Monash University Researcher Gill Matthewson's 2018 analysis of Australia’s 2016 census showed that women are a growing presence in architecture there. A higher percentage of women, 40 percent in 2016 versus 34 percent in 2011, are registering as architects. Of all women

active in architecture, 57 percent were registered in 2016 versus 51 percent in 2011. And yet, despite strong graduation rates, women’s participation falls off with age. Compared to their male peers, women are slower to start their own firms and less likely to incorporate them or employ others. After age 30, they are more likely to work part-time. Between ages 40 and 60, women are less likely than men to work “longer than the standard working week.” Among architect employees, “men dominate the higher earning brackets.” Matthewson summarizes:

“Whatever the measure used, women are present in strong numbers in the junior ranks, … but disappear from its senior levels.” This trend “has weakened … but the pattern persists.”8 I asked Matthewson if she thought women’s participation in architecture would grow if the profession was deregulated, a step proposed by Australia's Productivity Commission in 2000, following an inquiry that raised arguments against regulation similar to those made by California Governor Brown in 1979.9 She responded:

Self-regulation would mean less-formal means of gatekeeping, which usually do not work to women’s advantage, nor to the advantage of minorities. There is already some informality in the system in Australia that I believe discriminates. Formal credentials matter much more for women and the progress of their careers than they do for men. But registration is also to some degree disconnected from the everyday of architects’ lives and that is a big problem. But that could mean reform rather than removal.

Women are already a sizable portion of the field. The issue is that they leave more than the men do. Would deregulation reduce that leaving? Hard to predict the consequences, but I’d be surprised if it did. It may make no difference but it could also exacerbate the conditions that cause women to leave: tightly held male cabals, ruthless competition, and the like.10

Matthewson also clarified that the registration process in Australia includes a single exam, a signed-off workbook, and an interview. “That makes it perhaps less of a barrier” than the US process, she wrote.11

Ponce de León’s call to reform licensing, like Deamer’s call to scrap it, aims to shift architecture to a more inclusive and equitable place that’s better suited to contemporary practice and its possible futures. Deamer sees advantages in the Swedish model, which emphasizes education, simplifies experience, and eliminates exams, as well as advocating for architects as workers.

Citing Anne Witz's ProfessionsandPatriarchy(Routledge, 1992), Roan and Stead note that,

Witz claims that professions, by their very nature, may be an exclusionary project. … She states that "credentialist tactics, the use of educational certificates and accreditations to monitor and restrict access to occupation positions, are one of the major tactics of professional closure."12

Education, in short, is as culpable as experience, exams, and licensing. Yet, as Matthewson argues, running that gauntlet may benefit the women and minorities who manage to do it.

Deamer points to Architects Sweden because it’s a union in the Swedish sense of the word that is, an organization that advocates for architects, broadly construed, aiming to secure for the women and men in the field reasonable pay and working conditions, act as a clearing house for R&D, and monitor events in the wider world with implications for its members.

Reform is certainly overdue. Deamer devotes several chapters of her book to the way tech innovations have transformed practice. The pandemic has given this a gigantic shove, while simultaneously upending higher education. It’s highlighted inequities that were always there but are now almost embarrassingly front and center. But the push for deregulation is coming from other quarters. While Florida Governor DeSantis held off from moving on architects, his action which took place under the cover of the pandemic, like so much else perpetrated by Trump and his loyalists was justified, as the Wall StreetJournaleditorialized, by the need to “provide more opportunities for more citizens.” In an unintended echo of Ponce de León, the Wall StreetJournaladds, “It’s all about removing unnecessary barriers that make it harder for people to enter certain professions”13

Given that professional licensing may help rather than hurt women and minorities, as Monash’s Matthewson points out, the WallStreet Journaleditorial’s breezy endorsement is open to question. In the summer of 2020, Florida’s state-licensed interior designers successfully organized to resist DeSantis.14 The preponderance of women in that design profession supports Matthewson’s thesis: being licensed, which was hard won, certainly matters to them.

With the heightened awareness of racism and inequity now sweeping universities and design firms alike, taking the situation of women and minorities seriously is overdue. Ponce de León is right to make an issue of it. But, as Deamer argues, to be meaningful, reform needs to be holistic. If she points to Sweden’s union, part of its appeal is its ability to keep pace with and even lead change rather than content itself with rearguard actions. How the organized profession does this is a question The Architecture Lobby is pondering, as is Australia’s Parlour, a

women architect’s advocacy group. The means will differ with context. Tertiary education has a similar need to challenge disciplinary boundaries and preconceived ideas about practice. That’s a challenge Dean Ponce de León may want to take up.

Notes

1. Monica Ponce de León, "Hearing the Call for Structural Change," Princeton University School of Architecture, 7 June 2020.

2. "Florida's Licensing Breakthrough," editorial, WallStreetJournal , 16 July 2020.

3. Dana Cuff, "Historical License: Architectural History in the Architectural Profession," JournaloftheSocietyofArchitecturalHistorians , 76:1, March 2017.

4. Amanda Roan and Naomi Stead, "A 'New Institutional' Perspective on Women's Position in Architecture: Considering the Cases of Australia and Sweden," ArchitecturalTheoryReview17:2–3, 2012, pp. 378–398.

5. Per its website, saco.se.

6. Antonio Pacheco, "Mónica Ponce de León on the Future of Architectural Licensure," Archinect , 29 June 2020.

7. Susan Shannon, "Architecture and Equity: Education and Practice," ArchitecturalTheoryReview1:1, 1996, pp. 48–62.

8. Gill Matthewson, ParlourCensusReport2001–2016 , 23 October 2018.

9. ReviewofLegislationRegulatingtheArchitecturalProfession , Working Paper No. 1644, Productivity Commission, Government of Australia, 4 August 2000.

10. Gill Matthewson, email in response to my query, 16 July 2020; and her article, "When being female is weaponised against you...," Parlour , 13 November 2017.

11. Matthewson, email in response to my query, 16 July 2020.

12. Roan and Stead, op.cit.

13. Florida's Licensing Breakthrough," op.cit.

14. Joanna Thiger, posting on the Gresham Smith an architecture and design firm website, 16 July 2020.

Written for CommonEdge , 22 July 2020.

About DesignBookReview

In the summer of 2018, I learned from David Eifler, the librarian at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, that DesignBook Review , the quarterly that Laurie Snowden and I founded in 1983, was digitized in its entirety by Google and placed behind a firewall administered by the Hathi Trust. Eifler also told me how it could be made accessible. I forwarded this information to David Meckel at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco the person there with whom Laurie and I negotiated our gift of the journal in 1997. Meckel sent it to others, including Keith Krumwiede, CCA’s new architecture dean. He wrote back immediately: “I can’t believe we own this!” At that moment, the stars finally aligned, bringing DBRback from the dead.

An event on 17 April 2019 at the Curatorial Research Bureau in San Francisco marked CCA’s launch of the digital archive. Now CCA Professor William Littman has given that archive a better portal. Looking ahead, CCA is planning symposia around DBRthat I’m hopeful will involve the editors when Laurie and I owned and published it: Richard Ingersoll (above) and Cathy Lang Ho, a remarkable duo. Preparing for the launch event, Snowden and Littman posed some questions. Here are my responses.

Why an inclusive rather than a selective approach to design?

One impetus for starting DBRwas the volume of design-related titles, a considerable part of which was aimed at practitioners. We saw our audience as literate professionals, so we felt we should cover books aimed at them. In time, we became more selective to counter what we saw as a lowering of standards by some publishers, and to keep the DBRissues at a manageable size. But we still wanted to cover design broadly the whole field, not just architecture. This reflected the ideals of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, which sent its Design Department into exile at UC Davis in this period. Professor of Design Frances Butler was an early DBRcontributor, so we were aware of this and opposed to it.

What were your major dilemmas or controversies?

We took some heat for issues on the John Hancock Tower in Chicago and the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, part of Richard’s “Buildings in Mid-Career” series. Some saw them as a sell-out, but both issues have held up. An interview with Bruce Graham on Hancock was unintentionally funny, a bit like Donald Trump’s ArtoftheDeal . Our reexamination of postwar modernist icons, also including the Ford Foundation and the Kimbell, coincided with the postmodernist and deconstructionist work and polemics then emerging.

What determined the character of the magazine?

Editorially, Richard had a strong, lasting influence. Shaping and reshaping DBRwas a collective effort, but Richard was able to connect ideas to people. He constantly came up with innovative themes and features. Early on, Mark Rakatansky helped us enlist contributors outside the Bay Area. Suzanne Chun was our stalwart copy editor. Gordon Chun gave DBRa robust template that allowed for any number of departures, but gave us a fallback for issues without themes and for the many reviews that fell into categories. Gordon invited Zuzana Licko to design the feature wells of several issues work that is immediately identifiable as hers, and yet fits easily with the rest. Just as we were exceptionally lucky to have Richard as our founding editor and later to have Cathy as his co-editor, we were very fortunate to start out with Gordon. Cathy's sister, Betty Ho, art-directed and designed DBRissues from 1993 to 1997. (Lucille Tenazas designed the cover of the “Home” issue, our last before CCA took DBRover. Yingzhao Li worked on CCA’s first issue during the transition. Tenazas then redesigned DBR , setting a new look and format for CCA's issues.)

To what do you attribute DBR’slongevity?

Our early losses were staggering we were losing the equivalent of a Toyota Corolla a month at one point. So, getting it to breakeven was no small accomplishment. We ran DBRon a shoestring. Noticing that our newsstand sales often converted to subscriptions, we hired a Berkeley undergraduate, Siobhan Silva, to call bookstores, asking them to stock it. We ended up with a network of some 450 bookstores, plus distributors. One of them, which sold to Waldenbooks, was a goldmine while it was in operation. Our newsstand sales were substantially higher than our paid subscriptions. Our paid circulation was around 4,800 copies per issue.

Thanks to Laurie’s sister Kathy Snowden, my wife, we had ad sales from the outset and some remarkably loyal advertisers. We also won multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation. At different points, Bud Knapp, the founder of ArchitecturalDigest , Dennis Cahill, the publisher of Architecture , and Hans-Peter Thür, the head of the Swiss publisher Birkhäuser, all expressed interest in buying DBR , but none of them followed through. MIT Press co-published DBRin the 1990s, an arrangement that ended messily. After we got it back, we did one issue before CCA took over. In short, we did what we had to do to keep it going. but we also produced one great issue after another, constantly rethinking the content. People liked it and kept reading.

What did you gain by being based in Berkeley?

As Lars Lerup noted at the time, Berkeley was “a suburb of New York.” Yet it was far enough away from Manhattan to be out of the fray of the often-bitter feuds of that era. Our contributors were on both sides of various disputes, but they saw us as neutral ground. It helped that our cottage-industry credentials were real. Early on, our kids put stamps on the envelopes in which we sent the issues out.

How did you decide on themes and special issues?

We constantly experimented. It helped that DBRwas a book review and thus retrospective and anticipatory at once. The ideas came from everywhere, but less from other magazines and journals, and more from events like Le Corbusier’s centenary and from the zeitgeist to which we were attuned. John Loomis both guest-edited our “Other Americas” issue and raised money to pay for it. (It won an AIA national book award and had a lasting influence.) Alexander Tzonis and Liane

Lefaivre were similarly involved editorially. We were open to that kind of collaboration and willing to plunge in.

Were you influenced by other journals at the time?

We invoked the NewYorkReviewofBooksif people objected to being edited. We admired the AAFilesand sometimes ran articles from Casabellathat Richard translated. The Dutch journal Archisand another from Denmark caught our attention. Some of our UK contributors wrote for ArchitecturalDesign(AD) and Architectural Review . Andrew Rabeneck, a former editor at ADwho had taught at the AA, was very helpful in opening doors. We also had crucial support from Spiro Kostof and Marc Treib at Berkeley, Kenneth Frampton at Columbia, and Bill Moggridge at IDEO, among others.

What can younger people get from DesignBookReview?

It documented two important decades in design history, the 1980s and 1990s, in an unusually thorough way, grounded in ideas and drawing on people in the different fields of design who were well positioned to comment. As a consciously “cultural” journal, it always “looked up” to ask what else was happening. Hence themes like "gender" and “posthumanism” and a willingness to engage with transitions like industrial design’s embrace of tech and modernism’s dialectical passage through postmodernism and deconstructionism. It gave its contributors the freedom to range it had some truly wonderful writing, which we encouraged and gave sufficient room. As written discourse struggles to get its bearings among competing genres, the online archive makes DBRaccessible as a precedent.

