Revolve: Reconciliation in Our Time

LOGGIA There is no better word we know to describe the enclosing element that forms this museum’s main entrance (Museum of Redlands). There aren’t columns and arches but does it not perform as a traditional loggia would?

One hundred years ago, the poet T.S Eliot wrote an article “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in which among other insights he offers this one: “Tradition…cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature… has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

ARCH AND VAULT The underlying structural properties of brick and stone gave shape to the traditional arch and vault thousands of years ago. Our construction methods are different, but are the shapes therefore prohibited?

RUSTICATION As an elegant way since the Renaissance to render surfaces of an urban building that yield a sense of protection are there new ways to achieve the same effect?

Written in 1919, in the fledgling moments of what we now call the modern movement, this poet — one of the greatest of modernist artists — in these few phrases and those that follow argues for a conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written, that while the material of art never improves it is also never quite the same and what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.  

ROMANCE AND REASON 19TH century architects (left) indulged in romantic (and to them meaningful) adventures borrowing imagery from every corner of humanity and its history. 20th century architects (right) dispensed with all of that to instead focus on architecture in pursuit of solutions — programmatic, technological, societal and otherwise.

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE The Janus head (ancient Rome) and present day debates in the scientific community swirling around presentism v. eternalism, share an appreciation for the ambiguity inherent in what we mean by “our time”—is it ours alone, discretely wedged between an unrecoverable past and unknown future, or part of a continuum to which we have always and will always belong?

This is hardly “what’s past is past” or “what’s old is bad”— the kind of thinking that has come to characterize (or caricature) what we think of as the paradigm of art and architecture in the 20th century (with now the inevitable backlash in some quarters: “what’s new is bad”). Eliot, the modernist, instead argues for a relationship with the art of the past and further that the whole history of art is nothing more (nor less) than a train of thought that revolves. To be “original” may also mean to be “of the origins”.

ETERNAL MATH As early as 1947 Colin Rowe demonstrated how seemingly revolutionary modern architecture could in the hands of a profoundly thoughtful architect benefit from and carry forward arithmetic and geometric systems of composition that have been with us in one form or another since the beginning of human experience (Left, Villa Rotonda, Palladio; right, Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier).

BRICOLEUR Axel Vervoordt, a contemporary Dutch interior designer, draws from both ancient and modern, western and eastern (southern and northern), man-made and natural. The results are both unexpected and familiar, beautiful and enlightening.

ROMANTIC RATIONALISM Le Corbusier was not like a lot of modernists; a romanticist as much as a rationalist, his love affair with the Mediterranean while not always appropriate influenced his work life long. In southern California, this is not so much romantic as it is a (somewhat) natural response to the environment. (Above, his Beistegui apartment in Paris; (below our Mandell residence in Los Angeles).

If architecture can be thought of as built thought, the embodiment of consciousness (events and ideas), then it cannot have a past, present or future. The history of architecture is nothing more (nor less) than the accumulation of thoughts — experience that with a little bit (or a lot) of effort belongs to all of us, and upon which we are free to draw at any time for any purpose or at least to the extent that it furthers our effort to create a novel work of art. Good, bad or indifferent, why would we choose to censor experience? Innovation is nothing more (nor less) than making new (hopefully unexpected and fruitful) relationships among things we already know. Here again Eliot is helpful: “the poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

ANCIENT MODERNISM Louis Kahn had a love affair with the ruins of ancient Rome (not the actual buildings but their ruins) and it influenced his work life long. Whether made of stone, concrete or plaster, the barrel-vaulted room is forever compelling (Clockwise from upper left: ancient Rome, Kimball Art Museum, our Museum of Redlands)

VICTORIAN DELIRIUM Redlands, CA was established at the height of the Victorian era when luxurious patterns flourished on paper, walls and buildings. The back side of the barrel vault that pierces the Museum of Redlands is faced in a three-dimensional die-cut pattern that recalls such indulgences of the past.

CAN’T WE PLAY? Children’s libraries seem safe places these days to imbibe in flights of fancy that were once considered more pleasurable than decadent. (Clockwise from upper left: Palazzo del Te, Giulio Romano; our Beverly Hills Children’s Library and wallpaper designed by Alexander Girard in the mid-20th century).

Architects more than perhaps any other kind of visual artist seem to have had the greatest trouble with this. Why the uneasiness?  Interior designers, who are bricoleurs at heart and by trade (accumulators, collagists), have no problems drawing from whatever they find wherever they find it to create what they call “layered” experiences. They instinctively know that a so-called “ancient” or “modern” object takes on a different meaning when placed in a context not originally of its own—and conversely “ancient” and “modern” contexts mutate when populated with objects not originally of their making. It’s harder than it sounds, and the better the designer, the better the outcome.

