VULNERABILITY
method of “rhythmanalysis” (1992) that takes its cue from the rhythms of the body in space. Satirizing the all-controlling architect, architect Adolf Loos told the story of “The Poor Little Rich Man” (1908) whose completely designed home was so oppressive that he became deeply unhappy. The story ends with the man declaring, “Now I have to live with my own corpse. Yes, I am finished. I am complete.” Permitting people to be and express themselves in their surroundings, Team 10’s “open aesthetic” (1950s and 1960s) aspired to indefinite growth and change. Shadrach Woods, for instance, conceived of the Berlin Free University, “as an object in flux, transforming itself in relation to people’s changing needs and aspirations.” 45 During the 1960s and 1970s, there were many such efforts including the “open architecture” of Lucien Kroll, “supports” of Nikolaas Habraken, open or “unfinished” urban systems of Hans Scharoun, and Charles Moore and William Turnbull’s “Process Architecture.”46 In planning and urban design, Cedric Price proposed the “Non-Plan” (1969) and Christopher Alexander rejected the master plan, proposing instead a “pattern language” based on traditional typologies (1977 and 1987). The call for regaining our innocence or the child within, along with valuing play, has also recurred. Fifteenth-century theologian Nicolas of Cusa said we must “unlearn” that which screens us from perceiving truth in order to achieve the “child’s unknowing.”47 Zen similarly recommends not losing the “beginner’s mind.” John Keats recommended a state of “negative capability,” which is described as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”48 The value of play was apparent in the Surrealist’s “exquisite corpse,” the Situationists’ dérive and détournement, and in Nietzche’s critique of negativity and cultivation of joy. In design education, the Bauhaus Vorkurs (preliminary course) sought to cleanse minds and bring students back to kindergarten through Zen, Tao, and the philosophy of Eckhart. The goal was “to return incoming students to the noble savagery of childhood.”49 What a vulnerable urbanism asks us to “unlearn,” in contrast to the Modern period, is the part that privileges reason over intuition and experience, “expert knowledge” over our own feelings and opinions, and static discrete objects over contexts, relationships, and processes. Rather than privilege one over the other, it values — and integrates — all ways of knowing from the tactile, to intuition, to reason. A vulnerable urbanism does not advocate the tabula rasa, ultimately just a veiled attempt to impose someone else’s vision, whether it is an architectural vision on a bladed site or an
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