Note

In his acknowledgements to BuildingsinPrint(Prestel, 2021), John Hill wrote:

It was important for me to read reviews of architecture books to ascertain how they were received upon initial publication, and in this regard Design BookReview...proved to be invaluable. The depths to which contributors reviewed architecture books in DBRis unmatched before, during, or since.

My answers to Laurie Snowden and William Littman's questions about DBR were posted on Mediumon 18 April 2019. Our hope following the online archive's appearance was to host a symposium at CCA that Richard Ingersoll would join. Alas, he died in Spain early in 2021.

Fifty Shades of Dismay

I’m not a fan of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). There’s an Elks Club quality to it, and the people who work their way up its elected-leadership ladder often seem to be compensating for deficits elsewhere and/or preening on a bigger stage. Like other national organizations, the AIA reflects the localities of its membership. It has its Tea Party as well as its sophisticated urban chapters.

The AIA recently declined to adopt an amendment to its ethics code, sponsored by Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), to take facilities for torture, execution, and prolonged isolation off the table for its architect members. Explaining its action, AIA 2014 President Helene Combs Dreiling pointed to potential antitrust and enforcement problems. “The AIA Code of Ethics should not exist to create limitations on the practice by AIA members of specific building types,” she wrote, quoting the special panel that considered and rejected the measure. It was the wrong decision.

Perception meets reality

In the court of public opinion, your rationale is worth less than zero if your actions belie your words. The aging roué Dominique StraussKahn (in the car above), in the dock in France, told the court that he was “busy saving the world” and unaware of the details of the sex parties he joined “only four times a year.” When a woman on the receiving end testified in detail about his party habits, perception and reality collided, leaving Strauss-Kahn nervously studying his watch and whispering to his attorney. Reading this in the news last week, the AIA’s flimsy, legalistic letter to the ADPSR came to mind.

A few years ago, one of the American hikers that Iran detained and imprisoned, allowed to return to the US on humanitarian grounds (she had cancer), took up the cause of banning prolonged isolation. Having experienced it herself, she correctly described it as torture. Ever since 9/11, but undoubtedly before then, the US government has resorted to torture and summary, extra-judicial murder on the grounds of national security. We are all party to its actions, which are taken in our name by governments we elected. They are “busy saving the world.” Meanwhile, the federal government and most US states have death rows. Facing problems with lethal injection, a few are planning to revive the electric chair and firing squad.

Becoming what we condemn

The resolution that ADPSR put forward is a finger in the dike, but it’s our finger our opportunity as a profession to speak out against powers that torture and kill, judicially and extra-judicially, without much compunction. The AIA’s refusal endorses these powers and ignores the wishes of many of its urban constituents. It privileges business as usual and displays cowardice and/or political bias.

One precedent is Albert Speer. His defense did not impress the Nuremberg judges or history, and his condemnation is relevant to the AIA: the failure to act isn’t a trivial matter when issues of real import are at stake. Heidegger is another precedent, perhaps more relevant a celebrated philosopher whose work was tainted by his dealings with the Nazis. They shared a moral blindness.

As citizens, we’re exposed to conflicting narratives about how to confront real and dangerous problems that are often partly of our own making. Faced with them, how should we conduct ourselves? How should we live and work? There are no simple answers, but there are some fairly clear choices. When we abet state-sanctioned torture and murder, we risk becoming what we condemn.

The AIA has turned a blind eye to the profession's complicity in these deplorable acts. I see four possible steps in response:

1. Chapters should endorse the ADPSR’s resolution and make it clear to their members that they’re holding them to a higher ethical standard. (The AIA, anticipating local dissent, made its code of ethics the only standard.)

2. Chapters should reintroduce the ADPSR measure and demand a new vote.

3. If the AIA refuses to vote it through, chapters should withdraw from it.

4. If none of the above happens, individual members should resign from the AIA or its chapters, depending on their affiliation.

Break down the walls

A cultural sea change catches out the unreconstructed, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who try to live on as if nothing has happened. Both individually and collectively, we’re exposed daily to this often-visible dissonance. It can make us crazy or prompt us to act.

If the latter, then what’s needed is real debate about the shape this new world will take. Architects should be at the heart of it, pressing for reform up and down the line. AIA chapters, spurred by activism at their doors, should join them, because the AIA nationally is MIA. That the need to take concrete action on an issue this fundamental eludes it speaks to a moral blindness. If it persists, then it’s time to opt for a new organization with the requisite relevance and courage.

Posted on Mediumon 15 February 2015. It appeared a nanosecond before Michael Kimmelman wrote his take in the NewYorkTimes , and the late Kirsten Richards linked to both on ArchNewsNow , giving my piece unusual traction. Mimi Zeiger also wrote on this topic for ArchitecturalReview . The AIA eventually adopted ASPSR's resolution.

Campus Planning in a Hybrid World

In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic shifted our university the University of California, Berkeley totally online, along with the whole of education from childcare up across the country and most of the planet. In the wake of this forced and unprecedented experiment, debates about what it means remain ongoing. Will the episodic dream of a placeless university, or at minimum a hybrid place/placeless one, come true? Millennia of experience argue for giving higher education a local, physical anchor. And most universities and colleges have this anchor as their starting place, even as they consider what their ongoing experience with virtual teaching, research, and administration means.

Campus planners, those most directly responsible for pondering the future of universities as physical places, are avid followers of this experiment and the debates around it. The future of a university is guided by two questions: “What kind of places suit this institution?” and “How much of them do we need?” These questions look beyond the campus proper to ask how its community finds housing, services, entertainment, and culture in its university city and the metropolis around it.

Instead of thinking of placeand placelessas opposites, it may be better for today’s campus planners to embrace the concept of ba , a “shared space for emerging relationships, providing a platform for advancing individual and/or collective knowledge.”1 Put forward by the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida and his followers, Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno, baviews the real and virtual worlds as inextricably intermingled. Instead of focusing on physical settings, campus planners should ask how their universities can best enable the relationships that advance knowledge, wherever they occur.

This capacious, real-and-virtual take on place takes in the full repertory of physical spaces and connective tissue that support a university community, a milieu in which campus planners are engaged participants in what amounts to a democratic process.

The 178 acres of the UC Berkeley campus were never an island. From the start, Berkeley, a university city (above), has shared the broad values and purposes of its institution. The two are as much part of the cosmos as they are part of the East Bay, nestled in its hills, but both are prone to overcrowding. They form a whole that is set within a larger context that unfolds in response to the same pressures, the same pandemic, the same economic and political turmoil.

Having put our lives on hold en masse, with lingering questions about how to revive the campus and much else for full human use, planners need to look ahead open-endedly. This is the real spirit of “Never let a pandemic go to waste.” By slowing things down, they can get a clearer sense of what really matters for the university, discounting the instant pundits’ overreactions to the pandemic’s disruptions while taking seriously the working assumptions it challenges.

Heading into the pandemic, UC Berkeley projected that its campus population would grow to 70,000 faculty, researchers, administrators, staff, and students. That announcement led the City of Berkeley to bring a lawsuit, as this would nearly double a previously agreed-to cap. This raises a series of questions: What kind of place is a finite 178-acre campus with 70,000 people? Where will they be housed? How and at what pace will they get back and forth? UC Berkeley combines fouryear undergraduate programs, graduate programs, and a vast amount of research. Should it delegate some of this to other institutions?

Should it continue to grow as it currently is? The impact of 70,000 people suggests an on-campus experience like Venice with mass tourism.

The pandemic has halted mass tourism and other features of a “peak global” world that were starting to unravel before it hit. Political disagreements between China and the US had already sparked a decline in enrollments at the UC Berkeley from Chinese nationals. More worryingly, they were eroding the trust relationships that make research possible between UC Berkeley and equivalent institutions in China, and also hindering Chinese investment in research here. A change in administrations may ease these problems, but they raise larger questions about the nature of a university community: How local should it be? What are its responsibilities to its metropolitan region and, as a leading research university, to the nation and the world?

These questions are especially timely as UC Berkeley begins its Long-Range Development Plan (LRDP) process, a 20-year projection of the campus’s physical growth to meet its programmatic needs in light of its institutional ambitions. The pandemic is likely to weigh on the deliberations of the long-range planners. Trying to operate as a placeless university is like the “work from home” (WFH) efforts of other large organizations in the region to stay in business. Acceptable as a temporary exigency, WFH ignores the impacts it puts on the milieu. Unchecked growth raises the same red flag. If the milieu is the real context, then its planning has to be systemic. That is, it has to account for the externalities that affect ordinary people and the environment.

As the Bay Area revives from the pandemic’s shutdown, there are substantive debates that reflect people’s experience of what just happened. Central business districts and suburban corporate campuses both face doubts about their future from a workforce that’s less convinced of the benefits of workplace proximity and more resistant to the long commutes that come with it. Parents, reintroduced to their school-age children, question if having two full-time careers is worth the damage. Homeless people, newly housed in hotels, disprove political assumptions that this wasn’t possible. Tourists and tourism have much less priority. In short, how the region sees itself is in flux. Next steps are hard to predict, but the solution space is considerably enlarged.

Among the pandemic’s most dramatic and almost immediate effects in the Bay Area was to clear the air. This raised questions about our continued dependence on petroleum-fueled cars, trucks, buses, and trains, and it showed how the region functions as an ecosystem, with

the nature of the economy driving environmental degradation. Higher education, as a network, fits into this interconnected milieu. A 20-year plan for UC Berkeley has to account for the ecosystem in which it is situated, a larger whole that struggles currently to provide education, healthcare, housing, and transit at anything like a mass scale. The pandemic revealed a series of frayed and broken systems.

UC Berkeley exemplifies where we are today. Starved of state funding for several decades, it more closely resembles a private institution like Stanford in the way it depends on other sources of revenue to stay afloat. The cost of attending is higher, and individual programs that can attract higher-paying students charge considerably more. The pandemic has exposed what a creaking machine it’s become, potentially unsustainable. The LRDP invites the campus to consider, not for the first time, what a leading public research university should be in a world moving toward a new midcentury how it can spur relationships and create vital knowledge, fulfilling once again a mandate that goes back to its roots as a Land Grant institution.

It’s interesting to us that the Slow Movement, applied initially in the Bay Area to food, is relevant to these deliberations. Like ba , Slow has always aimed to bridge local and global. Alice Waters, its leading spokesperson, understood that the survival of the local required a symbiotic relationship with markets or constituencies beyond itself. But phenomena like mass tourism are the shadow side of the local/global relationship what goes wrong when it loses its balance. Inherent in the idea of Slow, whether applied to food and cuisine or towns and cities, is the idea of constant deliberation to keep the relationship in check, recognizing that the local is ever vulnerable to damaging, even ruinous exploitation. Baasks us to consider the relationships we hope to foster, and Slow asks us to consider how to balance the local and communal with the national and international. The risk of local and communal is provinciality, while the risk of national and international is homogenization, leveling, and the loss or eradication of difference. Between them is the cosmopolitan world that universities have always sought, local and global at once.

Note

1. Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno, "The Concept of Ba: Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation," CaliforniaManagementReview40:3, Spring 1998.

Written with Emily B. Marthinesen and Richard Bender for CommonEdge , 6 July 2020; reprinted by ArchDaily , 9 July 2020.

New Campuses for New Communities

Universities and colleges can be great forces for urbanity in their communities. Just how this potential is realized, however, has been the subject of various interpretations through history. There is a tendency in America today to think that a university or a college campus must be a place apart. If every new academic or institutional “need” is seen as a new building, they proliferate, undermining the sense of place that both the campus and its community value.

There are other options. While models like Jefferson’s University of Virginia and venerable Ivy League campuses still shape our sense of an appropriate setting for academic life, an even older root going back to Bologna, Padua, and Paris situates the academy within the polis and makes it an integral part of everyday life. The urbanity of this model reflects the historic tendency of towns and cities to mix uses in a finegrained way that creates and enlivens culture as well as stimulates the local economy. For many such institutions, a more intensive mix of uses may also reflect financial necessity, leading them to seek partners in their communities with whom to integrate facilities.

