Architecture From The Outside In

Selected essays by Robert Gutman Edited by

Dana Cuff & John Wriedt W ith Dialo gues from

Bryan Bell Deborah Berke Peggy Deamer Frank Duffy Keller Easterling Robert Fishman Marta Gutman Wallis Miller David Mohney Patricia Morton Eric Mumford Sarah Whiting

Princeton Architectural Press | New York

Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003 For a free catalog of books, call 1-800-722-6657 Visit our website at www.papress.com © 2010 John A. Gutman and Elizabeth C. Gutman All rights reserved Printed and bound in China 13 12 11 10 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.

Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Editor: Becca Casbon Designer: Paul Wagner Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Bree Anne Apperley, Sara Bader, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Carina Cha, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Carolyn Deuschle, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Wendy Fuller, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson, Aileen Kwun, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Laurie Manfra, John Myers, Katharine Myers, Dan Simon, Andrew Stepanian, Jennifer Thompson, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

“Human Nature in Architectural Theory: The Example of Louis Kahn” from Architects’ People, edited by Russell Ellis and Dana Cuff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), appears by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. “A Sociologist Looks at Housing” from Toward a National Urban Policy, edited

by Daniel P. Moynihan (New York: Basic Books, 1970), and “The Questions Architects Ask” from People and Buildings, edited by Robert Gutman (New York: Basic Books, 1972), appear by permission of Perseus Books Group.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gutman, Robert.

Architecture from the outside in : selected essays / by Robert Gutman ; [Dana Cuff and John Wriedt, editors ; with dialogues by Bryan Bell ... et al.]. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-56898-896-2 (alk. paper) 1. Architecture and society. I. Cuff, Dana, 1953–II. Wriedt, John. III. Bell, Bryan, 1959– IV. Title. na2543.s6g79 2010 720—dc22

2009020291

Robert Gutman 1926–2007 —— To Lucy, Teddy, and Sylvie

Contents

8

Foreword

10

Acknowledgments

11

A Note on the Dialogues

13

Before and Beyond Outside In

27

Introduction

1

Practices

61

1.1 Architecture: The Entrepreneurial Profession 1.2 Professions and Their Discontents: The Psychodynamics of Architectural Practice 1.3 The Designer in Architectural Practice

76

Dialogue One

81

Dialogue Two

86

Dialogue Three

32 43

/ Pre-form and Post-form Design Activism

Bryan Bell

/ Design and Contemporary Practice

Peggy Deamer

/ Fitting In: Architecture in the Art Gallery

Wallis Miller

2

Buildings and Projects

127

2.1 Human Nature in Architectural Theory: The Example of Louis Kahn 2.2 House VI 2.3 Building Evaluation, User Satisfaction, and Design

144

Dialogue four

94

119

/ Asking Questions

Patricia Morton 148

Dialogue five

/ An Architecture of the Workplace

Deborah Berke

3

Sociology and Architecture

186

3.1 The Questions Architects Ask 3.2 Site Planning and Social Behavior

202

Dialogue six

207

Dialogue seven

152

/ Sociologists in the Studio: Conflict and Cooperation

Robert Fishman

Frank Duffy

/ Parallels and Connections

4

Housing

239

4.1 A Sociologist Looks at Housing 4.2 U.S. Architects and Housing: 5 Relationships 4.3 Two Questions for Architecture

246

Dialogue eight

251

Dialogue nine

214 227

/ Translating the Harsh Speech of the Developer: Robert Gutman and the Design of American Housing Eric Mumford

/ Modern Housing: A California Story

Marta Gutman

5 258 287 297

309

Architectural Education

5.1 Educating Architects: Pedagogy and the Pendulum 5.2 Discipline Building 5.3 Two Discourses of Architectural Education / The Place of the Public in Architectural Education: A Case Study in Kentucky

Dialogue ten

David Mohney

/ Welcome to the Banquet (or, How to Increase the Relative Happiness of the M. Arch. Thesis Student)

