Disingenuous Discourse (Otherwise Known as Bullshit)

KNOWLEDGE EMBEDDED in 5,000 years of human experience applied to contemporary circumstances with a little imagination is all that we need to know to respond well to the needs of the 21st century city, no bullshit required.

To justify and promote its practices the modern movement in architecture generated some of the most incoherent propaganda ever written, and then later engendered some of the most coherent criticisms of both its propaganda and practices. For about thirty years from, say, 1960 to1990 there first emerged the intuition that something about the modern movement wasn’t adding up followed by analyses and evaluations of various kind that called out the questionable veracity and validity of the movement’s philosophical origins, its contradictions and failures in practice, and finally the discrediting of many, though not all, of its practices.

A TREATISE ON ARCHITECTURE is not so much a how-to book as it is a tool with which to organize the philosophical and practical foundations of the practice of architecture. It has a lineage extending back at least 2,000 years and in the heterogeneous, confused climate that is the United States of the 21st century would not be possible today. (Tens Books on Architecture, Vitrivius, Rome, 30-20 B.C, above; De Re Aedifactoria, Leon Battista Alberti, Florence, 1452)

TREATISES EVOLVED to express a point of view, then increasingly devolved into ideological arguments and then with the modern movement morphed into almost purely propagandistic manifestos. (Antoine Laugier, above; Viollet-Le-Duc, below)

INTENDED TO PROMOTE this architect’s vision for how we ought to think about buildings in the context of newly available modern technologies and potentially new ways of living this extended essay argued for the wholesale overhaul of 5,000 years of building traditions no matter the consequence (Vers Une Architecture, Charles Jeanneret, 1923)

Steve and I attended graduate school at the height of all that (late 70s, early 80s) when writers such as Colin Rowe and Alan Colquhoun, publications such as Oppositions and Perspecta, and architects such as Robert Venturi (Complexity and Contradiction) and Michael Dennis (Court and Garden)—most of them associated with schools of architecture—offered erudite, complex, and incisive commentary that despite their undeniable eloquence and convincing appeals to common sense never insisted on agreement, only an appreciation of the arguments made and fair consideration of them. It was “academic criticism” but only to the extent that it aimed to be useful in informing real world practice.

HONEST ASSESSMENTS of the modern movement probably began as early as the 1940s and possibly with Colin Rowe’s seminal essay Mathematics of the Ideal Villa in which he demonstrated the persistence and plasticity of traditional numerically guided compositional strategies linking Charles Jeanneret’s modern buildings to classical buildings such as Palladio’s villas in northern Italy.

FURTHER CRITQUE emerged throughout the mid-20th century in which authors suggested level-headed approaches to advancing modern architecture without having to discard all of the 5,000 years of practice that preceded it. (Alan Colquhoun, above; Michael Dennis, below)

ARCHITECTS WRITING in the latter half of the 20th century adopted the posture of the modernist manifesto to argue for overturning, reconsidering or at least moderating some of the many heavy-handed and authoritarian demands of the modern movement. (Robert Venturi, above; Aldo Rossi, below)

None of this was criticism in that way we think of movie or theater criticism—meaning thumbs up or thumbs down opinions about specific works—but rather an attempt to place theory and practice in historical, cultural, social, and economic context so that we may decide for ourselves. Persuasion was still the goal, but to the extent possible in an admittedly value driven conversation and despite however much the writing was always subject to the subjectivity of the writer, so was objectivity. Crucially, it was never only about historical, cultural, social, or economic context and always about the architecture and the architect’s practices in relationship with it. Those writing at that time viscerally or at least vicariously knew what it was like to be an architect. They knew that architects still always had (and have) agency no matter the context or era.

NO THEORETICIAN AND ONLY AN ARCHITECT such as Robin Evans could have ever hoped to offer such insights as he did through careful and considered reflection on the practice, its possibilities and limitations, its grounding in the real world of geometry, material, and construction as well as the dimensions, senses and mobility of the human body.