The need for alternatives to a territorial, facilities-oriented approach to campus planning was brought home to us in the late 1990s with the financial collapse of the American Center in Paris. Following the completion of a magnificent building designed by Frank Gehry, its director publicly reflected on how he had thought he was building a $40-million asset, when in fact he had built a $6-million-a-year liability. Universities have learned from their own past to the extent that they are developing more flexible buildings today and often forming new partnerships to share the cost with others, including developers. Urban universities are also increasingly looking beyond their own campus

boundaries to grow. Arizona State University, for example, is expanding across metropolitan Phoenix, while Harvard is shifting its science and technology faculties to a new campus across the Charles River. Bard College has established a study and research center in Manhattan, just as ASU, with its main campus in Tempe, is moving into downtown Phoenix. All of these developments point to a recognition that these institutions realize their futures lie at least partly in looking beyond traditional campus boundaries, integrating university programs with those of the city at large.

Such a rethinking of seemingly fundamental tenets of American campus design is particularly relevant today as “learning” becomes a lifelong, year-round pursuit. Postsecondary education is now a necessary accompaniment of adult life, enabling people to ramp up skills, get needed credentials, and finally move from work to the rest of life. Given this, the idea of building a traditional university or college campus may be more and more of a distraction from what real investment in higher education is coming to mean.

The rise of exurbia

A rethinking of what a campus is may prove especially beneficial in “exurbia.” This is the name recently given to sprawling new communities like Mesa, Arizona, which are frequently home to as many people as older cities like St. Louis. Such locales evince all the forms of the 20th-century American suburb, but without any sense of being tied to an original center. They are a logical next step from what Joel Kotkin and others have noted about US demographics: since 1960, more than 90 percent of all population growth in America’s metropolitan areas has taken place in suburbia.1

Another social critic, David Brooks, attributes the rightward shift in American politics to exurbia, which he contends is not simply an “opting out” of the city, but a more utopian impulse to reinvent it in the tradition of new towns from Ebenezer Howard forward.2

Exurbia may only be passing through a suburban stage on the way to becoming a new kind of metropolis. But universities and colleges may contribute to this transition by helping to give it much-needed cultural and civic life.

A missed opportunity

Despite the potential benefits that a rethinking of the relation between campus and city might entail, most large university systems continue to build according to old models. A good example is the construction of a

10th campus of the University of California, now underway in Merced (p. 152), one of a chain of cities extending south from Sacramento to Bakersfield in the state’s vast Central Valley. This formerly agricultural area is today developing according to the classic exurban scenario, and all indications are that it will become California’s third megalopolis by 2050. As a result of this growth, the population of formerly sleepy Merced is expected to rise to 200,000 in the next 40 years.

As the setting for a new urban agglomeration, the Central Valley has several things going for it. Older patterns of infrastructure and commerce already link its towns with a major highway (California 99) and several north-south rail lines, one of which the state may rebuild to accommodate high-speed passenger service. Its older town centers, largely developed in the early 20th century, feature tree-lined residential streets and tidy, if underutilized, commercial cores. Yet, instead of seizing on the potential offered by this pattern of existing settlement, with its transportation and communications infrastructure already in place, UC chose to locate its new campus (for an eventual population of 30,000 students) on open ranchland some six miles out of town.

UC has a history of locating its new campuses on open land. Its oldest campus, at Berkeley, was founded when the university moved out of its original headquarters in downtown Oakland. Built on grazing land in a town that was mostly a summer refuge for San Franciscans, UC Berkeley was eventually surrounded by a new city that grew up around it.

However, the real antecedents for UC Merced are the UC campuses developed in the 1950s and 1960s, like Santa Cruz and San Diego. Both were organized around separate, inward-looking academic/residential colleges. Both were also deliberately held at a distance from nearby cities, a strategy that has proved especially problematic at Santa Cruz, where it has largely eliminated any possibility of sharing facilities with the larger community.

The planning of the Merced campus, the work of a team led by John Kriken of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, San Francisco, largely adheres to this traditional territorial model.3 It proposes a tree-lined street grid, recognizing this as a pattern of Central Valley towns, as well as an effective way to make a compact and urbane campus that can mitigate the area’s extremely hot summers and cold, windy winters. But at UC Merced, the distance between the existing town and the new campus appears to impede initial opportunities for synergy between the campus and the Merced community. With its negative implications for

extended infrastructure, travel time, energy use, and pollution, six miles is just too far.

If the planners had looked further back, past UC's suburban precedents of the 1950s and ‘60s, they might have discovered models that specifically anticipated ways that a campus and a community might better evolve together. But this would undoubtedly have involved building closer to town, or even in town, and the political leaders of the multi-campus UC system did not want to take on the problem of assembling land in an area where patterns of development had already been established. Instead, they opted to site the new campus on “empty,” supposedly trouble-free, land that they were able to obtain relatively easily. As it has turned out, however, environmental problems related to the presence of vernal pools and other environmental constraints contributed to a nearly decade-long delay in construction. They have also led to the first phase of the campus being located on an adjoining former golf course an area not included in its original 2001 master plan.

One other obvious problem with the chosen site was the lack of any surrounding amenities. To make up for this, a new general plan for the City of Merced, produced in parallel with the campus plan, calls for a series of planned residential developments between the existing town and the site of the campus, anchored by a “town center” a private shopping area.

Although the opportunity was constantly emphasized during the planning process, the city and the university both failed to engage each other to find concrete ways they could benefit from the other’s presence. Libraries, museums, medical facilities, playfields, stadiums, and even things like utilities and police and fire services were all potential candidates for joint development. By banking land for future growth, they could both have gained from the rise in Merced land values.

From a regional standpoint, the choice of the site was similarly flawed. Had one been chosen that related better to Highway 99 and the north-south rail corridors that link the Central Valley towns, it might have better fulfilled UC Merced’s potential to serve the whole region, not just one part of it. Indeed, in the run-up to the opening of the new campus, the university opened academic sub-centers in other valley towns and cities. Many of the students now commute to the campus from their homes up and down the valley.

An American "new town"?

Ironically, UC Davis the one campus that most obviously reflects the University of California’s land-grant heritage (for years, one of its great strengths was agriculture and natural resources-related research) comes closest to being the model that might have provided the most sensible basis for a design that could have served both UC Merced and the larger Central Valley community.

Adjoining a rail and freeway corridor that links the Bay Area to Sacramento, Davis falls within a fast-developing “exurban” corridor one that extends from Vallejo to Sacramento, Roseville, Placerville, Truckee, and Reno, Like the Merced campus, the Davis campus was originally laid out on a grid pattern; unlike Merced, the Davis campus was conceived as a loose extension of the adjacent town. Even the creek that runs through it helps connect them.

UC Davis was not the only alternative that could have been seized upon as a precedent. Before the Merced site was chosen, the larger Central Valley city of Fresno had proposed that the core of the new campus occupy a section of its early-20th-century downtown, the Fourth Street Mall. This area had been a center of prosperity in the prefreeway era, but for many years it had been bypassed, as suburban development spread to the northeast. In addition to many underutilized properties, it offered good proximity to an existing train station and good access from Highway 99.

Those with experience of European campuses might recognize the Bologna model in such a plan to re-inhabit an older urban area. In the US, the benefits of such a strategy have also been reaped in Manhattan, where NYU has for years renovated industrial lofts as classrooms and student residences, and in a broader sense has adapted itself to the urban fabric of that city. DePaul has also followed this strategy in Chicago’s Loop. In other historic European towns like Siena, a further benefit is that the university can play the role of custodian of important elements of its historic fabric, while locating other parts of its program, like laboratories and athletic facilities, outside the town’s historic zone.

Looking farther afield, it is possible to see an even more relevant example. In the 1960s, about the same time that UC Santa Cruz was being developed, the French new town of Cergy-Pontoise was being created outside of Paris. The town was to incorporate several existing villages, but universities were planned to be among its earliest new elements. Today these institutions include ESSEC, one of the leading business and management schools in Europe. A technical university was also created, and it now supports many of the high-tech companies

that have relocated to the region. They were initially brought in as a way to provide jobs that would induce people to move there or “reverse commute” from central Paris part of a regional strategy that also saw the development of the RER line passing through Paris to connect these new towns to central Paris, and Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports.

The success of these planning initiatives 40 years ago is now fully evident.4 Cergy-Pontoise today has a population of close to 200,000 people, including 25,000 university students. The recent development of high-speed rail service to the UK has situated Cergy-Pontoise along a linear network of towns that are becoming proximate to London as well as Paris, underscoring its role in an expanded regional economy. Businesses in the town are already connected to this corridor’s fiberoptic line, which runs along the National Highway right-of-way next to the technical university at Cergy-Pontoise.

Evolving exurbia

Unlike the vast majority of new US communities, the development of Cergy-Pontoise involved a major initial public investment in physical and social infrastructure. And a conscious goal of the new-town effort around Paris was to shift growth outside the city.

In contrast to the French model, such peripheral development in the US usually emerges “in reverse.” The private sector leads the way with low-density projects coming first, followed typically by privately developed shopping malls. If there is an existing town, as there is in Merced, it often must compete with and may ultimately be undermined by this piecemeal development. The choice of where to locate a major public university could, however, have been regarded as a strategic intervention to encourage a more sensible and coherent (and less costly and destructive) pattern of development. While the planning of the UC Merced campus aimed within its own boundaries for this kind of coherence, it missed it entirely in terms of what the campus could do for Merced, and vice versa. This was equally true for the Merced General Plan which suggests that both entities failed to understand the exurban phenomenon.

Exurbia has tended to grow on an ad-hoc basis as an agglomeration of “planned communities” that are relatively low density and car dependent, with few public or community spaces. Schools and churches are often the first civic buildings, and cultural life often begins with them, along with shopping and movies. In this context, a university or college campus could help provide the missing elements

the “collegial” and cultural settings that support the civic and cultural life of the community along with opportunities for education and training. An example of such a relationship is the Texas community of Cypress-Fairchild (actually a school district) outside Houston, where the local government partnered with a community-college district to develop a campus whose civic, cultural, learning, and recreational facilities serve a population that runs the gamut from toddlers (and their moms) to younger postsecondary students, adult workers, and the retirees who enroll in its Senior Academy one of its fastest growing programs.

It is characteristic of these exurban campuses to capitalize on the interplay between learning and a broader community of learners. Another characteristic is how their physical form evolves in relation to their communities. Cy-Fair College is both a college campus and a government center, with both contributing to its development.

The need for stewardship

The last point reflects on what should be an important concern for campus planners generally: that, in developing a university or college in an exurban context, it may be particularly important to tailor development to where a community is in its lifecycle. Following such a tenet, what would have made more sense in a place like Merced than to utilize already existing, undervalued resources as a way to build together toward a common future?

In 50 years, UC Merced may come to seem a part of its community. By then, the population of the town may, in classic exurban style, “fill in” the agricultural land between the new campus and the existing town. It may even grow right up to its gates, so to speak, and create the same problems of boundaries and edges that cause such difficulties between other UC campuses and their surrounding neighborhoods. Until then, the town will gain less than it should from the presence of the campus, and vice versa. The region too will get less from UC Merced than it should.

That towns or cities and their colleges or universities need to see each other as partners is the salient point. Both need to share a sense of stewardship. As Frederic Law Olmsted put it, a campus needs to provide settings for learning for its students that reflect “the work of a disciplined mind.” In exurbia, especially early on in its development, doing so may be particularly valuable. Ebenezer Howard, who we might think of as one of the fathers of exurbia, saw new towns as an opportunity to build a new civilization. In a real sense, the campuses of

the new exurban universities and colleges, UC Merced among them, are opportunities to bring the benefits of the city to areas that are ready to embrace them, but in a new form.

Notes:

1. Joel Kotkin,TheNewGeography:HowtheDigitalRevolutionis ReshapingtheAmericanLandscape,Random House, 2000.

2. David Brooks, “Take a Ride to Exurbia,” TheNewYorkTimes, November 9, 2004.

3. John Lund Kriken, “Principles of Campus Master Planning,” Planningfor HigherEducation,July-August 2004; and University of California Office of the President, LongRangeDevelopmentPlan:TheUniversityof California,Merced , Public Draft, August 2001.

4. Bertrand Warnier, “Cergy-Pontoise: Du Projet à la Realité,” Atlas Commente,Pierre Mardaga Editions, 2004.

Written with Richard Bender for Places17:1, 2005, pp. 54–59, reprinted in arcCA , 05:4, 2005.

Local Motion

When San Francisco’s MUNI spent big money on a “central subway” to Chinatown [above], I was doubtful. But then I revived the galleryhopping I did before the pandemic, taking the train from Berkeley into the city, walking to one gallery near Embarcadero Station, then taking a tram past the ballpark to the CalTrain Station, where I switched to another tram to head south to Minnesota Street’s Dogpatch cluster of galleries and artists’ studios.

