[This review originally appeared in Ecumene, 1, 2 (1995): 109-111].
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Quantrill, M. and Webb, B. editors, 1993: Urban Forms, Suburban Dreams. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press. |
The twelve contributions to this edited volume were originally presentations at an international symposium, "Places Between Here and There," held in October, 1990, near Houston, Texas. In their preface, the editors explain that the main aim of the symposium was to examine the relationship between city and suburb, drawing on a range of topical and philosophical perspectives. Unfortunately, the editors provide little explication as to which contributors represent which points of view. Further, the collection is not broken into parts, nor does the order of presentation indicate any sort of thematic or philosophical patterns. In short, readers are left to figure out for themselves any underlying commonalities and differences. I organize this review around the conceptual similarities I was able to find.
A first group of four contributions can be identified as "historical" in their approach and outlook. Diane Ghirardo uses Rome, 1922-1943, as a context in which to examine the way that Italian fascists dealt with the modern industrial city, while Dennis Domer reviews the success of developer Gustave Ring's Arlington Village, a suburban garden-apartment community built in 1939 outside Washington, D.C.
In a somewhat similar way, Drexel Turner examines the short history of Florida's Seaside, the neo-vernacular town begun in 1978 by architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Turner asks whether this planned development, now so widely copied, can become more than "just another avatar of sophisticated press relations and downsized leisure-class pursuits." In a broader, conceptual manner, Colin Rowe uses historical examples to consider why modern urban design has failed so badly. He argues that the city has too often been seen as a set of objects rather than as a fabric of connections.
A second set of five essays can be called "deconstructivist" in that they largely reject the idea that urban design can facilitate any lasting sense of place, rootedness, or community in today's world of rapid change. Marco Franscari argues that it is time to reinstate, in some radically new way that he really doesn't clarify, a sense of wonder in modern cities: "It has completely disappeared from contemporary discourses on urban artifacts and...is realized only by accident in the practice of urban design."
Though he doesn't use the term directly, Stephen Holl seeks to renew such wonder by creating designs that share a "`pretheoretical ground' of psychological space, program, movement, light quality, and tactility." Similarly, Bruce Webb and Martin Price argue for a new kind of urban design better oriented to the modern high-speed expressway system and emphasizing "flowing lines, flowing spaces‑-flowing forms analogous to the flow of a river." Ironically, the two designs Webb and Price present to illustrate such flow appear brutalistic in aesthetic and intimidating in scale--a characterization that also fits the designs presented by Holl in his contribution.
Most cynical about architecture and a renewed sense of urban place are the contributions by Peter Eisenman and Paul Christensen. The latter argues that buildings are no longer primarily places of use but, rather, messages and signs largely manufactured by multinational corporations and communications. All objects of the city "are rising toward the realm of speech." If architecture is to regain meaning, Christensen believes that the only possibility is undermining and deconstructing the acts of designing and making: "The crooked portico, the fractured facia, the wobbling staircases... are the elements of the dream that pull consciousness back to earth."
As an example of such architecture, Christensen points approvingly to the designs of Peter Eisenman, whose contribution is by far the most outrageous and pontificating of the collection. Eisenman argues that architecture‑-as the making of settings for human life and experience‑-is dead, a casualty of an electronic world where here and there no longer matter. "There is no longer time for experience," Eisenman declares, "because people cannot concentrate long enough to have such a condition." He claims that the best architectural events are rock concerts‑-environments of episodes that turn on and off like TV sets.
Vigorously contradicting the questionable pronouncements of Eisenman and the other deconstructivist contributors, a last set of three essays seeks to reestablish place-making in the city and might be labelled "existential-phenomenological" in their outlook. Malcolm Quantrill draws on Louis Kahn's much-repeated "What does the building want to be?" as a guiding aim for any design or site programming, while Kaisa Bronner-Bauer calls for an urban design grounded, after Mircea Eliade, in "archetypes of the eternal present."
Perhaps the single most optimistic call for renewing a sense of urban place is William Whyte's contribution, which reviews his extraordinarily successful efforts at redesigning downtowns through a thorough understanding of pedestrian behavior and street dynamics.
All edited collections are risky because they must have a clear vision, whether conceptual or topical, to hold their contents together. Sadly, this collection has no clear substantive or philosophical focus, and the essays vary greatly in length, quality, and level of interpretation. Though the editors claim that the topical focus is the present-day interphase between city and suburb, none of the essays explore this topic directly and some‑-e.g., Rowe, Eisenman, Christensen--ignore the theme entirely.
At the same time, there is a tremendous range in the quality of the contributions. On one hand, there are articles like those by Ghirardo and Domer, which are carefully researched and thoughtfully presented. On the other hand, there are dogmatic pieces, like those by Eisenman, Christensen, and Holl, that arbitrarily proclaim a point of view but provide little philosophical justification, real-world evidence, or design success.
In short, this collection is a set of uneven, unrelated pieces, several of which would have been better left as the oral presentations they originally were. Especially for newcomers who are unaware of the philosophical and ideological arguments currently raging in the design and environmental disciplines, the collection will be a puzzling muddle.
The book is the second volume in a projected series, "Studies in Architecture and Culture." One hopes that the editors will give more care and attention to future volumes and rigorously reject any spoken presentations that are not adequately reworked to make their points understandable and convincing in print.