The Largest Art: A Measured Manifesto for a Plural Urbanism

The Largest Art

The

Largest

Art

A Measured Manifesto for a Plural Urbanism

Brent D. Ryan

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Names: Ryan, Brent D., 1969- author.

Title: The largest art : a measured manifesto for a plural urbanism / Brent D. Ryan.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017017108 | ISBN 9780262036672 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: City planning--Philosophy.

Classification: LCC NA9031 .R93 2017 | DDC 711/.4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017108

EPUB Version 1.0

d_r0

To John Louis Ryan and Isidro Bello Verdeal

Inspirations in family, work, and life

Contents

Preface

1 Unitary Architecture, Plural Cities

2 Five Dimensions of Plural Urbanism

3 Three Pluralist Projects

4 Three Plural Urbanists

5 Designing Pluralist Urbanism

6 Principles and Potentials of Plural Urbanism

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Preface

Midway through architecture school, I first heard the term urban design. I found the idea amusing: could one really design a city? My fellow students and I found the design of buildings to be challenging enough; designing a city seemed impossible, never mind unlikely. Gradually I warmed to the idea. At New York City’s Department of City Planning, myself and my colleagues, architects all, sketched design concepts and wrote zoning regulations for growing areas of the city, mostly in Manhattan where developers sought to build more than was currently permitted. Our urban design was slow and halting; regulations took years to be enacted and we urban designers could not oblige building construction—that had to wait for market interest. Participating in New York’s incremental urban design, watching its cityscape slowly respond, was a different creative satisfaction than my schoolmates possessed. As architects they could design smaller spaces where every detail reflected their hand. My urban design hand was spread widely over the cityscape, but its imprint was fainter.

When I departed New York to become involved in urban design education, I saw a different side of the discipline. As in architecture school, urban design students represented their ideas through plans, sections, and perspectives. Gazing one day at a plan for a hilltop complex with hundreds of new housing units in dozens of buildings, I was struck both by the drawing’s seeming completeness and by my realization that the project, if constructed, would take years if not decades to complete. Although my students saw and represented urban design as scaled-up architecture, I knew it to be a gradual enterprise, constructed by many and built over time. Why did we design such projects as pop-up cities—ready to build, complete in and of themselves, and immune from the realities that afflicted real urban design? Maybe it was because we knew nothing else, no other means of design.

What was urban design? Was it the gradual, incremental aesthetic enterprise of my time in New York, or was it the large, ready-to-build project of our urban design studios? My colleagues, experienced and talented as they were, either did not know or could not articulate the difference. All knew that cities were constructed over time and that urban design took time as well (of course) but nevertheless, we continued teaching and producing ready-to-build models. Urban design, it seemed, was a paradoxical field whose practitioners and scholars seemed uninterested in its paradoxes. We taught urban design as a larger version of architecture, but it functioned this way only rarely in practice, where it was a slower, piecemeal art. We felt urban design to be both a formal and a social enterprise but these latter ideals contributed little to the three-dimensional schemes that constituted the discipline’s visual language.

History and theory offered only intermittent assistance in resolving these paradoxes. Urban design histories were mostly turgid affairs: long, beautifully illustrated lists of cities that culminated somewhere in the twentieth century. Urban design theory consisted either of best practices—anodyne but attractive to many students—or of tracts of political economy or even philosophy that came from outside the discipline and rarely ventured far within. Most interesting by far were urban design manifestos, each purportedly a radically new take and disdaining, even attacking others. It seemed that nearly all such manifestos had been written by architects except for one, Good City Form, written by city planner Kevin Lynch.

Lynch was himself paradoxical; extremely well known, he remained an outlier in urban design’s intellectual universe. He did not self-identify as an architect, yet all aspiring urban designers knew his first book The Image of the City, and he garnered no disrespect from architects. Lynch wrote about history, but his books were not histories. Nor were they best practices; except for Image, they were difficult to apply in classroom or studio settings. Lynch’s work puzzled me mightily; well known as it was, it had failed over several decades to stimulate significant later work, either by theorists or practitioners. I found much of interest in Lynch’s work, yet his observations on urban design seemed underrecognized today: contemporary discussions of urbanism oscillated between different visions, none of which referred to Lynch’s work, almost as if his ideas had never been.