While talking with Ward Schumaker, whose ceramics show I came to see, he mentioned the convenience of the T line now that it runs to Chinatown. He was right: the T got me to Union Square quickly, connecting directly to BART and MUNI’s Powell Street Station, where I caught a train to downtown Oakland and another to Berkeley. The tram I took initially past the ballpark was the long way around, slowed by Giants fans on their way to a game. Taking the T back was a straight shot. What had been an ordeal I tended to avoid is now considerably faster, easier, and more attractive.

In EnergyandEquity(1974), the social critic Ivan Illich argued that 15 mph was a reasonable upper limit for human movement. He took bicycles as his metric, unaware that bike speeds would increase along with those of every other kind of vehicle. Illich was ridiculed for this assertion, but if we think of it as an average speed for movement other than simply walking, 15 mph seems reasonable in most local contexts. With it in mind, we could distinguish among trains, trams, buses, cars, trucks, and bikes, and their various pathways and needs.

Currently, we mix aided-movement modes irrationally. Local, nonarterial streets are designed mostly to accommodate emergency vehicles, delivery trucks, and SUVs. Arterial streets are designed to funnel cars and trucks across town at higher speeds, in theory, than local streets permit. In reality, they jam up at certain times of day,

slowing movement to a crawl. At other times, their permitted speed makes them hazardous to pedestrians trying to cross them. “Calming” the traffic on these arterial roads is a current urban fixation, as are efforts to make it safer for bikes to interact with cars and trucks on these same throughways.

What is transit for?

Walkable urbanism needs local mobility. We need to turn our idea of regional transit inside out, making local access as important a goal for it as geographic reach and point-to-point speed. This is not to say that the latter goals are unimportant. Regions need backbone systems with reach and speed, but they also need locally serving networks that do this efficiently, just like the T line: frequent; direct and accessible to and from the neighborhoods served; and connected to the regional transit corridor along Market Street.

The example of San Francisco’s central subway also suggests that local jurisdictions will be crucial to making walkable centers more widely accessible. Along major transit spines, bus routes that connect each station to likely destinations, not just take riders back and forth from their places of residence, will set the stage for better future service with trams instead of buses, perhaps, on well-traveled routes. (When trams have protected rights-of-way, they’re faster than cars on congested arterials. Reducing lanes on those arterials is easier if there’s a convenient transit option for getting from points A to B.)

Precedents and portents

In 1989, I visited Tokyo when Richard Bender was a visiting chair at RCAST, the research campus of Tokyo University. He was living in Mejiro, which reminded him of the Brooklyn of his youth in the way the station opened out to a shopping street, with residential neighborhoods behind it. It takes in Gakushuin University [above], the 19th century “Peers’ School” founded to educate Japan’s aristocracy. Its presence

gives Mejiro a “university city” feeling not unlike Berkeley. Almost 30 years later, I visited a much-denser Mejiro. The residential lane that I'd walked down in 1989, one car plus one person wide, is still there, but the buildings along it are bigger.

Fire and garbage trucks in Tokyo [above left and center] are scaled to the lanes. Car registration in Japan, based on engine displacement, led to “micro-cars,” like Europe’s Smartcar. In France, the EV revolution spawned the Ami, a two-seat Citroen “city car” with a top speed of 25 mph and a range of 75 miles; drivers as young as 14 can own or rent them. Sweden’s Luvly makes a four-seat EV [above, right] with a top speed of 56 mph and a range of 62 miles, shippable in a flat pack, with two removable batteries weighing 33 pounds each.

Established automakers have tended to convert their existing, fullsize gas-powered models to EV. Indeed, GM recently announced that it will stop producing its compact Bolt EV sedan to focus on its large EV pickup. But in cities, car use is mostly local, so speed and range are less important than cost, convenience, and ease of parking. On this basis, EV pickups and SUVs could soon be an endangered species.

City streets were planned and designed for large vehicles. Efforts to make streets safer for walking and biking take this as given, but a shift in vehicular scale, reflecting today’s urban realities, would allow us to rethink the streetscape entirely, reallocating the flow of cars, bikes, and pedestrians, the way we allot space to them, as well as how cars and bikes are parked, recharged, and potentially shared.

Rethinking’s “how come”

A welter of arguments is made for changing the urban condition where it meets the street. The arguments have committed and passionate advocates, but they often overstate their case and push their point of view past what others consider reasonable. Cities struggle to make sense of their demands, often put forward in terms of urgency, citing climate change, traffic fatalities, and other reasons to take action.

The solutions these advocates put forward, while well-intentioned, are too narrow. They miss the possibilities for urbanity inherent in a

broader rethinking of our cities as an ecosystem. This was what Illich meant when he suggested that we slow down and live in cities that get us to places “fast enough ” He was really asking how cities can support human life, restoring what he called their “conviviality.”

Transit at different scales needs to be at the heart of this. What we’re really rethinking is how our cities work, how “walkable urbanism” is activated by locally serving transit that supports walkable destinations by making them accessible at “Illich speed,” as I’ve defined it: an average travel time of 15 mph in town, some of which involves walking or biking. By re-establishing stations and stops as ordering devices for city districts and neighborhoods, walking/biking can again become the main way people use them.

Where topography is an issue, supporting infrastructure like Hong Kong's hillside escalators can be introduced. As I saw in Rome in 1998, small “micro-buses” take people from one district to another along the main walking routes, so they can forgo cars or minimize their daily use. Use taxes on private cars here in the United States could help pay for less impactful alternatives. Like water and power, private cars could be charged a base rate for reasonable size and local travel, with the cost rising as size and use increase.

When urban politicians and developers picture the 15-minute city, they still focus on the big moves sports facilities, convention centers, regional transit hubs that have their place and value in any large city. But the 15-minute city concept actually hinges on activating secondary and tertiary centers, one district and one neighborhood at a time. With transit ridership still down nationwide and systems facing huge budget deficits and possible cuts, a flexibility of approaches to transit, large and small, seems not only timely but necessary.

Much has been made of the Bay Area’s deflating tech bubble, but it’s restoring a less drastically tiered economy that invites a more locally based approach to city-making. We share this situation with most other cities. Exigency forces choices, and local activation is a bigger factor. Achieving it needs safe, convenient, transit-aided local access much easier to accomplish if we think of the 15-minute city as a 15-mph one.

Drawing on my third Visiting Scholar paper, this article appeared in Common Edge , 16 May 2023, and ArchDaily , 19 May 2023.

Stuck in Beta

American suburbs, mined by novelists like John Cheever and, more recently, repopulated by Covid-19-rattled millennials seeking social distance and yards, veer between the utopian and the dystopic. In RadicalSuburbs , Dr. Amanda Kolson Hurley considers the outliers, beta versions of what a suburb might be from Economy, a mid-19thcentury religious cooperative near Pittsburgh, to the New Deal's Greenbelt new towns, to postwar experiments like Concord Park north of Philadelphia.

RadicalSuburbshas three strands. The first is their founders’ desire to reshape their communities to serve their vision of a better life. Kolson Hurley’s examples are an anarchist village embedded in a New Jersey railroad suburb, and two upwardly mobile, architect-designed residential enclaves outside Boston. The first was organized around a school and library; the other two, a generation later, around young children's need for shared open space and their parents' need for mutual support.

The second strand is the desire to create replicable models of new suburban towns incorporating what we might now describe as “new urbanist principles.” These trade the detached house-and-yard ideal for a denser housing typology and planning that emphasizes shared and walkable patterns of use.

Kolson Hurley gives Greenbelt, Maryland, as an early example. It was part of an ambitious program by the 1930s New Deal's Resettlement Administration, led by economist Redford Guy Tugwell. He sought to develop Garden City-influenced new towns across the country, promoting a suburban model that used land more efficiently

while delivering a higher quality of life for the residents. Greenbelt was billed as the future, and drew 350,000 visitors before it was quickly denounced as communist. Tugwell was sidelined and his program halted.

In telling Greenbelt's story, Kolson Hurley makes two related points. First, how often new suburban models have emerged with considerable fanfare, only to fail to take hold, influencing the market but never finding one. Second, how public housing initiatives in the US have been consistently undermined by rightwing politicians, murdered in their cradles by defunding.

Kolson Hurley uses Greenbelt to introduce the third strand of her book: the challenges Black Americans experienced, despite rising affluence, to relocate to the suburbs. Despite federal involvement, they were excluded from Greenbelt. World War II accelerated a Black urban migration. Empowered by the war and by the postwar dismantling of outright segregation, Black families found their housing options crimped.

In 1954, Morris Milgram, a Philadelphia builder, set out to develop Concord Park, which he hoped would be an integrated suburban community north of the city. He failed to grasp that Black families' lack of housing options created a pent-up demand for any suburban housing available. Imposing a quota, he limited Blacks to 40 percent of the houses, but over time, it became predominantly Black, with families who have lived there for several generations.

Reston, Virginia (p. 162) was also an open community, welcoming both Black and white families. Begun in 1960 by Robert E. Simon, son of a New York City real estate family, Reston was inspired by older European towns and cities, and Europe's new towns. By pioneering planned unit development zoning, Simon mixed uses and heights in ways most suburbs didn't allow. Reston combined town planning sophistication with then-current modernist forms and massing in warm brick rather than brutal precast. But Simon was ahead of the market and his new community failed to sell. Mobil took it over.

Today, Kolson Hurley notes, Reston feels pressured to add higher density to accommodate the demand its quality of life attracts. Simon saw the need for taller buildings he lived in a 16-story one he built but the proposed new development is more "urban" than some of its residents want. They see higher density as a threat to the "village life" that was part of Simon's original vision.

Reston shares this dilemma with many other communities not only the suburbs or even the exurbs that are steadily urbanizing due to

population growth, but also the urban residential neighborhoods that were originally "streetcar suburbs" in relation to their cities' downtowns and industrial zones.

President Biden, backed by the New Green Deal, may push for federally funding below-market housing. How to integrate it into existing urban and suburban neighborhoods; how much of it is needed and in what forms: the history RadicalSuburbsrecounts is relevant to housing debates at the federal, state, and local levels.

Kolson Hurley is asking us to take a new look at how we "make community." Her examples point to such attributes as allocating more land for shared, not private use; seeing gathering as intrinsic to dwelling; and considering walking and biking to local destinations, including transit, as a key measure of livability.

She's also asking us to consider the question she raises about Reston: how can we add density without losing the character of what exists? Some contend the question shouldn't be raised at all that what exists reflects exclusionary tactics. Reston's origin story resists this argument, but other communities have well-documented histories of exclusion. What then?

RadicalSuburbsstresses the importance of envisioning new models and, crucially, developing policies and strategies to pull them out of Beta and into real use. It won't be easy America is still "an adventure in real estate," as James Baldwin noted, leaning heavily on the market. What the market delivers is market-rate housing. Augmenting it so that those now excluded are housed well in those communities, too so that adding density lifts all boats: this is the challenge to our imagination that Kolson Hurley sets out.

A review of Amanda Kolson Hurley, RadicalSuburbs:ExperimentalLivingon theFringesoftheAmericanCity , Belt Publishing, 2019, written as a journal post for ARCADE , 25 March 2021.

Boris Johnson's Wakeup Call

I did a double-take when TheTimesof London reported that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson intends to end local control of real estate development there.1 Reaction was swift and mostly critical. “The antagonism of Johnson and his colleagues towards anything local is clearly visceral,” wrote Simon Jenkins in TheGuardian . “But his reform is of a new order. It cancels the democratic right of people to exercise some control over their immediate surroundings, over the character and appearance of their neighborhood. This is not mere nimbyism any more than Johnson’s friends are mere profiteers. But it is a civil right that deserves better than to be smothered by commissars.” 2

What Johnson is proposing is a hodgepodge of Prince Charles–inflected New Urbanism with John Ruskin–inspired borrowings from Roger Scruton. But in proposing to control real estate development from the top and gut local control long enshrined in British planning law (not to mention the Magna Carta), it is echoed by proposed legislation now in play in California.

