All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
sought from six architects, with results that certainly raised many more interesting urbanistic issues than Muschamp’s (not so) exquisite corpse, while still feeding the celebrity beast. Indeed, two of Giovannini’s six designers were also on Muschamp’s list. For New York, Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid produced completely different, more fully elaborated schemes. Somebody has a good agent.
Stung by the attacks on its own six schemes, the LMDC had announced in August that it was ready for some list-mania of its own and was prepared to pony up a puny sum ($40,000 per team) to sponsor six more schemes. And whom did the LMDC choose from the 400 who applied? The same people. Frederic Schwartz (already backpedaling from the idea of burying West Street in the face of rising community opposition), David Rockwell, and Rafael Viñoly—all from Muschamp’s list—dominate one team. Another is composed of masters-of-the-universe Steven Holl, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, and trifecta winner Peter Eisenman—Muschamp’s list, one and all. Norman Foster makes the cut, as does Daniel Libeskind, our leading iconographer of trauma.
There is also an interesting, if jerry-built, team made up of a group of younger stars from the US and Europe. The final slot goes to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, making this the fourth such commission they’ve received. They are already designing 7 WTC for Larry Silverstein; they’ve produced a site-wide scheme for Larry Silverstein (featuring an extremely tall tower); and they’ve devised a planning study for the east side of downtown for Carl Weisbrod (head of the Downtown Business Improvement District and member of the LMDC board). Why not just hand them the commission now?
Immediately following the LMDC selection of his list, Muschamp returned the favor, doing a full 180, writing that the LMDC—those former masters of malevolence and implacable foes of art—are now likely to “change the course of cultural life in New York.” Come again? What would really change the course of cultural (and political) life in New York would be an open process, a genuine competition, in which public bodies (not to mention architectural critics) devoted themselves to promoting the widest—and wildest—styles of inclusion, not this endless, mad favoritism. And am I wrong to think that in offering his own proposal at this stage of the game, Muschamp has stepped over the critical line, compromising his future ability to judge developments dispassionately?
2002
17
Splitsville, USA: Why the Practice and Teaching of Urban Design Is Coming Apart
I’ve just come back from an excellent conference—“The Physical Fitness of Cities”—in Salt Lake City, then in the throes of its final Olympics preparations. Salt Lake was a heightened version of its usual dull, beautiful, weird, fascinating, and scary self. Security, needless to say, was draconian: explosives sniffers in the airport, troops with rifles over their shoulders, elaborate credentials around everyone’s neck, Jersey barriers guiding traffic, the whole nine post–September 11 yards. Salt Lake has always been a well-disciplined city, with its rigid Mormon theocracy, its grid of wide streets numbered to reflect their distance from Temple Square, its rigorous proscriptions of daily life (no caffeine, tobacco, alcohol), and its cultural uniformity. And it has been a physically fit city, too. Mark Twain wrote in Roughing It that “Salt Lake City was healthy—an extremely healthy city. They declared that there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act for ‘having no visible means of support’.”
Although the event sites were dispersed over a wide area, the Olympic Village—housing the athletes, presumably the fittest people on the planet—was designed as an autonomous town, located in a set of tacky new buildings on the grounds of Fort Douglas in the foothills of the Wasatch, overlooking the city below. The military camp was itself established in 1862, ostensibly to fight the Indians but also to keep an eye on the Mormons, cannons ready to quell any excessive behavior. The village remains highly defensible, ringed by three layers of security fencing, patrolled by armed guards, and completely self-sufficient, providing housing, meals, shopping, entertainment, and healthcare (including the hugely controversial free condoms offered to the athletes)—the ultimate gated community. However dull the new architecture or sinister the security, the village has much to say about the state of our urbanism—the good, the bad, and the ugly. To begin with the good: it’s well-scaled and the old military quarters nicely preserved; it’s walkable and wonderfully sited, right next to the university campus, another fine pedestrian ensemble. Moreover, the campus and the village are now served by a new light-rail line that runs down the hill to the center of town. For the athletes, the village represents an ethnic and national pluralism (if with a radically skewed median age) and a great place to party that’s the diametric opposite of the city below.
On the other hand, in its combination of Radburn, Blade Runner, and The Truman Show, the Olympic Village is a nice reflection of the troubled picture of urban design as a discipline. It’s a recombinant place that embodies many of the contending tendencies in contemporary American urbanism and the sometimes freakish results of their splicings. It’s also a most cautionary place, a clear marker of the ethical depths that are associated with particular formal preferences, and an object lesson in understanding that the place where strategies of organization meet form are where the urban rubber hits the road.
The field of urbanism has never been richer analytically, nor able to draw on more diverse intellectual positions. From Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner to Max Weber, the Chicago School, Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, Christine Boyer, Mike Davis, Peter Calthorpe, and Rem Koolhaas, the discipline teems with analysis. At this point, there is virtually no position without an extensive pedigree. Formal paradigms, however, are far fewer.
This split leaves urban design education in a parlous state. With no ideology enjoying the hegemonic sway of modernism, the field is contested and, in many ways, adrift. This reflects its own ambivalent origins. Arguments for the starting point of the discipline are both thick—José Luis Sert and Kevin Lynch, among others, are often cited as progenitors—and largely irrelevant. While the origin of urban design as an academic field cannot be clearly attributed, it is certainly the product of a particular moment in postwar American culture and reflects, in its emergence, other schisms that have characterized the practice of architecture.
The great originating rift in architectural education was the parting of the ways of architects and engineers in nineteenth-century France and the establishment of separate academies. This division of the artistic and the technical is one of the key operations of modernity, reflected both in the continuing clash between the two cultures and in various efforts to recuperate one side of the argument or the other.
A cause of the split lies in the origins of the discipline of planning. The central ambivalence here has long lain between the idea of physical planning and the set of anterior technical, social, and economic analyses that form the basis and shape the perspective of action. The conflict is not simply internal to planning, but is reflected in its fraught relationship to architecture, a product of planning’s dual origins in the social sciences and social work on the one hand and the formal disciplines of architecture and landscape design on the other.
This nexus of confusion is reflected in the academy by the migrations of the field of planning within the larger structures of university organization. The planning department at UCLA (in recent years the most progressive in the country) is now split off from the school of architecture with which it had long uneasily coexisted. At Harvard, a somewhat lackluster planning department was moved out of the design school into the school of government and, in effect, replaced by the urban design program, only to be moved back and joined to urban design under a bifurcated umbrella. At City University of New York, planning is at Hunter College, urban design is in the City College School of Architecture, and many of the powerhouse intellectuals—David Harvey, Neil Smith, Setha Low, and others—are rigged into the graduate anthropology department.
This bureaucratic discomfort reflects the historical circumstances of the emergence of the discipline of urban design in the attempt by architects to recover some influence over the physical design of cities from the planners who so dominated professional urbanism in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—the brains behind urban renewal, the interstates, suburbanization, and the paternalism of one-dimensional structures of social