I felt differently. Lynch’s thoughts mirrored my own convictions from my New York work, and they seemed more apt than ever. I knew that urban design had unique qualities—this art’s vast scale, length of time for construction, and dependence on multiple builders differed radically from those of architecture. And the public was a living, active agent, enmeshed in urban design as inhabitant, shaper, and designer. Urbanism was always public.

Treating urban design as a problem that could only be solved by architectural methods explained architects’ dominance in the studio, as well as the predominance of architectural thinking in much contemporary urban design dialogue. How limiting this was for urban design! Whereas urban design was nearly limitless in its qualities, architecture required a single site, often a single client, and a single form completely rendered and constructed. No wonder that urban design mimicked architecture’s qualities: instead of urban design having its own inherent qualities recognized and expressed, the larger art was being shaped by its smaller sibling.

I have seen many urban design problems that architects could never solve; places that needed a design vision to save them from unintended, unshaped growth, places with multiple municipalities and thousands of inhabitants. I saw cities where thoughtless developers constructed towers wherever they wished, damaging cityscapes while citizens endured speeding cars and crumbling parks. I saw places that needed to shape their directionless growth, where inhabitants lived in shacks while shopping malls rose behind their houses and where traffic choked every road. These were not architectural problems to be solved by a single building complex, no matter how vast. Nor were these planning problems either; aesthetic visions could not come from land use plans or participatory processes. These places needed urban design, but they needed urban design of a foundationally different kind than that offered by schools, scholars, and studios.

I thought there was a lot still to say about urban design. Urban design was a dis­tinct and unusual art; one that was needed everywhere, one whose presence was often faint, and one that was incompletely understood. Urban design needed a new manifesto that would declare it for what it really was, and that would distinguish it once and for all from the other building arts: architecture, landscape, sculpture, and land art.

I would structure this manifesto by reaffirming and describing urban design’s plural qualities. Unlike other building arts, urban design was plural first and foremost. Why pluralism? The term was widespread in studies of politics and society; I borrowed it for its broad meaning of multiplicity or manyness. Urban design was plural in scale, time, property, agency, and form; these qualities distinguished it from its sister building arts, and it was these qualities that enabled it to be the largest of all arts.

The Largest Art is a declaration of independence for urban design, a descriptive theory explaining the many qualities that distinguish urban design, or urbanism, from its sister building arts, particularly architecture. Throughout the book, I use the two terms urbanism and urban design interchangeably; many would view the term urbanism as broader and more encompassing than urban design, but this larger term is also consistent with this book’s broader understanding of urban design as a plural art. The book is not a history; there are no lists of designed cities, nor canonical urban design projects. Nor is it a compendium of best practices, a guidebook for professionals. Instead this book is a measured manifesto, a declaration of urban design’s plural qualities that is intended for scholars, students, and devotees of urban design. Projects, designers, cities, and history are to be found in this book, but only as supportive elements of theory, the concept of plural urbanism. The Largest Art is the product of my twenty-plus-year encounter with urban design; it constitutes my understanding and aspirations for urban design. I hope that the book’s readers will find it to be rewarding and compelling.

Chapter 1, Unitary Architecture, Plural Cities, presents urban design’s current dead end(s), as framed by critic Michael Sorkin, as a false alarm. Instead, the chapter explains that urban design has never been fully understood as the plural art it actually is; beginning with early twentieth-century modernist schemes, through modernism’s midcentury crisis, to the dead end(s) of today, urban design has wandered stylistically while remaining confined to what I call its unitary conceptions, stemming from monumental architecture such as Versailles. I highlight an alternative concept of the discipline that was cut off at midcentury, when architects stylistically imitated Cedric Price’s radical architectural proposal for an unfinished Fun Palace, while ignoring its deeper lessons for a balance between designer and public. I conclude the chapter by defining the qualities of and differences between unitary and plural urban design, or urbanism.