For readers outside the Golden State, let’s review the situation here and the debate it has engendered: A cohort of politicians the Bay Area’s Scott Wiener, David Chiu, Nancy Skinner, and Buffy Wicks, and San Diego’s Toni Atkins are pushing a legislative package3 that would put teeth in statewide housing production targets and dictate new housing types and densities in most California towns and cities, limiting local control. These bills find support from San Francisco’s SPUR, which argues in a recent report that housing should be considered as infrastructure:

State government has a very important role to play in addressing the housing crisis because it can create new rules around what gets built where. … State government can also create new sticks and carrots to discourage or encourage certain behaviors. It can diminish local control for jurisdictions that don’t help to address the housing crisis and offer new funding for

jurisdictions that work to build the housing needed. It can also reform existing laws, like the California Environmental Quality Act, that make it harder to build housing in already-developed areas.4

SPUR implies that housing is a public good, like others that underpin the public realm. It posits a cultural shift in how housing is viewed, emphasizing the unmet needs of renters and the homeless. This echoes the Green New Deal's sense of housing as a right. It would fund the renovation of existing public housing, to the benefit cities like New York with large, deteriorating stocks of it. While stopping short of renewing federal development of public housing, the Green New Deal at least acknowledges its importance.

In the wake of the 2008 Recession, California eliminated redevelopment agencies and cut funding for below-market housing.

Rather than restoring funding, some state legislators have blamed local zoning and tried to use state-mandated density bonuses to spur affordable housing development. Both adopted bills and recent amendments to the Housing Density Bonus Law were designed to stimulate affordable housing production through the streamlining of approval processes, the provision of additional density bonuses as incentives, the creation of a CEQA exemption, and the supply of a new funding mechanism for sustainable affordable transitoriented development (TOD).5

Analyzing California housing production against Regional Housing Need Assessments (RHNA) targets, Gabrielle Layton asserts that while market-rate housing production substantially outstripped its RHNA target, production of below-market-rate housing lagged its targets, especially for the "low and very low income" category.

“Although it is still too soon to assess the impact of the two bills passed in 2019,” she notes, “it seems clear that prior incentive approaches are not working as the state is building less new affordable housing than it was in the 2000s.” For this reason, she questions the current legislation’s tilt toward encouraging market-rate housing production.6 SPUR, however, takes the position that market-rate production is crucial to housing affordability:

Without a sufficient amount of market-rate housing, high-income workers will continue to outcompete everyone else and shift housing prices for the entire region. Building more housing for market-rate buyers can reduce their impact on the housing market as a whole and help limit rapid increases in price.7

SPUR recommends “housing targets that are almost double the RHNA estimates and slightly more than double the region’s annual production from 2000 to 2018.”8 While its targets are regional, SPUR cites the McKinsey Global Institute’s projection of a shortfall of 3.5 million units, based on 2025 housing needs a figure that the legislative package’s authors appear to rely on. Layton has challenged it, calculating the shortfall at 1.4 million units. As she notes, the shortfall is only in the below-market categories; market-rate housing is doing fine, consistently hitting its RHNA targets.9

Layton faults the current legislative package for failing to revive state funding of below-market housing development at its pre-Recession levels. Instead, the legislation’s authors blame local delays in approvals of higher-density development as the bottleneck and assume that by limiting local control and adding bonus incentives for higher densities, the market will make up all shortfalls.

Many of these bills offer additional developer incentives (e.g., increased density) while lowering affordability requirements (e.g., agreements to provide affordable housing) already in place in existing law. … As a result, this could lead to fewer affordable units being constructed as the statewide requirements to receive bonuses may require fewer affordable units.10

The shared issue of overriding local control of real estate development makes the unfolding debate in the UK around Johnson’s proposal of particular interest to Californians. That debate is front-page news in the UK, with a more even field between protagonists, pro and con. The proposal is rightly considered to be radical, even by those who favor it. Unwittingly, Johnson has triggered the debate California should be having.

The proposed legislative package in California is largely a product of the state's Progressive Left, supported by think tanks like SPUR and UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. In contrast to the controversy Johnson and Cummings have raised in the UK with their proposal, it is the consensus view here, and the opposition to it is disorganized and underfunded in comparison.

Livable California is an example. Running on donations, it nonetheless serves as a clearinghouse of information about pending legislation, the sheer complexity of which is an obstacle to the average citizen. It hosts weekly webinars featuring critics and opponents of the legislation. And it rallies its membership to weigh in with the State Legislature also not a simple matter when bills come up for vote. Its

colorful chat feed during the webinars reveals the many side issues that housing politics engenders.

A local opinion piece typifies three themes that unite the opposition: that overriding local control is unjustified because the housing crisis is overstated; that the legislation is tipped toward market-rate housing; and that the legislation’s authors are doing the bidding of powerful backers and have a built-in conflict of interest.11

It’s true that local control of real estate development in California cities is problematic. Even for very small projects, entitlements and regulatory review can be glacially slow and expensive. The root of the problem, however, is the extent to which the process has become almost universally case-by-case, rendering meaningless the by-right assurances that underpin zoning and building regulation. A case-bycase process encourages spot up-zoning that undermines existing zoning without updating it in a concerted way that would engage the communities involved. If NIMBYism exists, it partly reflects these communities' sense of being abused "from above."

The current legislative package does nothing to tackle this problem, substituting a top-down directive to up-zone that limits local checks on the scale and nature of building projects. It does this under the banner of “affordable housing,” emphasizing increased housing production as a cure-all. However, as Layton's data show, market-rate developers are the main beneficiaries. To accept that incentives for increased marketrate housing production will address this in the absence of state funding, you have to believe there’s an overall housing shortfall here of crisis proportions and take SPUR’s “domino effect” premise seriously:

As more higher-income households compete for a limited number of available homes on the market, they bid up rents and purchase prices across the board. This particularly affects new entrants into the housing market, making finding a first time home expensive if not impossible for everyone but the high earners.12

In both California and in the UK, the top-down proposals on offer present a Hobson’s Choice between dysfunctional local control and top-down measures that resolve it by eliminating it. Missing is the political will, locally and centrally, to reform local and regional control of development by pressing communities to plan their futures seriously and establish zoning and building regulations that reflect them. In California, counties are the democratically elected bodies best suited to coordinate these plans, mediating thorny issues of where development should go. Also missing is the political will, both at the state and federal

level, to invest public funds in below-market housing production. In California, this would require a tax regime that forces the industries that are the real sources of its wealth to pay their fair share of the public realm.

The heated debate in the UK is a reminder that the issue of central versus local control isn't trivial. The goals invoked by progressive California legislators may be worthy, but given their focus on overriding local control, they warrant much more scrutiny. SPUR and the Terner Center are too quick to accept their premises and dismiss their critics. Yet, as Boris Johnson has shown, populists far less identified with progress can play this game, too, invoking the same crisis as an excuse to grab the wheel. California’s package is a questionable fix, but SPUR and the Terner Center are all-in. My sense is that we have better options. Back to the drawing board!

Notes

1. Francis Elliott, Melissa York, and Oliver Wright: "Boris Johnson targets wealthy areas in radical shake-up of planning laws, TheTimes , 6 August 2020.

2. Simon Jenkins, "Boris Johnson cries 'nimbyism,' but his planning changes will be disastrous," TheGuardian , 4 August 2020.

3. Gabrielle Layton, "2020 Housing Bills: Legislation in an Age of Uncertainty," Embarcadero Institute, 28 July 2020.

4. Sarah Karlinsky and Kristy Wang, "What Will It Really Take to Create an Affordable Bay Area?" SPUR, March 2020.

5. Layton, op. cit.

6. Layton, ibid.

7. Karlinsky and Wang, op. cit.

8. Karlinsky and Wang, ibid.

9. Layton, "California's 3.5 Million Housing Shortage Number Raises Questions, Embarcadero Institute, July 2019.

10. Layton, "2020 Housing Bills," op. cit.

11. Susan Kirsch, "Nix the Nine: A Remedy for Harmful Housing Policy," MarinPost , 5 July 2020.

12. Karlinsky and Wang, op. cit.

Written for CommonEdge , 10 August 2020.

Don’t Call It Progress

Watching California State Senator Scott Wiener dice up his discredited SB50 as a nine-bill salad, I’m struck by the pass he gets not just from think tanks like SPUR and the Terner Center, but from YIMBY tweeters: “Scott Wiener is a progressive and the SB50 salad is progress defined” is their consensus. (See note 1 for a summary of the legislation.)

But Wiener has opponents on his left. As the San Francisco Tenants Union notes, he leads the pack in taking funding from real estate and developer interests.2 SFTU questions if SB50’s intent is to bolster housing affordability or repay those donors by forcing higher density development on California cities and towns by overriding local zoning. SB50 is based on the trickle-down theory that adding to the marketrate housing supply will result in greater affordability, SFTU explains. SPUR also subscribes to this theory and is all-in, but SFTU is skeptical. It’s also wary that forcing communities to rezone for higher density will displace minority owners and tenants. It cites NYC’s experience as the reason for its concern.3 This view is corroborated by UC Davis Professor Fred Block:

Developers continue to focus on high-income customers, and those of low and moderate income face an ever more difficult housing market. The only market-type mechanism available in this context is gentrification. Both smaller developers and families purchase homes in some predominantly lowincome neighborhoods and invest in upgrading the houses.4

Wiener’s opponent in November is Jackie Fielder, a Democratic Socialist in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, US Representative

for New York’s 14th Congressional District. Fielder has opposed corporations’ dodging their need to pay their fair share of the public realm they impact. It is telling that Wiener opposed San Francisco’s Prop. C, which would have taxed corporations in the city to help pay for below-market housing and homeless services.5 (Seattle also tried this; Jeff Bezos defeated it.)

It may take a Democratic Socialist to spot a Left Coast progressive poseur, but Scott Wiener is in the grand tradition of neoliberalism, so adept at changing its stripes to keep its project on track: “to become broadly embodied in belief systems about what is possible, what is realistic, what is efficient, what is economic … until it can be hard to imagine an alternative.”65 And why? So “a handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life … to maximize their personal profit.” (Robert W. McChesney, 1999.)6

Wiener’s legislative program tracks his donors’ interests. (His donors also include the cannabis industry and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Neoliberal Michael Bloomberg gives his profit-making activities a wrapping of “good causes” like gun control and limiting consumer access to sugared drinks and tobacco products. Of these, Wiener picked tobacco.) Wiener’s approach to housing aligns with this he proclaims it as the route to housing affordability, pushing market-rate housing, which benefits his donors, while ignoring the below-market categories where the real shortages are.7

The Green New Deal that Representative Ocasio-Cortez helped put together calls for federally funded renovation of some 1.0 million public housing units.8 That’s the kind of progress that will start to address our below-market shortages. In California, we also need the State to restore the funding for below-market housing production that thenGovernor Jerry Brown slashed in 2008. Despite our recovery, those funds have never been restored. Without them, the acute shortage of below-market housing will continue.

To the extent that the SB50 salad displaces mostly minority households by giving developers free rein, the shortage could actually get worse. Trickle-down is part of neoliberal magic thinking, like Ronnie’s Laffer Curve and Maggie’s selloff of Council Housing.

Call it what it is. It’s not progress.

Notes

1. Here are three summaries from July and August 2020:

§ Michael Lane, “SPUR-Sponsored Housing Bills Move Forward as State Legislative Session Enters Homestretch,” SPUR, 14 August 2020.

§ Gabrielle Layton, “2020 Housing Bills: Legislation in an Age of Uncertainty,” Embarcadero Institute, r28 July 2020.

§ “SB50 is Hiding in 9 Bad Bills,” Livable California, June 2020

2. Jacob Worcher, “Scott Wiener Takes More Real Estate Money Than Any Other Politician in the California Legislature,” San Francisco Tenants Union, 16 January 2020 and KnockLA , 13 January 2020.

3. Caroline Spivack, “How NYC rezonings spur ‘racialized displacement throughout our city,” CurbedNewYork , 5 December 2019.

4. Fred Block: “Beyond the Commodity: Toward a New Understanding of Political Economy, AmericanAffairs , Fall 2020.

5. Tessa Holland, NavigatingSlow,‘fast’andcraftedknowledges , Ph.D. thesis, Newcastle University, December 2017, p. 18.

6. Robert W. McChesney, “Introduction” to Noam Chomsky, ProfitOver People , Seven Stories, 1998, p. 7.

7. Gabrielle Layton, op.cit.

8. “A Green New Deal for American Public Housing Communities,” Data forProgress , The McHarg Center, 2020.

Posted on Medium , 20 August 2020.