313

Dialogue eleven

318

Dialogue t welve

Sarah Whiting

/ The Activist Entrepreneur

Keller Easterling

326

Selected Bibliography of Publications by Robert Gutman

330

Index

Before and Beyond Outside In: An Introduction to Robert Gutman’s Writings Dana Cuff

Robert Gutman’s career as a sociologist in architecture spans more than four decades, beginning very nearly at the moment when architecture first opened its doors to interlopers of his ilk. Even though Gutman was one of the first inside, he managed to maintain a productive outsider status, as his chosen title for this collection of writings suggests. Gutman refined his own brand of design criticism and scholarship primarily in the halls of Princeton’s School of Architecture, from 1965 until his death in 2007, and modeled that stance for generations of students.1 He was an ideal outsider, because his intellectual curiosity and personal demeanor led him to bring people together, bridging the self-imposed boundaries that keep individuals and disciplines from learning from one another.

Gutman organized this volume of essays by subject rather than placing them in historical sequence, to make visible a body of thought on the topics of architectural practice, buildings and projects, sociology and architecture, housing, and architectural education. His substantive decision, despite its advantages, has the disadvantage of clouding historical context. This preface attempts to redress that oversight.2 13

A walk through Bob Gutman’s writings in and around architecture maps not only a social geography but a historical trajectory through a changing discipline. From man-environment relations to post-criticality, from users to subjects, from perception to the gaze—the 1960s ushered in an era of architectural selfreflection, and Gutman was there to observe and comment. Though the turn toward theory in the 1980s and 1990s was not Gutman’s milieu, his early work sets the social and cultural stage for later events. In 1966, he published “The Questions Architects Ask” [reprinted in this volume, pp. 152–85], just eight months after beginning his long-running associations with the Bartlett School of Architecture in London and with Princeton, where then-dean Robert Geddes invited the young sociologist into the architectural fold. Gutman found his niche and didn’t look back—he never published straight sociology again.

In “The Questions,” Gutman foresees a future for what was then called “behavioral architecture,” an alliance with the social sciences analogous to architecture’s collusion with mathematics in the Renaissance. As a demographer, Gutman saw the science in the social without imagining it held the key to architectural design: “A more moderate viewpoint among the ‘scientific’ architects is that design must remain an achievement of the individual architect, requiring the intervention of his creative talents, but sociology can be used to evaluate the proposed scheme in terms of its suitability to user needs.”3 The second half of the 1960s was a propitious moment for a sociologist to take up with architects, and a look around at that time indicates why. Most of the action was in New York City, where, at the beginning of the decade, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in a reaction to urban renewal and Robert Moses. Gutman’s education at Columbia University brought him into contact with sociologist and public intellectual Nathan Glazer, whose best-known book, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, was published by the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies in 1963. Not since Robert E. Park’s Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s had an urban context crystallized social thought so clearly as in New York in the 1960s. Glazer took part in efforts to bring fellow sociologists to Washington so that informed policy might guide the nation toward viable solutions. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law in July of 1964, and just three weeks later urban race riots erupted 14

in Rochester, New York, spreading across the nation to Los Angeles and many other cities in the ensuing months and years. In this heated context, Gutman’s early studies of racial demography not only gained urgency, but could be tangibly located in segregated cities with substandard housing. Clearly, what had been academic issues among sociologists had taken to the streets, and, for Gutman, lasting concerns arose about housing and urban policy.

