Modernist Architecture’s
Encounter with the American City
by Nathan Glazer
Princeton University Press, 2007, 310 pp $24.95
Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always contained an element of fascism. It wasn’t just that a cuckoo notion like Le Corbusier’s “radiant city,” those celery stalks of lone skyscrapers surrounded by a verdant wasteland, was meant to simplify life, but that it was in some basic sense meant to replace it.
The light and space essential to early modernist design were a response to the darkness and claustrophobia of Victorian architecture in which so many poor were imprisoned. But the modernists’ own language suggested that the masses would simply be serving a new master. You can’t describe a dwelling as a “machine for living,” as Le Corbusier did, without having abandoned what most of us associate with the word “home”: comfort, refuge, freedom from regulation, a respite from routine. If a house or a high-rise apartment building is a machine, those living in it must be the cogs. The ultimate fulfillment of Le Corbusier’s vision might be like a Prozac version of the workers trudging off to the mines in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, drudgery tidied up and narcotized.
It’s no accident that the fascist potential in modern architecture has been clearest to those who saw it firsthand. Writing about the shift in Britain from the semi-detached suburban homes of the 1930s to the anonymous blocks of estate housing built after the Second World War, the filmmaker John Boorman said, “Le Corbusier’s manic followers descended like shock troops bringing more destruction to England than Hitler.” Members of the Situationist International went further. A 1954 issue of potlatch, the SI’s bulletin of resistance, referred to “Le Corbusier Sing-Sing” and read, “He builds morgues for an era that well knows what to do with them.” The memory of the war is in the SI’s words, the taste of ashes that is always the result of visions that attempt to overcome the human.
Sociologist Nathan Glazer is not temperamentally suited to that sort of confrontational talk. But the story Glazer tells in his latest book, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City, is of modern architecture’s willingness to subjugate people to its utopian fantasies. It’s a story told with a certain amount of regret. Once a modernist himself, Glazer has some residual affection for his youthful embrace of the movement. But he’s too good a critic to indulge in sentimentality. Toward the end of the book, Glazer sums up the prosecution’s case: “Modernist architecture began with social aims as strong as its aesthetic orientation, or stronger, but social objectives and interests have fallen away almost entirely, and aesthetic interests and judgment, ever more sophisticated and theory-based, have become predominant.”
What Glazer is talking about in those lines isn’t just the notion of the architect as star, but the notion of the architect as artist. The assumption that the architect is an artist and should be regarded as such is so commonly accepted that many people find it strange to even suggest that there’s something wrong with it.
A simple comparison might be useful. When we eat out or get our hair cut, most of us hope we’re in the hands of a chef or a barber who’s artful in his or her field, who might be able to show us something we hadn’t thought of ourselves. Still, that chef or that barber is working for us, preparing a meal or styling our hair to our taste. Yet architects, whose buildings serve anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of people, have the capacity to affect the surrounding streets and buildings and neighborhoods, and can last well over a century, are presumed to have the privilege of imposing their vision on the public regardless of consequences or the public’s wishes.
When architects are regarded chiefly as artists, discussion of their work is reduced to a question of their personal vision. Questions of whether a building serves those who use it or the larger community, of whether it honors or ignores the style and scale of its surroundings, of whether it adds to or damages the life of its neighborhood, are treated as quaintly prosaic and utilitarian, akin to reducing any consideration of a work of art to its social relevance. This has made it easy to put down people who don’t like a piece of modern architecture as being the same as the vulgarians who look at a Jackson Pollock and boast that their kid could paint that. But how can you look at the cubist pile-up of Jiffy Pop containers that is Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, a building grotesquely out of scale with its surroundings, and with a straight face listen to a member of the Royal Academy (in Sydney Pollack’s 2006 hagiograph Sketches of Frank Gehry) describe it as “the most impressive cathedral of the end of the twentieth century”?
That bit of censer swinging is the tone that Nicolai Ouroussoff tries so hard to pass off as democratic in a piece in the December 16, 2007, New York Times. “The age of manifesto is dead,” preaches Brother Ourossoff. “Instead we live in a time of competing voices, the best of which can offer penetrating insights into a culture that is in constant flux.” He goes on to proclaim Rem Koolhaas’s attention to function in his design for the Seattle Public Library as “a bold expression of the client’s conflicting needs to preserve old books and also to come to terms with emerging information technology.”