On Listening to a Pandemic

“Enlightened vision is actualized in the mountains, grasses, trees, earth, stone, fences, and walls. Do not have any doubt about it.” Dōgen Eihei

In late January, my friend Vickie Wang left her mother in Taipei and returned to Shanghai as the coronavirus lockdown descended on that metropolis. To allay others’ fears, she started blogging. Her daily posts reflect the rolling nature of this catastrophe: it spreads virally, as we say, and to stop it, everything had to stop. As it did, people noticed despite their misery how quickly the air cleared up. Even the Himalayas were visible again from the plains of India

The pandemic gives us insight into what life could be like pace Jeff Bezos and his stopwatch if the holdover from Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford were finally expunged from work; and if the petroleum oligarchy that still runs things, despite the steady tapering of demand, were finally and definitively seen off. We sense we’re at a cusp, that we might find a new operating system beyond even-later, last-mogulstanding capitalism an OS better suited to our planet.

The pandemic makes one big point: a crisis involving all of humanity demands a coordinated, cross-humanity response. Even as they close their borders, every nation-state knows that’s not enough. The constant undermining of cross-border organizations like the UN and WHO has to be stopped and reversed, rebuilding broad trust and a well-funded mandate to act appropriately on the other planetary emergency: climate change and environmental degradation.

We see vividly how our terrible habits make it happen. Like a fivepack-a-day smoker who manages to stop, we look in the mirror and see our yellowed faces and fingers return to health in surprisingly rapid fashion. The ways we work, consume, and travel are ripe for change, to name three obvious things that the pandemic has disrupted. Behind them are all of the societal assumptions about employment, for example, despite automation’s incursions.

We see this, but it takes humanity acting in concert to get to something better. Do we have to wait for it all to fall apart or have we just seen it do so? “Humanity acting in concert” can and probably should be a region taking steps that reflect its own situation and social construct. Like the pandemic, we’ll learn from each other while finding different ways forward. We can agree on the main goals. If we work toward them in unison, sharing our experiences and ceasing our bickering, it’s likely that regional progress will add up to planetary progress fairly quickly.

Since the oil crisis in the early 1970s, California has led on environmental and energy regulation. It’s big enough that it sets standards elsewhere, which is why the Trump Administration has muscled in. One opportunity the pandemic affords is for the states, coastal and inland, of the American west to pursue a Green New Deal that sees in our “mountains and rivers without end,” as the Zen reformer Dōgen Eihei put it a millennium ago, a direct, planetary reflection of our health as one species among others. It flips on its head our idea that nature bows to us. The pandemic says no. We need to listen and act.

Written as an ARCADEjournal post, 22 April 2020.

The Bay Region as an Ecosystem

The San Francisco Bay Area lacks regional governance appropriate to the size of its economy, which is roughly as large as the Netherlands. No single major city dominates the region, leaving decision-making to county and city governments, and a variety of regional and area-based authorities and jurisdictions. The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), each with its own board, coordinate regional policy. The MTC board also oversees the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA), although it has a separate advisory board. ABAG and MTC’s boards are appointed by county and city governments. (Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin is ABAG’s President.)

Regional governance depends on mutual cooperation among a subsection of the elected leaders of Bay Area counties and cities. Only indirectly accountable to voters, ABAG and MTC lack political power, which leaves it to our counties and cities to respond to federal and state regulatory and legislative interventions when effective regional responses are needed.

How we define the Bay Area has a bearing on its governance. We could map it to its watershed or consider it as part of a megaregion that reflects economic ties and transit links across a much larger area. What’s needed is to provide governance at a level that suits the issues raised. If the region is defined by its watershed, then its stewardship as a watershed is crucial to its future. Responsibility for the watershed is shared by different agencies, each with its own agenda. Water is political, but should it be? Decisions about watersheds can have

consequences for their regions centuries after they were taken and implemented. (The Venice Lagoon is an example.)

Taking stock

It’s important to recognize the remarkable attributes of the Bay Area. Tech may be deflating, but it remains an important hub of that global industry cluster. The region is home to three leading research universities, two of them public. Stanford (engineering), UC Berkeley (science and mathematics), and UC San Francisco (medical science) give the region an international profile for basic and applied research. They underpin the region’s economy and its quality of life. While the region is subject to natural disasters, it has a temperate climate and a topography that shapes land use and gives it a stunning natural beauty factors that still draw people here and induce them to stay.

The deflating of the Tech bubble echoes the dot.com bust in 2000. Such events are consequential, but their consequences aren’t existential. Things come back to earth and, if the region’s past is any guide, rise from that new floor. If office towers are trading at huge discounts, that’s not so different from the Savings & Loan crisis in the late 1980s. Housing is stalled by overbuilding and higher interest rates. This too will sort itself out.

We can impose fees and local taxes, but our public realm depends on patchworks of revenue. Public transit is in trouble because so much of its current funding comes from fares, and fares are down as commutes have vanished the same phenomenon that’s emptied out downtown office towers. Yet we use public transit. In time, commuting will revive, but trips will be more balanced between peak and non-peak hours.

Our problem isn’t the market but our chronic condition of “austerity amid abundance,” a situation found in late-capitalist economies like the UK that fail to tax wealth at levels sufficient to finance a robust public realm. Like the Bay Area, the UK is no economic slouch, despite a relatively worse performance following Brexit. (Our state economy is now bigger than the UK’s.) But its public realm. like ours, is underfunded for an economy of its size. Singapore, in contrast, funds a robust public realm with relatively low but hard-to-avoid taxes on personal and corporate wealth. The cost of its public realm is shared equitably by individuals and corporations, whereas here, corporations are lightly taxed, while the rich shelter their wealth from taxation. This leaves property owners, employees, consumers, and bond measures to make up the difference. The result is insufficient funding support the kind of robust public realm that an economy of our size needs.

I realize that Singapore is a city-state and the Bay Area isn’t, but San Francisco tried and failed to impose a corporate tax, quelled by lobbyists. Our lack of regional governance makes us vulnerable to interest group and corporate lobbying that threatens reprisals for taxes and regulations they can evade by choosing more business-friendly locations. Tech decamped for Austin and other cities, but those moves made it harder for them to attract talent. We appear to have more leverage than we realized. So, even if we lack the political apparatus of regional governance, can we nonetheless start punching at our actual weight? Let’s consider this.

Think 2030, not just 2050

In the midst of the pandemic, ABAG and MTC adopted Plan Bay Area 2050, which sets out their regional ambitions for the midcentury. The plan was criticized on its debut as a “camel,” a typical product of a large committee, with something for everyone and very few specifics. But 30-year plans are like this by definition. Their generality can still be useful if the goals they set out reflect broad consensus. A precise road map is less helpful that is, more likely to be wrong than a sense of overall direction.

My longtime writing partner, Professor Richard Bender, noted that 30 years is a good timeframe to consider significant change. If 2020 was in some sense anticipated in 1990, what changed over those 30 years that we would deem significant? What didn’t? This thought exercise reminds us that many of our challenges recur, even as they take new forms. (“Resolving” speaks to their episodic nature.)

The big changes we hope to see in 2050 will likely result from incremental changes we manage to accomplish along the way. We need five- and 10-year plans to address whatever we fail to anticipate. If reality prompts us to shift our priorities, we can do that we’ll do it anyway, of course but following up, tracking how our plans are unfolding, adjusting our strategies and reallocating our investments: this is how it works. ABAG and MTC are well positioned to lead this, tapping the best minds, of which we have many.

Think like an ecosystem

Left to their own devices, cities respond to urgent matters by looking for immediate solutions. They may seek community input and expert opinion, but the measures taken often fail to anticipate the problems they create. And because city budgets are limited, the burden of compliance usually falls on others. Cities will also try to solve problems

unilaterally that are better tackled in concert with other cities, counties, and/or the region as a whole.

To think of a city as an ecosystem is to see it holistically and remind its districts and neighborhoods to take a similar view. These different levels matter, and the boundaries we set between them are artificial, porous, and sometimes wrongheaded or even impossible. Thinking of a city as an ecosystem makes us ask “What time is this place?” and consider the different tempos of change. Nuances surface and keep a city from acting too narrowly. They also help guard it against expecting results that its partial or underfunded actions are unlikely to deliver.

Thinking of it as an ecosystem helps us see what a healthy region looks like. When the pandemic cut traffic drastically across ours, for example, everyone noticed that the air immediately cleared up.

Some problems are staring us in the face, but others have to be monitored and measured. An ecosystem provides feedback. It gives us a framework for facing challenges before they become crises. It suggests that governance in its different forms is ultimately a dialogue among different actors at different levels, not excluding those parts of the ecosystem that can’t speak for themselves, but need spokespeople who track their well-being and alert us to problems.

Parts of this framework are already in place, but not yet instrumental to this dialogue. Nor have we tried very hard to foster it. We lapse too often into top-down actions taken for the sake of acting. Our success stories reflect the harder work of engaging with relevant communities to reach an actionable consensus. It’s a constant process because a region is in constant motion. A framework helps us see the interconnections and interdependencies, the gaps and disconnects.

Regional governance’s most important role may be as the region’s steward. Our research universities can support this, providing the science and tech needed to monitor the ecosystem and inform public policy. Both convene discussion, promote dialogue, and keep the longer term in view.

Politics, “the art of the possible,” as Willie Brown put it, is messy and short-term, but benefits from knowing the bigger picture. Denial and

resistance accompany significant change as voters wrap their heads around it and weigh the political response. An informed electorate is better at working through this, responding to problems and pressures in real time and real life. Ordinary people can prompt innovation and breakthroughs, if heard.

We can qualify Brown’s truism by adding that politics is the art of constant persuasion. Ignoring this, a very common act of hubris on politicians’ parts, is ultimately perilous if the electorate is unpersuaded. Even in authoritarian states, the potentates can push their luck only so far before people hit the streets. When it comes to significant change, persuasion in both directions is absolutely crucial. A healthy ecosystem depends on it.

Sources

My writing partner Emily Marthinsen suggested the idea of the Bay Area as an ecosystem in a paper we wrote and presented in 2016 at the Univer-Cities Conference in Newcastle, NSW, Australia.

The reference to levels comes from John Habraken, who argues in Supports that each level should make decisions in discussion with the levels above and below it An ecosystem is broader than this, but I take his point about the need for the discussion to be bottom-up as well as top-down.

Posted on Medium , 19 May 2023.

Kevin Kelly Looks Ahead

Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of the tech magazine, Wired , summarizes his thoughts and theses about tech’s future in a new book, TheInevitable . As he makes his way through such topics as hyper-interactivity, the end of privacy, the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics, and the scaling effect of data agglomeration, Kelly is always cognizant of tech’s dystopian potential, yet he remains optimistic. Let’s consider this.

As the book’s title suggests, Kelly believes that resisting tech is futile. Moreover, civilization will temper any untoward consequences. He posits, for example, that the democratization of content creation, in tandem with platforms for sharing and even funding it, will be rescued by the curating function of humans and/or artificial intelligence-driven algorithms. The goal is for content to find its perfect audience, which seems benign and “frictionless,” but risks as critics of Facebook have noted spoon-feeding each audience a tailored viewpoint. The ubiquity of smart devices, another win for democratization, can be hacked and sifted to enable unobtrusive social control.

In my view, technology is inherently “political.” I put the word in quotes to emphasize that it is subject both to the vagaries of human, often hierarchical manipulation and to formal structures that are politically established and administered. Tech in a corporate sense is also closely tied to global capitalism for funding and commercial exploitation. As Giovanni Arrighi noted in 2009, global capitalism has historically sought to define and operate within “non-territorial spaces-of-flows” that resist local and national regulation.1

Kelly’s optimism about tech may relate to its origins in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences fields that view the world to varying degrees as “problems to be solved” pragmatically and abstractly. Horst Rittel skewered this optimistic view in 1969, showing that an entire class of “wicked” problems falls outside these fields’ provenance.2 Nassim Nicholas Taleb reinforced this in 2001 with his distinction between moderate and extreme risk. He argued against the hubris of “quants” traders in financial instruments who believed they could leverage the tools and methods of “fintech,” financial engineering, to beat the market.3 Paul Feyerabend, Rittel’s colleague at UC Berkeley, argued convincingly that the scientific method itself is a fiction and that science is political.4

Arrighi, Rittel, Taleb, and Feyerabend collectively provide a corrective to tech’s optimistic narrative. Arrighi implies that tech is just

one more manifestation of global capitalism. Rittel and Taleb point to the irrationality of our species and the randomness of events that undermine tech’s attempts to “tame” its problems. And Arrighi, Rittel, and Feyerabend reject its claims to float above politics, even as its disruptions roil the established order.

Tech optimism, like global business’s animal spirits, reflects its perennial confidence that “there’s a fix.” Enumerating the trends, Kelly mostly sticks to the script. When he addresses the tension between hierarchies and networks, the book becomes interesting.