Among potential design problems, housing constitutes a unique joining of urbanism, architecture, and sociology. That nexus of disciplinary interest was becoming evident in the 1960s with the increasingly obvious failures of modernism, in both high-rise public housing (Pruitt-Igoe would be dynamited in 1972 and 1975) but also in the disturbing popularity of Levittown. The sociologist Herbert J. Gans published his populist analysis and vindication of these new suburban communities in The Levittowners (1967), helping fuel raging debates about architecture’s relevance. If this were not enough fodder for a merger of social and architectural interests, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, campus protests against the Vietnam War, and the events of May 1968 in Paris all had their roots in schools of architecture. These actions in the 1960s did not radicalize Gutman or sociology, but all together, they built a receptive stage in architecture for sociology, and gave a clear motive for sociologists to turn their sights toward the physical environment. Sociology’s foot caught in architecture’s door at just the moment when modernism was crumbling and urban renewal’s misdirections were becoming all too apparent. Urban politics and long simmering racial issues erupted just as American mass-urban housing was hitting high gear.

Since urban sociologists had no means with which to implement their ideas, and architects were faced with problems that stretched far beyond their expertise, a marriage of possibilities ensued. In 1970, Gutman published a thoughtful essay, “A Sociologist Looks at Housing,” [reprinted in this volume, pp. 214–26] in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s collection, Toward a National Urban Policy.

There, Moynihan identified two interwoven trends, the first being the erosion of what he called “general community,” paired with a second trend toward more “specific community.” Together, he saw the interaction of these new demands as producing a “crisis of the cities.”4 In his chapter, Robert Gutman discloses his own desire to find solutions that would cure such problems: “The sociologist, in other words, when he examines the effects of housing and related aspects of our society, sees himself as a kind of cultural doctor who 15

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will be able to prescribe the appropriate therapy for the sick societal patient.”5 His recommendations were based not in politics, but in sociological research that suggested policy can positively affect social action if it aims to produce ownership among the working poor.

The widely held belief that the material aspects of housing could directly influence social life is manifest in the literature of the mid1960s through the early 1980s, and persists to a lesser extent into the present.

In this view, housing is the locus uniting politics and a concern for the environment, the place where policy about the physical environment can most directly affect social behavior, community, and poverty. The housing site plan’s reach extends further, to the implications raised by the work of Kevin Lynch and his notion of urban “imageability.”6 That seminal work was part of a larger interest in the perception of the physical environment, along with the ways that the environment communicates to those experiencing it and the meanings they assign to it. In Lynch’s work, however, imageability and related types of user studies were politically neutered, thus severing this trajectory from its social origins in modern housing. Instead, this school of thought took an empirical stance toward the formation of community. People felt alienated from places, like Jersey City, that Lynch found difficult to map cognitively, and neighborly relations depended largely upon the arrangement of houses. From this perspective, even crime rates, according to architect Oscar Newman, could be altered by better urban design.7 In conjunction with the urban and political upheavals of this pivotal time, a series of changes took place in architecture. In the late 1950s, at schools like Berkeley and MIT, but also at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Cornell, and Princeton, a new interdisciplinarity seduced architects from their isolation. Wellestablished research universities led the way by merging departments of planning and architecture into single colleges, bringing social scientists, preservationists, and building scientists into the fold.

Gutman comments, “When I entered the world of architecture in the 1960s the behavioral sciences . . . were all the rage in the practicing professions.”8 These new alignments served to reframe architecture as an expanded field, appropriately named “environmental design.”9 The College of Environmental Design at Berkeley was founded in 1959, and the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) emerged almost a decade later in 1968. Professional organizations 16

(EDRA, the Design Methods Group, the Association for the Study of Man-Environment Relations) and academic programs (at CUNY, Clark, and Berkeley) grew up around the idea that environment and behavior were integrally linked. The social science perspective was dominated by environmental psychology, which became a field in its own right.10 Funding was available if not abundant in this era of early enthusiasm, particularly from the National Institute of Mental Health, which supported several research centers founded in the 1960s.