Chapter 2, Five Dimensions of Plural Urbanism, by far the longest chapter in the book, is a descriptive theory of urban design’s plural qualities. Plural scale explains how urban design has the widest scalar range of any of the building arts (i.e., architecture, landscape, sculpture, and land art), ranging from the space beyond a building to the scale of a metropolitan region, or even larger. Through scale, urban design becomes the largest of the building arts. Plural time explores urban design’s profound relationship with history, where a design gesture becomes part of a city’s life, even after its destruction. Plural property reminds us that urban design has many owners, and that these plural properties make urbanism the most challenging of the building arts. Plural agents describe the many makers of urban design, ranging from the designer to the public. Urbanism is a collective art, yet this very collectivity can diminish urban design’s meaning, an existential tension that has stimulated profound urban design thinkers. Lastly, chapter 2 describes urban design’s plural form. More than others, this plural art possesses a distributed quality that allows it to exist among diverse elements of the city that are not part of an urban design idea. Together, these definitions of urban design’s plural quality secure the plural art’s distinction from unitary building arts, particularly architecture, that lack these qualities.

Chapter 3, Three Pluralist Projects, contextualizes chapter 2 within the setting of three urban design projects constructed at various times and locations during the twentieth century. Each ensemble is linked to well-known designers and artists, and the design of each has been long acclaimed, but none of these projects has been understood and analyzed through the lens of pluralism until now. The first, Constantin Brancusi’s sculptural ensemble in Târgu Jiu, Romania, economically shapes an urban axis and a city center through three exquisite Platonic forms: circle, arch, and column. The second, a social housing project at Twin Parks in New York City’s Bronx, intersperses late modernist apartment towers between vernacular Bronx tenements to shape a monumental, large-scale composition with both social and formal meaning. The chapter’s culmination comes with Jože Plečnik’s work in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, a programmatically, formally, and spatially diverse grouping of projects that range from infrastructure to landscape to private and civic buildings, but that together shape what is the finest built example of plural urban design.

Chapter 4, Three Plural Urbanists, revisits the thoughts and works of three urban designers from the late years of modernism, from 1960 to the 1980s. Each of these urban designers was also considered an urban planner, which is an interesting commentary on their devotion to the city as a plural space. These three urban designers knew that urbanism was not simply large-scale architecture. Each of them understood urban design’s plural qualities, wrote about these qualities, and incorporated their understandings into their built work, though none did so to their full satisfaction. Before entering into decades of professional practice, David Crane published a series of articles in the early 1960s on a concept he called the capital web. Edmund Bacon is well known as Philadelphia’s chief planner for almost twenty years, but he was also a scholar whose 1967 book Design of Cities emphasized a conceptual tool called the movement system. Kevin Lynch, familiar from this preface, both wrote and practiced much, and his ideas of city design come closest to this book’s theory of plural urbanism, though Lynch’s thought eventually veered into other directions. Understanding these designers’ ideas contextualizes this book’s theory of plural urbanism within a trajectory of modernist urban design thought whose innovative qualities were never fully understood.

Chapter 5, Designing Pluralist Urbanism, takes the reader from existing projects and designers into three scenarios for imaginary places, fantasies of plural urbanism in locations that have many connections to reality but that do not fully exist. Each is borrowed from personal experience, and the design ideas—founded in precepts of plural urbanism explored in the previous three chapters—are mine, though the delightful illustrations come from my collaborative discussions with a talented former student, now an architect in Texas. These three scenarios remind us that a variety of locations exist that might benefit from plural urban design, and that the creative potential of plural urbanism is as vast as that of any other creative discipline. Like any of the building arts, plural urban design will stem from the qualities of a place and from a designer’s (or designers’) inspiration, but these scenarios also show that urban design’s plural qualities of scale, time, property, agency, and form are what transform these diverse environments into something special: the largest art.