Hierarchy's dilemma

The real-time adventure that is Chinese national politics hinges in part on whether the ruling party can maintain command-and-control in the face of a networked populace and enterprises that need to range free in order to transform its export-based economy.

The CCP is not the only large, networked organization facing this dilemma. Kelly notes that global enterprises in general are shifting from products to platforms, a shift that requires them to “act more like governments in keeping opportunities ‘flat’ and equitable” (p. 153). Even a product-focused enterprise can only function in today’s networked world “by keeping its hierarchy from fully taking over,” he adds (p. 153). “The proper dosage of hierarchy is just barely enough to vitalize a very large collective. We’ve learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed” (152–53). While noting the limits of tech-aided “democratization” (or “open source”), which he characterizes as “the brute dumbness of the hive mind” (153), Kelly still believes that tech can pull us into a future that gets us past this.

The exhilarating frontier is the myriad ways in which we can mix out-ofcontrolness with small elements of top-down control. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all top down. Now it can contain both control and messiness. Never before have we been able to make systems with as much messy quasi-control in them. We are rushing into an expanding possibility space of decentralization and sharing that was never accessible before because it was not technically possible. (p.152)

In describing global, networked enterprises, Kelly uses the word "governments," but he really means "governance." Organizations like these have to cede most of their decision-making, order-giving power to “nodes” that are largely autonomous and self-managing. Governance makes this sharing of power possible by providing the guardrails that keep things humming with minimal static.

Looking beyond traditional enterprises for a model, Kelly picks Wikipedia. While the choice speaks to his background as the editor of a tech publication, it points to what he calls “the new collectives” (152) consciously nonhierarchical, yet with just enough hierarchy to uphold their foundational standards and reasons for being.

The importance of governance

I found his argument for networked collectivities that use tech-enabled flatness to reset the balance of power to be the most interesting part of Kelly’s book, but achieving this is far from inevitable. Tech has long been split between open source and autonomous teams, on the one hand the aspects that depend on an absolute minimum of hierarchy and the gods of command and control, on the other. This split is not unique to tech, of course.

In the last decade of his life, Horst Rittel worked on IBIS issuebased information systems an initiative that anticipated the enormous computational power tech now possesses. IBIS amounted to a collective memory bank that, prompted, would inform any current debate with a relevant history of the issues and the decisions taken. Rittel argued that the most interesting problems, the real challenges humanity faces, are only resolvable temporarily or provisionally. Along with Buckminster Fuller, he saw that tech could make information both universally, “instantly” available and germane to the issues at hand. Rittel and Fuller both saw information as fodder for open-ended, democratic problem solving, not as grist for top-down social control. `A social compact unites and activates a networked enterprise like Wikipedia. Tech facilitates its radical flatness, enabling it to achieve the light touch that Kelly argues is needed to support and accelerate a network’s creative or productive potential. But governance is key: Wikipedia has the equivalent of a Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Never have we needed that governance more than now. Tech on its own won’t provide it, but it could give us faster, more transparent ways to model, test, and strengthen new social compacts that let networked communities deal collectively and democratically with the “wicked” problems we perennially face. “Politics,” being human, is irrational, and governance is the best we’ve managed as a species to compensate. Kudos to Kelly for pointing to it; I hope his next book forgoes the trends and focuses on it.

Notes

1. Giovanni Arrighi, TheLongTwentiethCentury , Johns Hopkins, 2009, p. 82. His idea of “non-territorial spaces-of-flows” points to the cloud and digital connectivity.

2. Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” PolicySciences4,1973, pp.155–173.

3. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, FooledbyRandomness , Random House, 2001.

4. Paul Feyerabend,AgainstMethod , New Left Books, 1975, Verso, 1978.

A review of Kevin Kelly, TheInevitable:Understandingthe12Forcesthatwill ShapeourFuture , Viking, 2016, written for Technology|Architecture+Design (TAD), 1:1, May 2017, pp. 114–115.

Living in a Material World

“The true reality of an object lies only in a part of it; the rest is the heavy tribute it pays to the material world in exchange for its existence in space.”

Fernando Pessoa, TheBookofDisquiet , New Directions, 2017, p. 76.

Buildings fall into two broad categories those that aim for this pareddown essence and those that make a display of the tribute paid. Bucky Fuller idealized the former, seeking lightness in the manner of Zeno’s paradox. His self-proclaimed disciple Norman Foster makes a fetish of the tribute, structure rendered as ornament.

So-called minimalism, if mired in materiality, uses endurance as its building blocks or shrinks things tiny houses, guestroom capsules, sleeping pods hoping we won’t notice their solidity. Traditional Japanese houses, with demountable wooden frames and mats and screens that are ephemeral by design, are the exception.

At a certain point, Fuller introduced time into his concept of lightness. His four-dimensional houses were as physically light as he could make them, but they were also intended to be lived in only when needed. If this idea is played out, everything might change. We can imagine a service economy in which a fresh set of clothes follows us from place to place, arriving in the night. For ultimate portability, even our shoes might change espadrilles, sandals, clogs, or boots instead of shoes designed more exactly for our feet. We may retain one seasonal outdoor pair, shed each quarter.

To extend Pessoa’s observation, this "lightness" also involves a sleight of hand, with an apparatus no less weighty for being external to the households it serves. As we cease to shop as we did, the mass goods we still buy come from warehouses in delivery trucks. Despite the threat of automation, workers handle this. Artisanal workshops, farmers/specialty markets, craft breweries, and individually owned restaurants and cafés are each locale's walkable counterpoint.

How the great “houses” of bespoke goods find their place is not yet clear. Will they form networks of affiliates that produce bespoke goods and import them for their high-end clientele? If life is local and segmented, retail rents will fall back to earth. The food and beverage business might split between commodities and imports obtainable in bulk and what a region’s farms and vineyards raise to sell seasonally to local buyers through local shops and markets.

Warehouse retailing already reflects how politics affects trade. The urge to decouple from China reflects a clearer sense of the weight of the

tribute. This can be extended to intellectual property, for example, which we’ve often handed over to gain access to a market we saw as vast and steadily wealthier. True, but also a market innately given to import substitution. Ironically, architecture was a leading indicator the high-grade steel and tailored façades imported from Korea were substituted by Chinese products five years later. Now China is looking for other places to export its factories. Southeast Asia is pricing itself out, so Africa is the logical next choice resource- and labor-rich. China will revive its countryside, recreating a docile, agrarian village cohort and tone down its restless cities. Only the bought-off, upwardly mobile middle classes will thrive in cities, served by an underclass of ambitious migrants. Industry will be tamed and pollution will be reduced. All that will move to Africa, which will grow fetid catering to this new colonial power.

The big democracies Brazil, the US, and India resemble each other in their contradictions. Parts of them aspire to rise to a higher standard; other parts are mired in corruption and ignorance. But they can no longer hide their problems. They will either reform or fragment. Regions, if they control their own fates, face the same existential choice work together or be divided and conquered.

An oligarchy already runs ours, arranging for concessions to be made by others to the restless underclass in order to remain in power. Politicians negotiate this process, dogging the professional class with fees and taxes to mollify blocks of disaffected voters who blame that class, not the oligarchy, for their plight. National policies to tax the corporate sources of oligarchic wealth may undo this, with corporations finally made to pay the real cost of their local impacts.

“Object” in Pessoa's sense should find wider application not just to buildings or blood diamonds, but everything that trades on its surface appearance and keeps too much hidden or unmentioned, whether it involves sweatshops, exploited labor, pollution, or profits that in a societal sense are unearned and even grotesque. The rest is too large, too out of scale with everything around it, to be ignored. We have to reckon with its true reality: the size of the tribute.

Posted on Mediumon 12 December 2020.

Is It Time for Architects to Unionize?

Unions are a trend among college-educated young people, the New YorkTimesreports1 They seek solidarity collective leverage to bring about desired changes that are being resisted. While Amazon and Starbucks get the headlines, younger architects are also organizing. Doing so is urged on by The Architecture Lobby, a group that leans Democratic Socialist. The Manhattan-based firm SHoP was a recent, ultimately unsuccessful target of a group of its employees and a sponsoring trade union.

The response of SHoP’s owners was disbelief: Aren’t we all in this together? A working assumption of urban firms on both coasts is that they’re progressive, as reflects their cities’ politics. There’s a dividing line in what “progressive” means, however: Millennial and below, coastal professionals lean socialist; Gen X and above still look mainly to the market to solve social problems.

To organize, a sense of grievance has to be widely enough shared to win over a majority of those affected. Amazon’s warehouse workers have had some success because the company’s ethos is a mix of Frederick Taylor’s pursuit of efficiency and Big Tech’s “insanely great” cult of sacrifice, augmented by AI. Architecture firms can be exploitative, and even toxic, but people can take a piss without issue.

“Architects love what they do, so they’re ripe for exploitation,” David Baker once told me, but the era of free love is over. Studying to become an architect is more and more expensive, even at public universities, and young architects enter the workplace laden with debts. Their ambitions expect a faster payoff than has traditionally been the case for the profession. In short, there are gaps between what’s being sought and what’s offered. That can feel oppressive.

The appeal of Democratic Socialism to this cohort reflects its insight that not every problem they face can be solved by even the largest and most progressive architecture firms without a broader effort to strengthen the public realm. Public goods like childcare and education, healthcare, housing, and transit are starved of funds. Their cost and often their scarcity contribute to young architects’ sense of oppression, but even as they organize their firms, they’re pushing for regime change.

Democratic Socialism’s premise is that market capitalism is compatible with an adequately funded public realm, but absent such funding, the public realm will fray and society’s broader prosperity will falter. During the pandemic, the public realm got a huge, if haphazard, dose of funding, reflecting Trump Administration's sense that without it, things could actually have fallen apart. Biden has continued this in a more targeted fashion, accepting the Democratic Socialist premise.

Aren’t we all in this together?

The SHoP episode shows that are and we aren’t. Where people differ has become problematic. The difference is substantive. SHoP looks progressive, but it’s tied to a late-capitalist economy whose oligarchs view the public realm as philanthropy. The architect-economist Kevin Batcho notes that the US was a middle-class paradise through the 1960s because we were competing with the USSR for Third World allegiance. When the Soviet Union toppled, the neoliberal gloves came off. Social welfare shrank quickly as a belief that markets could maintain it gained currency.

So, here we are. Public goods are privatized, and instead of middleclass affluence, we have a growing gap between the top tier and everyone else. Despite their gentlemanly pretensions, architects are part of the professional class, one to which my family has belonged since the 19th century. Unions rarely figured; instead, we have the AIA, an august body that resembled the US House of Representatives in attracting older white males whose outlooks reflect the priorities and world view of their cohort. This is the organization whose thenexecutive director Robert Ivy famously welcomed President-elect Trump with a tone-deaf press release,3 and whose directors turned back an ADPSR petition to declare designing execution chambers and solitary confinement cells in US prisons unethical.4

My local chapter is an admirable exception, but the AIA nationally has lagged behind it. There’s a new executive director, though, so things could change. National’s main function has been to hand out

honors like a monarchy. And yet, if overhauled, it could be a better option than a union.

A different kind of union

“WTF!” I hear a Brooklyn friend exclaim. But let me cite Peggy Deamer, The Architecture Lobby founder and author of several books on architects as workers. When she says “union,” her main example is Architects Sweden. Yes, it’s a union but it’s more like the AIA than a trade union.

What’s similar is that Architects Sweden’s members include firms and practitioners, and it sees itself as an advocate for both. One difference is that Sweden is a socially progressive democracy with a robust public realm, consciously seeking to level the playfield for women. Another is that architects and related professionals are certified by Architects Sweden. Anyone can call herself an architect and practice freely; the government is not involved. Despite this, most architects, interior designers, landscape architects, and planners join Architects Sweden as students. With a university degree or its equivalent and two years working for relevant firms in the EU, they are certified by the union in their chosen field.

What keeps Swedish design firms and professionals in their union is the support it offers both. Architects Sweden helps firms and practitioners decide jointly on working conditions, keeping tabs on compensation and on, for example, the participation of women at different levels in their firms and how their careers are progressing in comparison to men. It tracks and shares best practices in firm

management, innovations in materials and techniques, technology integration, market conditions, and working in and outside Sweden. The organization lobbies the government.