While social scientists dominated the centers, a good share also had architects in their ranks. Public monies forged a nascent body of environmental design research, but Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980 staunched the flow of funding, and afterward there were far fewer opportunities to implement studies into postoccupancy evaluation or programming. In retrospect, the studies may have spoken more to the psychologist-researchers than to the architect-practitioners. As a result, the environmental psychology school of thought cleaved from its parent departments, attempting its own disciplinary autonomy.11 In the 1960s and 1970s, the largest, strongest camp of social sciences in architecture was represented by implants: researchers whose work maintained a comfortable distance from that of their hosts. These researchers sought quantitative means to inform architectural decisions, whether by gathering user needs and behavioral data (Sandra Howell, Irwin Altman) or by performing post-occupancy evaluations (Michael Brill, John Zeisel). For their part, most architects maintained a healthy distance from such prescriptive notions, save for a few exceptions (Donald Appleyard, Robert Geddes). This was in spite of a tremendous optimism about fundamental shifts in disciplinary boundaries: social scientists were to bridge from quantitative, experimental models to ecological studies, and architects were to see their art as culturally bound.

There were some architects who reconceived their practices in new ways, most notably Joseph Esherick on the West Coast, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown on the East, and Charles Moore seemingly on all coasts. From their three different orientations, these practitioners and their writings led the way toward practices that broke with modernist tenets to reestablish a role for history, community, and what Moore called a “sense of place,” in some cases joining with ideas derived from Josep Lluís Sert’s Harvard Urban Design Program.12 There was a natural affinity, or at least 17

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grounds for good discussion, between these practitioners and the social scientists around them. The projects that both thought might mutually benefit from this affinity included elderly housing, affordable housing, and schools—all settings where public funds were simultaneously focused.

But as sociologists and psychologists were drawn deeper into the complexities of research in natural settings, their architect doppelgängers were joined by “Whites” like Michael Graves and “Grays” like Robert A. M. Stern to shape the emerging postmodern movement.13 Even if postmodernism began with an effort to give architecture greater public appeal, as Charles Jencks claims, there was more “appeal” than “public” in the equation.14 Whether neohistoricism was to be semiologically decoded or ironically formalistic, there was little airspace for the rather humorless manenvironment relations movement as it had evolved at that point.

Here again, sociopolitical context set the direction of architecture’s course. In particular, the peak of postmodernism in the Reagan era of the 1980s coincided with a declining government role in affordable housing and in social service programs as a whole.

Government-funded social action gave way to smaller government under a supply-side, filter-down economic model. Since housing had long stood as the strongest intersection between architecture and the social sciences, these government retractions adversely affected the collaborating disciplines. Doubts seeded in the failed revolution of the 1960s resurfaced about the value of collaborating with sociology. In spite of a faith in empirical research, sociologists and environmental psychologists rarely had enough evidence to make definitive claims. Throughout the 1970s, the belief remained that empirical research would guide design to a far greater extent than it had up until that point. When funds withered in the 1980s, so did the dream that a quantifiable body of knowledge could be built about the physical environment.

Sociological Reflection That dream was by no means shared by all social scientists or all architects. Robert Gutman saw sociology’s role in architecture as one that not only brought news from the people, but turned a mirror back onto the profession itself. Indeed, since his earliest writing, Gutman let his fellow social scientists know about the questions architects had asked of them, rather than the other way around. Gutman was sure in his sociological footing and curious 18

about architecture. In this second major phase of his investigations, he immersed himself in architectural culture, not by going native but by becoming a scholar of the profession.

Sociological studies of professions were nothing new in the 1980s. They stemmed from a wave of interest in sociological fieldwork thirty years earlier (think Herbert Blumer, Eliot Friedson, and Everett C. Hughes), which evolved to a surprising degree into studies of the professions, in general and in specific ways (primarily of medicine, but Howard S. Becker’s work on the arts is notable).15 It was not until the 1970s that sociologists’ interest in professions turned toward architecture, beginning with Magali Sarfatti Larson’s and Judith R. Blau’s important works.16 Robert Gutman was in this cohort, having begun his studies of architectural education when he first entered the Bartlett and Princeton in the mid-1960s.