Chapter 6, Principles and Potentials of Plural Urbanism, concludes this book by outlining three signal considerations that every urban designer must acknowledge: eternal change, inevitable incompletion, and flexible fidelity. Cities are entities whose inhabitation by thousands or millions of autonomous actors make them as ceaselessly active and motile as an anthill. By becoming part of the plural cityscape, any urban design project will itself change perpetually as it is added to, subtracted from, or otherwise altered. Generating art whose aesthetic qualities can survive perpetual change is a challenge for plural urbanists. Incompletion is embarrassing and dysfunctional in architecture, but it is inevitable in urban design, where projects take decades, styles change, and political regimes shift support with comparative rapidity. Unlike unitary urban design, plural urbanism need not be complete to succeed, for this largest of the arts can never be complete. Similarly, fidelity of a finished work to a designer’s intention is the hallmark of every art from sculpture to landscape, and diminution of that intention is correspondingly a diminution of that art’s value. Plural urbanism, in contrast, must be content with more flexible fidelity, because it is too large to be effectively controlled by a single actor and because its many other plural qualities preclude a high degree of control. Urban designers must create a design that can survive enactment by others with less capability or even commitment. These three principles need be appreciated and accentuated through great creativity, and the book closes by calling for creativity from all quarters to continue the enterprise of plural urbanism, the largest art.

chapter one

Unitary Architecture, Plural Cities

The End(s) of Urban Design

In 2006, architectural critic Michael Sorkin declared that the discipline of urban design was at a dead end. Sorkin was well known as a trenchant and plain-spoken observer of the architectural scene. He did not mince words. Urban design was both estranged from theoretical debate and from the living reality of cities of the time. Once broad and hopeful, urban design had become rigid, restrictive, and boring, a discipline unable to confront the human needs of cities and citizens—needs that Sorkin saw as especially pressing in an era when the growth of slums … the endlessness of megalopolitan sprawl … [and] the alienating effects of disempowerment placed into question the fate of the earth itself. ¹Strong language indeed! Sorkin depicted urban design not only as intellectually bankrupt, but also as shamefully unable to confront the urgent problems of the day.

The decade or so since Sorkin wrote his essay has been one of turmoil, at least superficially, in the urban design discipline. Events such as continued urbanization and the world’s warming climate pose challenges for urban designers in tandem with other professions. But within the discipline itself, the fundamental dilemma posed by Sorkin, of a discipline unable to reconcile theoretical debate with human needs, has remained unresolved. The end(s) of urban design remain where they were ten years ago.

This book provides a new theoretical and practical understanding of urban design. It does so by reexamining the discipline’s relationship to urban space and urban populations, and by reframing urban design as a building art that accepts those elements of cities that are beyond designers’ direct control—other buildings, other owners, other actors—and that then incorporates these elements into urban design. By incorporating the city’s plural elements—those many elements imagined for more than a single design or by a single designer—urban design becomes a plural art that is more powerful and wide-ranging, more influential and beneficial, even as it becomes more democratic, participatory, open-ended, and infinite. Understanding urban design as a plural art may sound utopian, but it is actually the opposite—it is eminently practical. In fact, this book will demonstrate that urban design must by necessity always incorporate one or more plural elements and that to pretend otherwise is to ignore what urban design really is.

Many theorists and practitioners have recognized elements of urban design’s plural nature in the past. Famed urbanist Jane Jacobs identified urban design’s plural qualities when she called for redevelopment to reconcile life with art, as did MIT professor Kevin Lynch when he spoke of city design instead of urban design. This book goes further than previous works, by providing a comprehensive descriptive theory of plural urban design that details each of urban design’s plural qualities; then by reinforcing this theory with examples of plural urbanism and plural urbanists, existing projects, and past designers. Ultimately this book may be understood as a manifesto, a call for urban design’s true plural nature to be understood and acknowledged, and for urban design’s independence from other building arts, particularly architecture, to be recognized once and for all. In doing so, this book moves urban design past its end(s) and reopens the door for an urban future in which design can encompass all cities.