NO HISTORIAN AND ONLY AN ARCHITECT such as Michael Dennis could ever hope to offer such a comprehensive and actionable treatment on the first principles of humane town planning and urban design that we inherited from the thousands of years of experience in the west.

Later, though, we got quasi-poetic sociologically minded writers like Mike Davis (City of Quartz) and D.J. Waldie (Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir) who seemed to know or care little of architecture or architects and who wrote as if all that mattered in understanding our built environment was historical, cultural, social and economic context—the implication being that it, like Hegel’s ghosts, determined the architecture of societies and their cities. For an architect there was not much to learn beyond what any citizen generally interested in understanding the sociology of a place and time might.

ALGORITHMICALLY AMPLIFIED BULLSHIT is what’s unique about our time, bullshit having probably been with us since the beginning of time.

Then toward the end of the questioning-of-modern-architecture era counter-reformation critics emerged who wrote mostly for newspapers and magazines about just-opened buildings as movie critics do about just-opened films resplendent with up-to-the-minute, off-the-cuff, trending, topical and entirely subjective commentary. Critics at turn of the century such as Herbert Muschamp at the New York Times and Nicolai Ouroussoff at the Los Angeles Times published articles that offered little more than gossip and promotional PR copy for their favorite architects (and themselves). For an architect there was not much to learn except which architects those critics liked.

PABLUM is the inevitable outcome of nepotism in the world of contemporary academia, a world in which the quantity not quality of output matters, no matter how dumb.

ATTENTION FOR ATTENTION’S SAKE is one value, among others, most cherished by bullshitters. (Interview of Jeffrey Kipnis with Architecture Exchange, 2018)

Finally, today, we get nothing but gossip. We get descriptions of how buildings were built, the political twists and turns to get them built, who paid for them, what people are saying about them along with personality profiles of the architects who designed them. 

PARAMETRIC NONSENSE would have us believe that dimensions don’t matter, and straight lines are curves, when calculus tells us the opposite: curves are an accumulation of straight lines and dimensions are fundamental to understanding them. Computation itself is constituted of discrete bits. (Ark of the World Visitors Center, San Juan, Costa Rica, Greg Lynn, Form, 2003, above)

GASLIGHTING is the modus operandi of the consummate bullshitter. (EDEN Apartment Building, Singapore, 2019 Heatherwick Studio, above)

Meanwhile, from the schools of architecture we get intellectually opaque dissertations ostensibly about architecture from those who, because they are so far removed from practice, so driven by the output demands of the institutional-educational complex, and so steeped in cloistered terminology (usually borrowed from other disciplines such as literary criticism, philosophy of aesthetics and psycholinguistics) produce writings so steeped in obfuscation that they offer next to nothing from which a practicing architect could learn anything.

CYNICISM AND BOREDOM are two of the professional hazards of newspaper critics who because of the audience they serve can only ever live in a world of second-hand knowledge, trends, personalities, and gossip. (Herbert Muschamp, left; Nicolai Ouroussoff, right)

We are mired in disingenuous discourse—what the Princeton University philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt calls “bullshit.” Instead of analytical, methodical discussions of facts and principles, or any kind of theoretical effort aimed at creating testable, conceptual frameworks with which to inform our practice (and vice-versa), we get pretend academics such as Sylvia Lavin at Princeton University and Jeffrey Kipnis at the Ohio State University who are neither interested in nor capable of any of that and just want to sound smart. And pretend architects such as Greg Lynn (FORM) and Thomas Heatherwick (Heatherwick Studios),  who with little interest in the true practice of architecture or uncovering its truths in service to improving it in the 21st century just want their work to seem smart.

TALKITECTURE A typical 21st century American end-of-semester architecture school design studio student presentation and faculty jury.

DEVELOPER TALK A typical City of Los Angeles Planning Commission meeting (Los Angeles City Hall, 2022, above)

Architecture like any art should stand on its own, no talking or writing necessary. But there still is, in moderation, the room and need for both. For those of us who want to order our thoughts for ourselves and our fellow practitioners, or for those who are just learning, or because in practice we’re always having to explain ourselves and our work while it's in progress we do have to talk and write at least some. But in the 21st century because of the confusions wrought by the propaganda and practices of the modern movement, the reluctance of the counter-reformationists to accept the modernism’s failures and because so many of us feel threatened or are confused by sound reasoning in response to those failures, we obsfucate. As a result, it has been those who write about architecture and architects themselves who have contributed most to the dumbing down of the public discourse on architecture.