These studies led to what remains the most definitive research into architectural practice, Gutman’s Architectural Practice: A Critical View, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Funding from the NEA is notable because Gutman sought arts-related support rather than sciences-related funding sources at a time when his own intellectual orientation was evolving, and because it demonstrates that the primary federal arts agency saw sociological research as being within its purview. Though its data is now out of date, the book’s structural analysis remains a model. Gutman introduces the book thus: The text describes ten trends that have been transforming the subjective experience of architects. They are: (1) the expanding demand for architectural services; (2) changes in the structure of demand; (3) the oversupply, or potential oversupply, of entrants into the profession; (4) the increased size and complexity of buildings; (5) the consolidation and professionalization of the construction industry; (6) the greater rationality and sophistication of client organizations; (7) the more intense competition between architects and other professions; (8) the greater competition within the profession; (9) the continuing economic difficulties of practice; and (10) changing expectations of architecture among the public.17

This multivalent investigation of practice moved from clients and education to the construction industry and buildings themselves.

With this book, and in the articles that are included here in the 19

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section on practice, Gutman cast off the role for sociology laid out by his early work, about what sociology might contribute to the tailoring of the built environment to society. Instead, he offers sociology’s capabilities to examine the working of the profession. In a way, this was consistent with his view that talented individual architects should make the architecture; sociology contributes most when it illuminates the context within which architecture happens.

Theoretical Turn The same year that Architectural Practice appeared, Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson curated the Deconstructivist Architecture show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Just as architecture was getting a glimpse of its collective form in the sociological mirror, it simultaneously entered an era in which its own autonomy mattered most. Deconstruction, with intellectual guidance from Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, promoted formal experimentation without constraints from function, symbolism, or modernist principles.

The social sciences had almost nothing to say about the formal play that became architecture’s preoccupation. This was because the architects pursuing such consequences were largely uninterested in social discourse. Although Gutman’s point of view was at odds with the mainstream, this also meant he was an invaluable resource in architecture, as the loyal opposition but also as a voice for those in the younger generation who were socially minded. Gutman contributed the essay “Human Nature in Architectural Theory: The Example of Louis Kahn,” [reprinted in this volume, pp. 94–118] on Kahn’s Richards Research Laboratories at Penn, to a volume I edited with Russell Ellis, a sociologist in architecture at UC–Berkeley, taking one of the only creative starting points that was left to sociology at this time: Who are the imaginary people that populate architects’ minds as they design? What implicit sociologies and psychologies do architects bring with them to their projects?

But formal and theoretical interests swamped such cultural readings. In keeping with the autonomy of the discipline, Eisenman equates architecture with existential poetry: I am looking for people to read my work not as a series of images but as a reading event, as text: the idea of architecture as text; architecture that is arbitrary and without recall to type-form, or natural or divine origins. . . . To all those people 20

worrying about making the world a better place, I say “Why not do better architecture? Why not do better poetry?”18

Still, Eisenman remembered Gutman’s critique of House VI [reprinted in this volume, pp. 119–26]: “William Gass said of House VI that he could write the most marvelous poetry, make the most marvelous love, and cook the most marvelous food in that house.

Robert Gutman says that it is a shambles sociologically. Well, those are two views. The human being is the most adaptable of all creatures.”19 In a way, the turn toward theory also marked a turn toward subjectivity, reflected in Eisenman’s defense of the house that Gutman baldly calls, “a lousy house, no place for a family to live, even on vacation, whatever interest the building might have as an architectural thesis.”20 From a sociologist’s perspective, the emphatic subject was a double whammy—with heightened significance attributed to the psychologic subject, groups, cultures, and communities were downplayed. When Robert D. Putnam’s book Bowling Alone— which argues that the breakdown of social structures in everyday life has undermined the public sphere—appeared in 2000, Gutman thought this loss placed the analysis of architecture in the more plastic and subjective realm of cultural studies rather than in the more objective and public realm of social science.21 Not only was sociology marginalized but architects themselves grew more fractured over the decade of the 1990s. Recurring crises plagued architecture in the 1990s, and afterward, in the new millennium, and the profession seemed to lack schools of thought, movements, associations, or shared beliefs to unify itself. Although this was by no means outside a sociological purview—indeed the breakdown of professional ties would be as interesting as the formation of them—it was nonetheless distressing for those in the field. Gutman never doubted that architecture was an art that played an important social function, and that this social function would be best served by talented individuals who saw themselves as part of a profession that understood its collective mission.