What Is Urban Design? Construction versus Ideology

Delivered as a magazine article and again as a 2009 book chapter, Sorkin’s essay was intended as a call to action for his audience of urban designers, particularly urban design students. ²But what was urban design anyway? And why was Sorkin holding this discipline—rather than, say, politics or civil engineering—responsible for the life and welfare of the planet as a whole, ³as he so plainly put it?

A concise answer to that question was provided by Alexander Cuthbert, professor of planning and urban development at the University of New South Wales, in a 2010 review that was essentially a riposte to the 2009 book (entitled simply Urban Design) containing Sorkin’s essay. ⁴Cuthbert criticized urban design as strongly as had Sorkin, but with somewhat different aims. The professor’s energy was directed not against the perceived failures of urban design, as Sorkin’s had been, but against what Cuthbert saw as an unclear understanding of the term urban design’s meaning. Cuthbert argued first that urban design was not a particular program, product, or period that could be claimed by a single designer or institution, particularly Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Harvard’s erroneous claim, as Cuthbert put it, was based on a series of conferences in so-called urban design that the School’s Dean had initiated between 1956 and 1969, together with a graduate program in urban design created in 1961, and on the fifty-year history of this program since that time.

Harvard’s fifty-year connection to the term urban design did not, Cuthbert claimed, accurately define the term. Instead, he provided a much more expansive understanding. Urban design, he said, was a social, economic and political process of city-building that had generated a multitude of cultural and aesthetic forms, including architecture and public spaces, for as long as cities had existed, around 10,000 years. Urban design, according to Cuthbert, had generated a vast social complexity of urban form[s] over time; urban design had therefore invented itself, and no authorship [could] be made on it, particularly not that of architects operating during a particular form of capitalist development at a specific historical moment, such as the 1950s and 1960s. ⁵

Cuthbert’s meaning was clear; where Urban Design’s authors, including Sorkin himself, were content to discuss urban design within the relatively narrow confines of a series of designers and institutions existing mostly in the United States and often affiliated with Harvard, urban design for Cuthbert actually comprised the entirety of human-built environments over time. Since anything that could be called a city had been designed in one way or another, this broad stroke meant that any built component of the city could therefore also be called urban design.

An end of urban design in this sense would be catastrophic, if such an end could actually occur. But it was inconceivable, at least in 2006, that urban design in Cuthbert’s sense could cease; the production of built environments was expanding, not contracting, as the world urbanized, as formerly developing nations such as China and Brazil transformed their economies through industrialization, and as populations in developed countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom continued to flood into prosperous cities. In the early twenty-first century, Cuthbert’s version of urban design had not reached its end by any means. What, then, was Sorkin’s end(s) of urban design declaration really about?

Sorkin had entirely different ends in mind. Whereas Cuthbert understood urban design in terms of a single, long-term event—the human construction of cities—Sorkin’s essay portrayed urban design as a series of formal ideologies that had shaped the aesthetic direction of cities during the twentieth century. Sorkin’s particular concern, as he put it, was with ideologies that had reached the end of their usefulness, reaching a dead end; these ideologies, and their promoters, were conceptually exhausted, dried up, as it were, and designers seeking guidance were left with nowhere else to turn.

Sorkin’s distinct understanding of urban design was an important one. While one might easily accept everything in cities as being designed in some sense, one could not as easily accept the entirety of human construction being art. While Cuthbert spoke of urban design as a broad social process, Sorkin spoke of it as a conscious art, one shaped by beliefs, leading urban designers, and paradigmatic, built projects. It was urban design as art, not as social process, that was at risk by his formulation.