What’s left out of Ourossoff’s celebration of this democratic vision is, of course, the question of whether people like the library, whether they find it congenial to use, and how those who work or live nearby regard it. Function is completely a matter of how Koolhaas has realized his vision. (Similarly, there is not the barest discussion of the public function of architecture in Pollack’s film. Nor is there any acknowledgment of Gehry’s dunderheaded mistake of wrapping the Los Angeles Disney Concert Hall, which sits under the Southern California sun, in twenty-two million pounds of steel, thus heating up surrounding buildings by as much as fifteen degrees.)
After reducing public architecture to the false choice of either “bland soul-sapping buildings” or individual modernist vision, Ouroussoff hails the alignment of architects with mainstream developers as “a chance to step out of the narrow confines of high culture and have a more direct impact on centers of everyday life that were outside their reach, from shopping malls to entire business districts,” as if the chance to have Koolhaas in your neighborhood is the same thing as being able to buy a $10 Philippe Starck Kleenex box at Target. But quick to deny that more direct impact might not be so salutary, Ourossoff opts for the Nuremberg defense. “Architects have no control over a development’s scale or density,” he writes. “Nor do they control the underlying social and economic realities that shape it.”
This is horse puckey.
When a “starchitect” (in Ourossoff’s coinage) signs on to an immense public development, as Frank Gehry has to Forest City Ratner’s gargantuan Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, he not only gives concrete expression to how the scale and density might be realized, thus having the most direct impact on “underlying social and economic realities,” his imprimatur gives the project the weight of cultural edification, as if green-lighting a megalithic public development were akin to commissioning a Giacometti or a Picasso for a public space.
I dwell on Ourossoff because the voice of his article is the very one Glazer argues against. Expanding the definition of modernist architecture to include public works of art and memorials, Glazer focuses on how a style that had aspirations to represent a populist vision became an elitist one.
What could be more elitist than the general tone of the outrage that the art world expended on behalf of Richard Serra when his Tilted Arc was taken down and destroyed. For Glazer, Tilted Arc, a curved wall of rusting steel placed in an open plaza in front of Manhattan’s Jacob Javits Federal Building, is emblematic of the insularity that has taken over public work. The installation, as Glazer writes, “obstructed the plaza, offered no space to sit on . . . blocked sun and view, and . . . made the plaza unusable even for those moments of freedom when the weather permitted office workers to eat their lunch outside.”
But for Serra, that was the point. Serra’s “truth,” Glazer argues, was “more than verbal or written criticism, more than an op-ed that could be taken out with the rest of the recycling. Serra was building something large and permanent; and a permanent critique, particularly with its accompanying discomfort for all the people working in the building and using the space, is another matter. . . . He is attacking the awful by increasing the awfulness. To the misery of working in an ugly and poorly designed building, it was Serra’s thought to add additional misery.”
Given the egotism Glazer sees at work in Tilted Arc, it’s no wonder that what he praises in public monuments is anonymity—not, as that word is used, to denote blandness or conformity but to describe work in which the artist effaces him or herself.
It’s not surprising, then, that he sees Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial as an eloquent example of what the modernist public monument ought to be. Glazer finds that Lin, unknown at the time, was intent on proving, rather than declaring, herself; she put her art at the service of its purpose. As a result, her memorial “evokes a mixed emotion suitable to the event it memorializes.” By presenting the names of the dead chronologically rather than alphabetically, the Memorial encourages interaction from its viewers.
Glazer’s writing on public memorials and installations is not a digression from the subject of modernist architecture. It is, if anything, a sly assent to the insistence on the architect as artist. The implicit irony is that buildings, monuments, public art are not on display in a museum. They can inflict discomfort or utterly disrupt the life around them. Architects and artists who choose to work in the public realm should understand that the public has (or should have) a say in what they do—which places architects, artists, and their creations in an unprotected position. A critic has no power over the existence of a painting or sculpture he or she doesn’t like. But that is precisely the power the public, to a reasonable degree, ought to wield over architecture.
