Writing Urbanism: A Design Reader

Edited by Douglas Kelbaugh and Kit Krankel McCullough

Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2008, 424 pp., $44.95 paperback

In this long and often abstruse collection of writings on urbanism, one essay stands out as a marvel of imagination and observation. It’s San Francisco architect Daniel Solomon’s well-informed 13-page meditation, “Whatever happened to modernity?”

For those who missed Solomon’s mesmerizing talk at the 2006 CNU congress in Providence on how modernism came to dominate architectural education (inflicting lasting damage) and influence artistic and popular culture (sometimes for the good), this book provides a chance to catch up.

Solomon fears that “rigid orthodoxies” — those insisted upon by dogmatic modernists, on the one hand, and those upheld by strict historical revivalists, on the other — are marginalizing New Urbanism. These conflicting orthodoxies have, in Solomon’s view, caused many people to regard New Urbanism as “the domain of maudlin saps — aesthetic and political reactionaries whose ideas about the city are discredited upon arrival because of the imagery in which they are clothed.”

He traces the roots of the dismissal of New Urbanism back to Walter Gropius and Siegfried Giedion at Harvard’s School of Architecture in the late 1930s. Gropius and Giedion were hostile to historical forms of architecture and city-making. The antagonism toward tradition that they inculcated in young designers has continued decade after decade. Over nearly 70 years, says Solomon, “ideas hatched at Harvard became an almost universally shared and rarely questioned set of received opinions among American architects.”

In looking at how ideas are planted and perpetuated, Solomon notes that even today, Harvard architecture students are instructed to read Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music, a 1949 book that supports the Gropius-Giedion outlook. Philosophy of Modern Music portrays the harsh dissonances of composer Arnold Schoenberg as “an appropriate art for the harsh, dissonant turmoil of modern life.” Adorno’s book criticizes the at-times neoclassical composer Igor Stravinsky for producing “premature harmonies, ignoring the persistence of social contradictions.”

What a young designer learns from such jaundiced instruction is that modern thinkers and creators should absorb and reflect the ills and stresses of current society. Architects who have been trained to demand radically modern expression and to distrust the idea of social harmony are not going to admire an exquisite town square or a beautiful tradition-inspired street. Those are “premature harmonies.”

Solomon, who over the years has come to question his own modernist training, acknowledges: “Recovery of the knowledge that helped make the world civil for centuries is unquestionably a good thing.” Nonetheless, he has mixed feelings about historical revivalists like those in Notre Dame’s architecture school or in the Institute for Classical Architecture & Classical America. What would be best for New Urbanism, he argues, is a more inclusive attitude — one that “consists of a fascination with what is new and promising in the moment that one is living through and simultaneous reverence for the historical past of one’s discipline ….”

The editors of Writing Urbanism — Douglas Kelbaugh, dean of the University of Michigan’s architecture and planning school, and Kit Krankel McCullough, an urban design lecturer at Michigan — set out to compile “the best articles on urbanism to be found among contemporary American academicians.” They have assembled nearly four dozen writings and have organized them into three categories: urban process, urban form, and urban society. A few pieces are by new urbanists, including Robert Fishman,

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Ellen Dunham-Jones, and Aseem Inam.
Some essays raise useful warning flags about present or potential problems in New Urbanism. One danger is “town centers” that superficially seem “public” but that do not uphold freedom of speech and assembly. Another danger is public spaces so tightly designed and furnished that they don’t allow the users enough flexibility and choice. “There is a virtue in the inclusion of the imperfect and the unfixed,” says Dunham-Jones, of Georgia Tech.

A third problem, says Kelbaugh, is the scarcity of jobs and industry (other than retail, restaurant, and small offices) in many new urban projects. A fourth, he says, is the lack of “tectonic integrity” in many historically-styled buildings.

On the whole, this collection, for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, is disappointing. Some writings are already becoming outdated, like a 1987 essay by the late architectural historian Spiro Kostof arguing that “the momentum to recreate a genuine public realm has been lost.” In fact, New Urbanism has spurred a widespread revival of interest in the public realm in the 21 years since Kostof’s essay was first published.

Some contributors practically dare readers to make sense of their tortuous writing. Many employ arid, academic terminology — words and phrases like “post-industrial,” “post-urban,” and “cultural product” abound. Many seem temperamentally at odds with New Urbanism’s quest for a pleasing aesthetic order and a more beautiful public realm. Dan Solomon got it right; American architectural education became, to a depressing degree, “a widespread cult of unlearning.” No wonder some of the writings in this book are so sour.