Inherent in Sorkin’s proclamation of urban design’s end was a call not for the renewed production of built environments—an unnecessary act in any event—but for renewed ideologies of urban design. Renewed theoretical debate, as Sorkin saw it, could generate new ideals and might then be able to influence the lived reality of cities through the design of new built environments. Sorkin did not proclaim the existence of any such new ideology himself: instead he concluded his essay by calling broadly for new urban design ideals that understood the city as an evolving project grounded first in social justice and a deep connection to urban history, and in endless explorations of the ethics and expression of consent and diversity. ⁶Many of Sorkin’s remarks referred directly to New York City, where he lived and where many of these issues were of particular importance given rising housing costs and inequality.

Sorkin addressed three different urban design ideals in his essay. The first, modernism, motivated the creation of Harvard’s urban design program and persisted throughout much of the twentieth century. Modernism diminished in favor in the 1970s, and Sorkin and Cuthbert would agree that modernism, at least as it was conceived during the twentieth century, has today become an obsolete ideology. Succeeding modernism, the second ideal, postmodernism or neotraditionalism, can still be detected in the ideology known as new urbanism. Sorkin clearly disfavored postmodernism, and he spent much time criticizing it in his essay as one of urban design’s ends. Sorkin referred to the third ideal as post-Urbanism and as the major alternative to postmodernism (as well as the other end of urban design), but he spent little time discussing it.

Understanding these three urban design ideals further is worthwhile, but such an exposition is not the sole purpose of this chapter. This chapter will also explain how all of these ideals are to a certain extent identical; all three—modernism, postmodernism, and posturbanism—share what we may call a unitary quality. Only when we have understood these ideals’ unitary quality can we distinguish this unitary understanding of urban design from a second, equally important understanding, of what we will call urban design’s plural quality. Just as there is unitary urban design, so is there plural urban design. But plural urban design, or plural urbanism, is not well understood. It is this book’s purpose to explain it in detail in order to move urban design as an art beyond the threatening end Sorkin so aptly formulates in his essay.

Modernism: Urban Design as Fundamentalism

The ideas of Swiss architect Le Corbusier are fundamental to understanding modernist urban design. Perhaps the most revolutionary and innovative of his urban design projects was the City for Three Million, or Ville Contemporaine, proposed in 1922. Its innovation lay not in Le Corbusier’s program for an ideal city, nor for its avant-garde aesthetic, for many such ideal cities had been proposed in the decades previous, including well-known projects such as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City of 1898, ⁷Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle of 1904, ⁸and Antonio Sant’Elia’s futurist visions of 1914. ⁹The City for Three Million’s radical quality lay instead in its neat synthesis of industrial imagery, radically minimalist aesthetics, and incorporation of the latest transportation technologies, all comprehensively organized into a single city design. Le Corbusier’s city was a neat rectangle of cruciform towers and lengthy low-rise slab buildings interspersed with landscape, ringed by open country and nearby marinas and airports, and threaded by limited-access automobile highways. Fordist notions of repetitive efficiency were manifest in the City for Three Million’s more or less identical building types; the city’s sixty-story apartment buildings were architectural versions of the Model T, constructed in numbers large enough to generate an entire city. The Ville Contemporaine was brand new, but Le Corbusier’s succeeding Plan Voisin of 1925 showed that Fordist, mechanized buildings might just as easily replace central Paris.

Le Corbusier’s urban visions became famous both for their ruthlessly repetitive quality and for their depiction of a minimalist, functional, technological city, an ahistor­icism that was shared by Le Corbusier’s Bauhaus contemporaries in Germany and by other early modernists. ¹⁰In tandem with their Fordist quality, Le Corbusier’s cities were also entirely professionalized: they were to be designed exclusively by the architect-engineer. The piecemeal quality of existing cities was gone. Accidental, wandering, inefficient street networks, cluttered shops and packed streets, and straggling peripheral areas all were replaced by consciously designed, identical structures.