NO ONE SHOWED how that power might be wielded better than Jane Jacobs. By the time her Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961 she had already led the opposition that defeated a Robert Moses plan that would have wiped out much of New York City’s West Village. Jacobs made the case that urban planning, which she used as a synonym for the destruction of neighborhoods, revealed a profound distaste for and misunderstanding of urban life. Taking their miscues from the line of myopic theorists stretching from Ebenezer Howard to Le Corbusier, urban planners looked at the variety and busyness of city life and saw chaos and confusion and ugliness. Jacobs argued that alleged chaos was the essence of the mixed use that neighborhoods needed to flourish. It was she who declared, “When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities. A city cannot be a work of art.” The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of those very rare books that have the power to forever change the way you view the world.
Glazer cannot make that leap of imagination. Of New York, the city that inspired Jacobs, he writes: “Cities, we know, must be crowded and noisy and dirty to some degree, but connected to our idea of cities is also urbanity, graciously shaped civic spaces, avenues, noble buildings monuments, and aspects of nature.” (It’s hard not to detect in this a bit of hostility to New York that’s endemic to Cambridge, the city where Glazer lives and where I was born.) Glazer is arguing for a renewed type of urban planning, one free of the arrogance that allowed atrocities like the destruction of the old Pennsylvania Station. It’s not that his arguments for a city of reduced density and humane scale don’t make sense or that there shouldn’t be urbanity in the urban. It’s that he can’t quite free himself of distaste for the rude energy that is inseparable from city life.
It’s easy to imagine that Jacobs, with her distrust of urban planners, and Glazer, with his disdain for the ego of star architects, would each find something to despise in the mammoth Atlantic Yards project planned for Brooklyn.
Developed by Bruce Ratner, the project will cost four billion dollars and cover twenty-two acres on which will be built eight million square feet of buildings. The anchor will be a twenty-thousand-seat basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets (whom Ratner owns). But since sports arenas commonly lose money, there will also be sixteen drunkenly swaying skyscrapers, consisting of office space and housing units, ranging from twenty to fifty-five floors—all this in two neighborhoods that consist mostly of three- and four-story brownstones. The arena will put a barrier right across Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue, with the complex acting as a wall dividing Fort Greene (where I live) from Prospect Heights. The height of the development will keep several surrounding blocks in shadow twenty-four hours a day.
There is a vigorous neighborhood opposition, chiefly in the form of the group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, headed by Daniel Goldstein, the only remaining resident in a building whose other tenants all allowed themselves to be bought out by Ratner.
Whether or not Atlantic Yards is ever built, the journalist who undertakes to tell its story will have an epic tale of corruption, cronyism, and obeisance to private interest. (Isabel Hill’s documentary Brooklyn Matters tells the story so far.) Because Ratner went directly to the state, local hearings on the project have been limited to one meeting. No local officials or residents have had the opportunity to vote on the project. Months after Ratner announced plans, a report miraculously found urban blight existing in the exact footprint of the project, thereby giving the state the right to seize property by eminent domain. And Ratner has stirred up racial tension in the predominantly African American neighborhood by founding BUILD (Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development), a “community” group that argued that those opposed to Atlantic Yards were white newcomers who didn’t care about affordable housing or jobs, though most of the “affordable” housing planned is well above the median income of Brooklyn, and many jobs are likely to consist of maintenance, security, and concession jobs for the nights there are events at the arena.
Introducing his design for Atlantic Yards, Gehry spoke about trying to understand “the body language of Brooklyn.” But the only language Gehry has ever been interested in is the language of Frank Gehry. To say he is defiantly noncontextual is to imply that context enters into his thought at all.
Gehry might have taken The Life and Death of Great American Cities as an anti-text. With its interior “public space,” its super-blocks, its potential for creating what Jacobs called “border vacuums” and the attendant crime that always accompanies such areas, in the way it cuts itself off from the neighborhoods around it and cuts them off from each other, Atlantic Yards represents the sort of thinking Jacobs discredited nearly fifty years ago.
Atlantic Yards is the largest project Frank Gehry, now seventy-eight, has ever undertaken. And if it proves to be his last large project, it will be a fitting capstone to a career utterly blind to the public function of architecture. For how better to assert your dedication to personal expression over context than to have your distinct visual style serve as the emblem for the death of two Brooklyn neighborhoods?
Jacobs’s legacy, on the other hand, is assured. Her influence continues to be present both where she is heeded and where she is ignored. I even know of one Manhattan bar where you can order a “Jane Jacobs” (Prosecco, elderflower liqueur, orange bitters, Hendrick’s gin). I know of no establishment where you can order a “Frank Gehry.” Certainly not in Brooklyn.
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