Beyond but Still Outside?

Debates in architecture schools from at least the 1990s until now continue to marginalize the formerly significant concern of social relevance. Instead, thick discussions of autonomy, formalism, digital technologies, surface, and not the least, theory, dominate discourse in the studios and seminars of America’s elite institutions.

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The waning concern for social relevance is not confined to architecture—but, rather, is part of a bona fide sea change: witness Marxism’s fading credibility, the flagging sway of sociology in general, the ubiquity of literary criticism across disciplines, a political economy that saw the rise (and, later, fall) of fictional capital, the declining role of the state in public life in light of neoliberalism, and the rise of the culture industries that have turned everything, including design, into a consumer product.

If the mission for architecture is no clearer now than it was in the 1980s, we must ask: Where does Robert Gutman’s work, and in a larger sense, sociology, stand now, at the republication of these essays? There are several answers to this question, found inside and outside the present volume. All the dialogues included here serve as answers that suggest the perspective of social thought no longer belongs to the outsider. A sociologist teaching within an architecture school creates sociologically informed architects. While the outsider status holds certain benefits, a more broadly based professional membership is a significant achievement. The short essays from practicing architects ranging from Deborah Berke to Frank Duffy and Bryan Bell offer evidence that Gutman’s influence continues to be felt in offices. Architect-teachers like Sarah Whiting, David Mohney, Keller Easterling, and Peggy Deamer have found ways to bring some form of cultural studies into their studios and seminars.

And a host of academics, including Eric Mumford, Robert Fishman, Marta Gutman, Wallis Miller, and Patricia Morton deal with social history or social theory in their research and teaching. Robert Gutman gravitated toward history as the appropriate intellectual home for someone interested in social phenomena and the stories behind works of architecture. If some of Gutman’s own writings read as historical documents, that by no means lessens their importance. As Gutman wrote in 2003 about the revival of political advocacy within architecture: Young people who are innovative and radical often are bolstered by an awareness that they are part of a noble historical tradition, that others before them have fought the same battles, perhaps even for similar reasons. It is an advantage for movements, architectural or otherwise, to stand on the shoulders of ancestors.22

22

In one recent essay near the end of the collection, “Discipline Building” from 2004 [reprinted in this volume, pp. 287–96], Gutman reflects, “The events of 1968, and the few years afterward, marked the end of the active collaboration of architecture and social science.” The post-’68 disillusionment, coupled with the rise of theory, meant that sociopolitical concerns were thrown under the bus. Yet outside this volume there are further indications that architecture’s sociopolitical victim is by no means dead, but has found new ways to return to the field. A deep concern with the environment, while yet to be embraced by the design intelligentsia, is sure to infuse the discipline with issues larger than its own autonomy. Indeed, beneath the freighted terms “sustainability” and “green building” lies an emerging ethical, cultural, and political universe that depends upon architectural innovation.