BLUE AND GOLD The Hedrick Study at UCLA (upper and lower right) sought patterns natural and man-made—a sunset, deep space, Portuguese tile—that would subliminally suggest school colors.

BAROQUE EXUBERANCE While it would undermine the seriousness of purpose with which Borromini pursued his work to say so, his work undeniably results in a kind of exuberance that’s enduringly sensual bordering on the lurid. (Left, Sant’ Ivo della Sapienza, Rome; right, our lobby of the Main Instruction Building at Chaffey College).

We architects are more (or less?) than bricoleurs. We are also partly engineers. We unlike poets do have to respond to economics and mechanics — and this may be part of the problem. Maybe in the last century, this our other role, our obligation to society, has loomed too large, devoured our interests as artists in anything other than what’s right in front of us. To this day, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we persist in the myth that the technology of today (and yes tomorrow!) — construction technology, environmental technology, computing technology — will do all the innovating for us. Or worse: that it’s all about us. We have engaged in willful ignorance as if somehow forgetting is liberating.

BAROQUE THEATER Deceptively simple, the theaters of 18th century Europe were boxes decked out in color and pattern. (Below, our children’s story time theater at Beverly Hills Library).

BAROQUE GARDEN Mastering nature, ordering it and employing it for the purpose of decorative patterns in the open was outlandish to say the least in the context of today’s tastes. Out of bounds today? (Below, our Chaffey College Main Instruction Building).

We choose otherwise; we choose reconciliation. We choose  El Lissitsky and  Edwin Lutyens, Antonio Gaudi and Giulio Romano. We reserve the right to be as inspired by the Parthenon as we are the iPhone. More importantly, we choose to seek how our experience of the iPhone changes our relationship with the Parthenon (and vice-versa), how Lissitsky changed (without obliterating) our relationship with Lutyens, or Gaudi, Romano. We choose to play a part in and be played by all history or better yet since we are Americans all our histories that are and will always be alive. We choose to be of one mind with all human experience, a mind, which to paraphrase Eliot, both changes and abandons nothing en route. We choose to be conscious not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

NEOCLASSICAL BEAST 18th century architect LeDoux created buildings intended to read as massive, impenetrable, heavy blocks of stone. 20th century architects have sought to lighten the load, making buildings thin and transparent. Do we not ever get to indulge in weight and solidity again? (Left, his Royal Saltworks; right, our Doheny residences, West Hollywood, CA).

Ok Sure But Who Designed Greenwich Village?

WHAT PLANNERS AND DEVELOPERS ACCOMPLISHED Twenty-five years ago we offered a way to enhance a neighborhood in the heart of Los Angeles through increased densities and a mix of uses. We got big box development instead.

NOT WHETHER, HOW California’s got a housing crisis! CA SB-50! The sky’s falling! The issue facing us is not whether increased housing densities are a good thing or not, it’s how we do it. Housing in place of car repair anyone?

Among the observations we remember from Jane Jacobs” famous book THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES are “the ballet of the sidewalk” and “eyes on the street”.  Another comes near the end of the book (never quoted probably because few people have actually read the book): “a city is not a work of art”.  She was referring to three ideas which had gained prominence in the early modern era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which she had spent the previous 400 pages berating:  The  Garden City (English, Ebenezer Howard), The Radiant City (French, Charles Jeanneret) and The City Beautiful (American, Daniel Burnham)

NO MAN’S LAND TRANSFORMED Streets that seem too wide now when framed with appropriate densities will spring to life.

IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME RIGHT NOW Homes don’t have to be one story bungalows or condominiums in a tower—we have at our disposal a whole array of possibilities: townhouses, flats, lofts and garden units.

These were movements led by architects who had concluded (on their own) that maybe we needed to rethink cities in the context of all that had gone wrong in the wake of the industrial revolution.  All three assumed that traditional cities didn’t work and couldn’t work in humanely accommodating burgeoning populations and modern industry and therefore needed radical reconfiguration. Jacobs saw these speculations as top down, anti-city, artistic abstractions devoid of considerations for real people and real life.  She called it the Radiant-Garden-City-Beautiful problem.

MID CENTURY SOUNDING OF THE ALARM Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson were contemporaries. Together they introduced concepts associated with complex interrelated systems (“biodiversity”, “sidewalk ballet”) in thinking about our natural environments and large cities. Clearly the science of systems was in the air however dubious its application to the planning and design of cities has proven to be.