Overhauling the AIA

The AIA currently lacks Architect Sweden’s activism and sense of purpose. To change, it would have to broaden its remit not just licensed architects, but the full roster of professionals who plan and design the built environment. It would need to look beyond professional boundaries and barriers to see how interconnected they are, in reality, yet still respect their professional cultures and expertise. If database architects are a recognized profession, the AIA shouldn’t be shy about broadening the term “architect” and supporting its sister fields as members.

Evelyn M. Lee, a well-qualified Bay Area architect, is running for president-elect of the AIA on a platform of effecting change. But can the AIA really match Architects Sweden’s activism and its ability to pull the design professions together? It’s an open question. Should it falter or refuse to take up the challenge, there are two alternatives: The Architecture Lobby, active in organizing and visibly Democratic Socialist; and the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), of which Lee is also a member. A bigger tent would give design firms and professionals more visibility and heft as they tackle their shared challenges.

Whatever organization rises to the occasion, it’s unlikely to use trade unions as its model. Warehouse workers’ grievances differ from those of design professionals. Long, inadequately compensated hours as well as the hire-and-fire nature of many offices make working as an architect precarious. This isn’t new, but it often

reflects poor firm management, not bad intentions. The firms need to be in the mix, but the organization needs independence from the larger ones. The practice of firms subsidizing their employees as members should end. Individual membership should be affordable, and firm membership should be tied to size and revenue. Both can have their own conclaves, reflecting their different situations, yet also work together collectively.

What makes Architects Sweden a compelling model is that so many of these challenges fall on firms as well as practitioners. Architecture firms are still hobbled by an antitrust settlement5 the AIA made decades ago imposed on them by the SEC at the behest of the profession’s largest federal clients. Until then, the AIA’s fee schedule dictated the minimum fees (on a percentage of construction cost basis) that member firms could charge clients. It gave them a “floor,” the same way the minimum wage does for workers protection, however minimal, against exploitation and mismanagement. The ban on fee schedules should be revisited, not just for architects, but for all of the professions involved with planning and designing our cities.

But the main task is to raise all boats to push for equity for women and minorities, and for an affordable and accessible public realm. The issues we face as design professionals too often reflect societal shortcomings. So, yes: We are all in this together. But we need a union that gets that.

Notes

1. Noam Scheiber, “The Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class,” New YorkTimes , 28 April 2022.

2. Noam Scheiber, “Architects at a prominent New York firm drop their unionization bid,” NewYorkTimes , 4 February 2022.

3. “AIA pledges to work with Donald Trump, membership recoils,” Architect’s Newspaper , 11 November 2016.

4. Michael Kimmelman, “Prison Architecture and the Question of Ethics,” NewYorkTimes , 16 February 2015.

5. Nicholas Kemper, “Antitrust and Architecture: Coordination not Domination,” NewYorkReviewofArchitecture , February 2022.

Written for CommonEdge,9 May 2022; reprinted by ArchDaily , 27 May 2022.

The Bicycle Shed Conundrum

Pevsner’s cathedrals-vs.-bicycle sheds distinction is back in play. A recent NYTop-ed piece by Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen, “How to Rebuild Architecture,”1 led to a furious rejoinder from Aaron Betsky in Architect . 2 ArchitecturalRevieweditor Catherine Slessor took Frank Gehry to task for dabbling in luxury goods. Contrasting his Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum with Giancarlo Mazzanti’s primary school, she wrote that the school “gets to the heart of what architecture should be: modest, socially minded and truly transformative.”3

“Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal,” Pevsner wrote. So, the FLV Museum is architecture and the primary school may not be, but there are two aspects, scale and aesthetics. A cathedral is meant to be visible, a landmark and destination. A bicycle shed is functional, but could also have aesthetic appeal. If it does, is it then architecture? I would say yes aesthetic appeal is how it moves beyond mere strength and commodity (to cite Vitruvius) to provide delight.

Bingler and Pedersen begin their op-ed by citing Bingler’s 88-yearold mother’s dislike of an affordable housing project in Charlottesville, VA. While confessing that he likes it, Bingler says it’s indicative of the gap between architects and the public. Betsky retorts, “Good architecture can be startling, or least might not look like what we are used to.” Wallace Stegner makes the same point about nature its “inhuman” scale can overwhelm us. (Thoreau viewed the “wildness” of the Maine woods similarly.) There’s an innate tension between the familiar and the new, whether it’s due to scale, appearance, or sheer difference.

Bingler and Pedersen also argue that contemporary architecture’s disconnection from the everyday condemns it to irrelevance. The term starchitectis invoked. Like Slessor, they see the world as two camps the 0.1 percent and the deserving rest. What doesn’t pass their litmus test of “common sense” gets lumped in with “fashion…indulgently removed from the real purpose of architecture,” in Slessor’s words.

Betsky is right to resist, for two reasons. First, “common sense” too often leads to Poundbury and worse dreadful New Urbanist concoctions. In an urban context, it leads to anonymous, market-driven density the same towers and podiums endlessly repeated. (In this case, mass customization doesn’t even produce affordability. It’s like a skyline full of high-end cars.) Second, aesthetic progress is often

bespoke, as Thorstein Veblen notes in TheoryoftheLeisureClass . A glance through history shows that “modest” has its own cult remember that “dumb” and “ordinary” were often on the lips of an architect like Joseph Esherick in reference to his old-money houses.

We accept that a bicycle can cost the earth, with a bamboo or carbonfiber frame and other accoutrements that appeal to a minute fraction of bike riders, yet potentially benefit them all if the innovation finds its way down market. Betsky makes this point to argue for experimentation as a path to higher performance, while Slessor, Bingler, and Pedersen are mainly arguing against an “art for art’s sake” that ignores functionality. Frivolity has its uses, though. It produces masterpieces along with fluff. Even cathedrals have moments of it.)

Betsky has said of architecture that “it’s all art,”4 but his standpoint is really Vitruvian. He agrees with Pevsner in making aesthetic appeal the tipping point between architecture and buildings, but he keeps goodlooking bike sheds in the picture while also admiring their commodity and firmness. But, as the writer Yukiko Bowman noted to me, ambition is in play here, not just aesthetics.5

This brings us to Pevsner’s invoking of scale. Is a bicycle shed architecture if the designer’s ambition creates something original? Or does its size eliminate that possibility? Consider the small church that Raphael designed near the Farnese Palace in Rome, or Tsien & Williams’ late, lamented Folk Art Museum. They suggest that scale isn’t the dividing line Pevsner asserts. Ambition, originality, daring they also tip a building into architecture.

Notes

1. Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen, “How to Rebuild Architecture,” New York Times, 15 December 2014.

2. Aaron Betsky, “The New York Times versus Architecture,” Architect , 23 December 2014.

3. Catherine Slessor, “Editorial View: Architecture has nothing in common with luxury goods,” ArchitecturalReview , 5 November 2014.

4. I heard him say this at a panel at SFMOMA that included Cathy Lang Ho and Michael Sorkin, presenting the ProgressiveArchitectureAwards my memory tells me; it could have been another panel, also at SFMOMA.

5. In an email to me when we discussed this controversy.

Posted on Medium , 18 January 2015. The prompt may have been a class that Eva Hagberg was teaching that semester at UC Berkeley CED.

Never Been

Like Alice Waters' take on haute cuisine, Donlyn Lyndon, et al's The SeaRanchepitomizes a Left Coast view of the country home. "Living lightly with the land," his version of the mantra, picks up on the site's agrarian background. The premise of the development is straight from TheTheoryoftheLeisureClass . What still captures our attention is the care with which the whole thing is done. With Larry Halprin in the William Morris role, Joseph Esherick and MLTW designed housing that fit beautifully into "nature" that's half real and half bespoke. While Esherick's hedgerow houses draw primarily on the landscape and old coastal barns, MLTW's more freewheeling condominiums although they reference Fort Ross, the Russian fur traders' toehold down the road clearly reflect their decade (the 1960s) and the urbanity of book's likely readers.

Alice Waters spawned a generation of chefs and restaurants, some better than others. The original Sea Ranch architects have had a similar influence. Over 40 years, the place has bred a substantial number of very good houses along with some lesser ones, sometimes by very good architects. A fifth of the houses in the book could have been safely left out and the Sea Ranch story could have been told convincingly with a dozen or so examples. But that would be a different book. This one's substantial variation on a few themes is worth studying for its details. The houses are often exemplary in their attention to how inside and outside relate, and in the ways the architects used space, light, and views to raise the ante of daily life.

The book's visual appeal is like WorldofInteriors a realtor's wet dream, really. One can imagine "As featured in TheSeaRanch" serving as an imprimatur. Does it make me want to go there? Like Richard Meier's Getty, it feels like too much sameness in one place, but it has great word of mouth. Mentioning the book to a friend, she instantly recalled the living room of a rented house there, fixed now in her memory. She liked the book, too. Maybe you had to be there.

A review of Donlyn Lyndon, et al's TheSeaRanch , Princeton Architectural Press, 2004, that appeared in ArchitecturalRecord , April 2005. Senior editor Clifford Pearson substituted "fantasy" for "wet dream" in the published version. Top: Anaīs Wade's photo of Elizabeth Snowden at The Sea Ranch, from their article, "Continual Encounter," OpenSpaces , 2023.

Richard Bender: An Appreciation

At the start of the 1972–1973 academic year, Berkeley architect and UC Berkeley Professor Sandy Hirshen introduced me to Richard Bender and we began a 5o-year writing partnership. We go back so far that calling him Richard, not Dick, has never been a natural act.

It’s not easy to sum up a man who packed the careers of four or five lifetimes into one. There’s a worldwide network of people who found themselves pulled into his orbit. We led our independent lives, but where Richard was concerned, we set them aside.

When I met him, Bender was already well known as a planner of new towns, with Paul Lester Wiener and José Luis Sert, and an expert on mass housing from self-help in the Bronx to the market experiments that HUD launched under Nixon and Mitt Romney’s father, George. Soon after, he led the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. He was present at Bridge Housing’s creation and helped nurture it. Word got around, and soon he was advising half the planet on how to revive aging new towns and provincial villages; redevelop metropolises like Tokyo; and plan universities in California, China, and Singapore for the future.

He had a long view and a “good nose,” as the Zurich architect Peter Steiger likes to say. His intuition was like a great physician’s diagnostic sense. Even physicians sometimes speak sharply if their patients are too obstinate, but for the most part he was renowned for his bedside manner. Giving advice is much harder than it looks, especially in the company of the grandees of their elevated worlds.

You have to convince them that it’s their idea, and he knew how to do that. As the TaoTeChingputs it, “When the sage is done, the people say they did it themselves.”

His monument is the Berkeley Campus, which he saved from being paved over by enlisting then-Chancellor Albert Bowker to explain the campus to itself and help its community preserve its sense of place as it grew. Several of us were part of the Campus Planning Study Group, and one of us, Emily Marthinsen, became Berkeley’s Campus Architect now that’s a long-range plan!

Bender had a favorite analogy, “clocks and clouds.” Those he counted as friends definitely formed a cloud a flying circus or motley crew that rose to every occasion in which we found him at the center. But I’m glad that the Bender clock ticked lucidly on right to the end and that beams of insight radiated from the bit of Manhattan atop St. Paul’s Tower he shared with Sue Bender, the artist and writer who was his partner in a truly remarkable life.

Written originally as a tribute to Richard Bender when he turned 90, then turned into an obituary in Berkeleyside . “ Born in 1930, Bender died in Oakland on 8 October 2022, age 92, leaving his wife Sue and two sons, Michael and David. Along with clocks and clouds, another favorite was “elephants and sled dogs,” extolling the latter’s flexibility and self-sufficiency. Optical illusions that show how our preconceptions blind us to the fuller nature of many things illustrated his talks. “Slow,” in the sense of making room for time whenever beloved places were to be altered, was also mentioned. We spoke regularly, often with Emily Marthinsen, and he sent us both clippings and comments right up to end. Several times, I watched him discuss projects with the late Tokyo developer Minoru Mori, who would interject, “I have already thought of that,” and yet understood that Bender invariably saw things he’d overlooked. He influenced a great deal of work at different scales carried out by others far better for his having considered it and shared what his capacious mind took in

Top: Richard Bender with Professor Hidenobu Jinnai in Tokyo, 2018.

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SNOWDEN & PARMAN

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© 2024 John J. Parman

(Opposite: Elizabeth Snowden at Pallas)

UrbanTopicsdraws on John J. Parman's half century observing the San Francisco Bay Area as a built and natural environment that's cosmopolitan, insular, and often at war with itself. Here too is evidence of his other interests across a long career in the fields of architecture and planning. Much of it was written in the "barn" (above) that houses the library shown on the front cover.