Monthly Archive for May, 2011

From Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb at n+1…

Americans have always been suspicious of our cities. Before the Civil War, writers competed to denounce them in the strongest possible terms, culminating in the twin Transcendentalist broadsides of Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden. The latter prompted Henry James, himself no fan of the city, to describe its author as an “essentially sylvan personage,” that is to say a woodsman, a phrase that could go just as well for most American thinkers until that point, in spirit if not always in fact. Even Benjamin Franklin, as natural an urban creature as ever there was, felt no qualms about pamphleteering aggressively within the city in favor of country life. Nor was this American attitude confined to American cities. The New York of Melville’s Pierre is not yet as bad as the Liverpool of Redburn. And it was Rome that bore the brunt of Hawthorne’s distemper in The Marble Faun, where he notes that

all towns should be made capable of purification by fire . . . within each half century. Otherwise they become the hereditary haunts of vermin and noisesomeness, besides standing apart from the possibility of such improvements as are constantly introduced into the rest of man’s contrivances and accommodations.

At once too densely civilized and not civil enough, the city fared little better at the hands of an emerging pragmatism. Jane Addams sought to reform it by creating a smaller community in its midst, while William James, likely the American thinker most favorably disposed until recently, sought to transcend its opposition to the country rather than affirm it. If one was to locate a counter-tradition to all this city-phobia, it would be in the literature of the American oppressed. The shimmering Manhattan of Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem prefigures the contemporary vision of the city as refuge from a savage and bigoted populace, and while Emma Goldman suffered on the East Side, it is impossible to miss the role that neighborhood played in the development of her ideas and commitments. More…

From Misha Lepetic at 3quarksdaily.com…

What is the responsibility of the architect or designer within the contemporary context of urbanism? If we’re to begin with the preceding quote, taken from an interview with an astonishingly anti-urbanist Frank Lloyd Wright, it is an unconditional, Roarkian supremacy. If these sentiments had prevailed, of course, Le Corbusier would have ensured that today’s Paris would look very different.

Wright, his avatar Howard Roark, and Le Corbusier exemplify extreme, or perhaps extremely self-aware, instances of one of the great struggles in architecture: the uncomfortable fact that the world is full of people, and that architects are primarily educated in the total discourse of buildings. However, the increasing urbanization of the human race relegates the efficacy of architecting individual buildings as, at best, proofs-of-concept and as, at worst, vanity projects. And many such buildings placed in proximity to one another do not add up to a coherent urban solution. More…

From Dominic Sandbrook, Financial Times.com

The ceremonial centre of London, as last week’s royal jamboree reminded us, makes a magnificent political theatre. When a million people lined the streets to watch the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s triumphant procession, they were following in the footsteps of millions more who once poured on to the streets to celebrate Victory in Europe or the relief of Mafeking, or to mourn the deaths of George V and Queen Victoria. Almost every yard of the processional route was steeped in history: when the carriage rolled past Whitehall’s Banqueting House, I wondered if the ghost of Charles I was waving a little flag from the spot where he met his end in 1649. And although we often think of politics as a battleground of ideas and interests, it is also, of course, a struggle for place. Throughout history, people have shed blood to control not just the streets themselves, but their meaning. Is Parliament Square a place of pageantry and patriotism, as the royal wedding crowds suggested, or a place of protest, as it might seem to student marchers on the same spot? Or both of those things and more?

When we describe ourselves as products of our environment, we usually think of class, money and parenting. Only rarely do we reflect on how our identities are shaped by space, and specifically by the random spaces of the modern city, what the historian Leif Jerram calls “the myriad nooks and crannies, backstreets and thoroughfares, clubs and bars, living rooms and factories”. We forget, for example, that the London Underground, now merely another element of our mundane daily lives, was once novel and exciting, forcing people to behave in entirely new ways. Travelling by Tube is both an intensely solitary experience, each of us cocooned in our thoughts, and an eminently collective one: inside the carriage, all distinctions of class and status are forgotten. No wonder, then, that in the early 1930s, the Soviet authorities saw the building of the Moscow Metro as the ideal way to create a new communist man. As hundreds of thousands of rural peasants flooded into the capital, taking up new identities as technicians and engineers, it seemed that a new proletariat was being born. “How many people,” asked a Pravda headline, “recreated themselves making the Metro?”

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