THE TOOLS MATTER. A 450-page book of words is not the way to plan or design a city.

It is thought that Robert Moses—who replaced thriving neighborhoods with highways and towers all over New York --was Jacobs arch enemy but he barely rates a mention in her book. Instead, her enemies were established high modernist architects (and architects in general) all of whom in her mind had failed to understand the complex, organic and diverse systems of the American metropolis, didn’t value it and therefore were intent on obliterating it. She blamed them. They were Moses’ enablers.

GARDEN CITY Ebenezer Howard thought industrial age cities had become unlivable and thought we should all live in small towns surrounded and permeated by gardens. Frank Lloyd Wright was a proponent too.

But Moses was (recklessly and indiscriminately) employing ideas in the 1950s that had been formulated a generation earlier in the 1920s and that most architects by the 1960s already knew did not work. Jacobs seems not to want to acknowledge that by the time she wrote her book these ideas had already been dismissed. In architecture school none of us were taught that those early modern speculations were anything other than intellectual failures interesting only has historical object lessons on what not to do. (Although some architects still do to this day perpetuate the habit with speculations on wholesale interventions, giant projects that are supposed to solve a city’s ailments all at once.)

RADIANT CITY Charles Jeanneret found metaphysical truth in proposing a model of the city based on modern technology: tall buildings and automobiles. How has this worked out?

In her 450-page book Jacobs includes not a single drawing (except four diagrams about city blocks on pages 179-182).  Instead she uses words to describe how she thinks a city should be “planned” by which she means policies, incentives and economical models that will ensure that streets, parks and neighborhoods will teem with life. She understands that a thriving city—especially a metropolis—is made up of complex, interconnected systems of people that organically evolve, but which also need monitoring and sometimes intervention to maintain.

CITY BEAUTIFUL Daniel Burnham adopted Baroque planning principles at a huge scale to create entirely composed cities (left). These principles in practice have given us some of the most beautiful civic spaces and parks in America, of which Pasadena, CA has one of the best examples in its city hall (right).

Jane Jacobs saw the planning of a city in the way one might plan a party: invite the right mix of people, have something for them to do, make sure they intermingle. The party requires a host (a government), but one who, paradoxically, is just there to manage the spontaneity. The setting is secondary (maybe some flowers, a tablecloth, a candle or two) and if the setting is only secondary no wonder she thinks a city can be planned with words.

WHAT’S WORTH PRESERVING. Activists and city planners saved Greenwich Village (left) and Old Town Pasadena (right). But architects designed them.

Jacobs disdain for modern (obsolete and long discredited) theories of city planning and worse her appropriation of the word “planning” to mean something other than what it had meant 5,000 years prior partly explains the tenor of our relationships as architects with cities and communities in our work. Jacobs managed to sow the seeds for the (self-defeating and unproductive) animosity we feel almost daily in our interactions with “city planners” and “community stakeholders.” Parroting Jacobs they think cities can be planned with words and numbers – social policies, economic incentives, development incentives, zoning regulations, design guidelines, height limits, setbacks, FARs.  If we just MANAGE things right, our cities will turn out, ignoring the obvious that while, yes, cities are lived they are also MADE.

PARKING LOT TO NEIGHBORHOOD. This demonstration project from 25 years ago, before Culver City was on anyone’s radar, showed how to transform underutilized land in the heart of metropolitan LA into a livable, desirable place to live.

SHOPPING CENTER TRANSFORMED No sacrifice in commercial space was required to accommodate hundreds of new residents on the site of this shopping center.

Neither Jane Jacobs nor any “city planner” (as we now know that to mean today) designed Greenwich Village. Architects designed it just as they have every place in the world that we value. We are architects-- not writers, planners, developers, lawyers, managers, economists, big tech, activists or politicians—who design cities.   Thankfully, Jacobs saved Greenwich Village from the decimations of Robert Moses who didn’t know what he was doing anyway and who was certainly neither an architect nor planner (as we used to know that word to mean).

THERE THERE Enhanced density improves the environment of the surrounding streets.

SOME PLACE TO LIVE Must our streets really succumb to the back sides of big box stores? Can’t we live on them?

A city is a place for people to be sure, but the place matters, it effects people as much as the people effect the place.  The physical environment creates culture as much as it is a result of it. The physical artifact that is a city is a collection of buildings and the spaces between them, the better the buildings the better the cities. The more buildings and the spaces between them are works of art, the more beautiful the city and the life within.  Any city we value is as Jane Jacobs stated “not a work of art” but it is made up of works of art.

RECLAIMED SPACE Not every open space we experience has to also accommodate our cars.