The world—and, with it, architecture—is also returning to the city, which had been more or less abandoned after the modernist era. Urbanism, in all its guises, is inextricably tied to the political, cultural, and economic forces at hand, and various schools of thought in architecture and landscape architecture are grappling with them creatively. More than anything else, the radical upheaval in the global economy will instigate restructuring within architecture. Housing and the subprime mortgage debacle were instrumental in bringing about the economic collapse, and whether or not architecture can contribute to new solutions will depend upon us broadening our disciplinary sights. In practice, the changing structure of demand and more intense competition among architects are creating extreme economic challenges for offices. (These terms of analysis come directly from Robert Gutman’s research.) At the time of this writing, the British Architect’s Journal reported that the number of architects filing for unemployment had increased faster than in any other profession.23 Just what architecture as a practice, a profession, and a discipline will look like in the coming decades is uncertain. But we will certainly benefit from the next generation of social thinkers, whether they come from inside or out, who can guide architecture toward a new, more publicly engaged agenda.

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Notes The author would like to thank Eric Mumford and Robert Fishman for their thoughtful advice on an earlier draft of this essay.

1 Gutman’s primary academic appointment was in sociology at Rutgers University, though his identity was more strongly bound to Princeton, where he held the titles of visiting professor and lecturer.

2 This historical and conceptual locating of Gutman’s thinking is the heart of his essay “Discipline Building,” reprinted in this volume, 287–96.

3 Robert Gutman, “The Questions Architects Ask,” reprinted in this volume, 152–85.

4 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Toward a National Urban Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 5.

5 Robert Gutman, “A Sociologist Looks at Housing,” reprinted in this volume, 214–26.

6 In his survey of research on site plans and community, Gutman draws the conclusion that social scientists had more work to do in order to guide decisions about “better and worse methods of planning a site.” Robert Gutman, “Site Planning and Social Behavior,” reprinted in this volume, 186–201. Kevin Lynch defines imageability in The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 9.

7 Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972). The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently adopted this book as a guideline for planning housing.

8 Gutman, “Discipline Building.” For an extensive review of the emergence of the field, see Robert B. Bechtel, Environment & Behavior: An Introduction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997).

9 The term “environmental design” was used as early as 1953 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

10 For example, see CUNY’s program of environmental psychology. There were a few anthropologists, like Amos Rapoport, and sociologists, like Robert Gutman, but they were in the minority.

11 That autonomy continues to prevail, as is evident in departments like UC– Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, CUNY’s Environmental Psychology major, and so on.

12 Eric Mumford, Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937–69 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

13 The Whites and the Grays were groups of architects representing opposing schools of thought in the 1970s. The New York Five (from a 1969 exhibition of that name at New York’s Museum of Modern Art)—Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier—were called the Whites because of their associations with Corbusian modernism, pure form, and disciplinary autonomy. In 1973, Robert Venturi organized a critique by five architects—Romaldo Giurgola, Allan Greenberg, Charles Moore, Jaquelin Robertson, and Robert A. M. Stern—who became known as the Grays, standing in favor of complexity, ambiguity, and historical reference.

24

14 Charles Jencks, What Is Post-Modernism? (New York: St. Martins Press, 1986).

15 Craig J. Calhoun, Sociology in America: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See also, Eliot Friedson, Professional Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, Everett C. Hughes, and Anselm L. Strauss, Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); and Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

16 Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Judith R. Blau, Architects and Firms: A Sociological Perspective on Architectural Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). Judith R. Blau, Mark E. La Gory, and John S. Pipkin, eds., Professionals and Urban Form (New York: SUNY Press, 1983).

17 Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice: A Critical View (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 1.

18 The quotes from Eisenman are from interviews with the author, published in “Through the Looking Glass: Seven New York Architects and Their People,” in Architects’ People, ed. Russell Ellis and Dana Cuff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 67.

19 “Through the Looking Glass,” 66.

20 Robert Gutman, new introduction to “House VI,” 122.

21 Personal conversation with the author.

22 Robert Gutman, “Two Questions for Architecture,” reprinted in this volume, 239–45.

23 Christopher Sell, “Number of Architects Claiming Benefits Rises by 760 Per Cent,” Architects’ Journal, March 20, 2009, http://www.architectsjournal .co.uk/news/daily-news/number-of-architects-claiming-benefits-rises-by-760per-cent/1995647.article.

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