1.1 Le Corbusier’s 1922 proposal for a contemporary city for three million inhabitants eradicated vernacular construction, speculative development, and the past. This utopian place shaped entirely by the architect-engineer directly influenced urban design for the next fifty years.

Cities in 1922 (and today) grew in a disorganized, seemingly uncontrolled manner, but Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine defeated disorganization: it was complete in and of itself, with all human needs seemingly being met in a single design. This vision, unlike any existing city of the time, may seem totalitarian and even terrifying today, but in their era Le Corbusier’s ideas provided a tempting vision of a world where architect-engineers had wholesale control over the form of the built environment. This vision of the totipotent architect-engineer would deeply influence the formal academic programs in urban design, including that of Harvard, that would appear forty years after Corbusier’s urban vision was first proposed.

Influenced by the chaotic quality of existing cities and by the temptation of total design that could remake these cities, modernist urban design remained throughout the twentieth century committed not to reforming existing cities but to replacing them. Other modernist urban design projects such as Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Großstadtarchitektur (1927) ¹¹only reinforced Le Corbusier’s propositions.

1.2 Josep Lluís Sert’s 1960 Peabody Terrace in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a large-scale housing development that was also a small-scale realization of an ideal vision of the city.

Following the Second World War, a second generation of modernist urban designers—including Josep Lluís Sert, dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design—retained the fundamentally radical philosophy of Le Corbusier’s 1922 vision of the totally designed city, although they introduced additional refinements such as variations of building type and open space. Sert’s 1960 Peabody Terrace housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a graduate housing development that described in miniature a comprehensive formal vision for a city shaped by clearly defined open spaces and diverse building dimensions. Such refined modernist urban design was a refreshing alternative to monotonous, poorly built speculative urban neighborhoods, but even second-generation modernist urbanism rejected contemporary cities as often as it reformed them. Le Corbusier’s own Unité d’Habitation, designed in the late 1940s as an urban neighborhood contained within a single, mixed-use building, did not replace the city, but simply rejected it entirely. The building was autonomous, standing apart from the city in a forested landscape. Where there once were city streets, the Unité instead provided traditional neighborhood features like shops and schools inside its concrete structure.

Modernism’s avant-garde urban design was both promising and demanding. Where existing cities were monotonous, poorly built, and seemingly out of control, modernism promised to entirely reorganize urban functions within a wholly new, full designed setting. But modernism was also demanding; in order to achieve this new order, the entire past must be abandoned. Modernist fundamentalism, so strong in its commitment to the future but so unable to accommodate the past, contained within it the seeds of the critique that would ultimately lead to the ideology’s abandonment. Faced with modernism, an ideal that sought to destroy the existing city, doubters reacted equally strongly against it, generating a counterreaction called postmodernism, which would prove to be just as radical and intolerant as modernism had been.

1.3 Le Corbusier’s postwar Unité d’Habitation combined traditional functions of the city such as housing, retail, and social services within the form of a single building, implying that the city itself was unnecessary.

The Counterreaction: Postmodernism

Given modernist urban design’s vision of a total city with little connection to the past, it was little surprise that any reaction against modernism would look not forward, but backward, to the design of existing cities. In this sense the reaction to modernism shared some aspects of previous antitechnology movements, like the Luddites, that had also looked back to preindustrial agricultural society. ¹²The postmodern counterreaction to modernism feared technology too, in the form of hygienic towers that had begun to replace the existing city, and it too would look back to a preindustrial past.

The first spokesperson for the counterreaction to modernist urbanism in the United States was the author and activist Jane Jacobs. Appearing to her sexist foes as a stay-at-home housewife, ¹³Jacobs was in reality a highly erudite reporter-cum-public intellectual who placed modernist urbanism directly in her sights in her now-canonical book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Jacobs’s attack was conceptually elegant: Where modernist urbanism claimed progress—new housing, efficient cities, improved economies, and enhanced quality of life—Jacobs saw the opposite—inefficient, inhumane, economically damaging, and above all, antihuman places. Her critique was astute and well timed,