A BUILDING IS NO MORE THAN AN INCREMENT in the larger project of building a neighborhood even when there is yet no neighborhood.  (Johnson Favaro proposed residential development on Blackwelder Street in Culver City, CA)

CITY PLANNING is not the same as land use zoning—it goes beyond programming, it requires drawings and models, or, in other words an architect’s capabilities. (Johnson Favaro proposed residential development on Blackwelder Street in Culver City, CA within an imagined future neighborhood)

A FUTURE NEIGHBORHOOD envisioned for the Blackwelder-Smiley area of Culver City, CA (Johnson Favaro study, 2022)

Opting Public

INVESTMENT IN COMMUNITY Why would a city and its taxpayers go to the trouble to build a community center— a building that will never generate a profit nor even pay for itself?

On the UCLA campus in Boelter Hall, the engineering building, there is a room that has been converted into a small museum.  It was once a research lab led by Professor  Leonard Kleinrock where the first “e-mail” was sent across an electronic communications system (then known as ARPANET, now known as the internet) in 1969 between UCLA in Los Angeles, CA and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto, CA. As a practical application of his team’s seminal research in the fields of computer science and electronic communications, this was the first of that which became a messaging system among colleagues within the academic world, a modest, quick and easy way to share research among peers working at a distance. 

INVESTMENT IN THE ACADEMY Professor Kleinrock and his colleagues at UCLA and Stanford Research Institute invested their time and our public dollars in research that ultimately led to a revolution in communications and transformation of our economies world-wide.

PRIVATE ENTERPRISE BUILT ON PUBLIC INVESTMENT The communications revolution was popularized, monetized and advanced by highly motivated and highly performing individual entrepreneurs.

Thirty years later, the internet became available to everyone. It got commercialized and popularized as the “world wide web”. Websites were created, dotcom became a thing, we got the cell phone and apps and all that.  Start-ups became big tech, the world changed.  “Making the world a better place” was often the stated motive and profit was the incentive. And since 1995 in the fields of computer science and digital technology both the motive and the incentive have driven innovation ever since.

INVESTMENT IN SCIENCE American taxpayers funded the mostly unglamorous work of over 400,000 people who together put a man on the moon and returned him to earth.

INVESTMENT IN PEOPLE Steve Johnson’s father, a mechanical engineer, worked at NASA in the 1960S on the Saturn program — the precursor to the Apollo program. Above: Steve (second from left) and family at Cape Canaveral Florida; Below: Steve’s father in the control room (third from left).

ENTREPRENEURS TAKE ON SPACE TRAVEL Neither Musk, Branson nor Bezos (top to bottom) invented space travel, nor its associated technologies nor anything close to it. They are personalities, figureheads, building businesses that rely on the experience of scientists and engineers whose knowledge was built on the foundation of years of public investment that preceded them.

But all that innovation—the appearance, dissemination and now ubiquity of so called “high-tech” (or “smart technology” driven forward, we are led to believe, by smart people) was preceded by a century of behind-the-scenes, blind alley wandering, fits-and-starts enduring, plodding and grinding, incremental innovation driven forward mostly by the desire to expand the boundaries of scientific and technological understanding and knowledge. At places like UCLA, a public university, and Stanford, a private university with lots of post war federal funding, the foundations laid for all that came later.

INVESTMENT IN INFRASTRUCTURE The federal government funded the transcontinental railroad and its expansion into a nation wide system. Railroad entrepreneurs then built business empires based on that infrastructure (Above: the transcontinental railroad under construction; Below: clockwise from upper left: Leland Stanford, Walter H Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie).

IT’S NOT THE TECHNOLOGY, STUPID Elon Musk and his team at Hyperloop (the technology of which is at least 200 years old) don’t get that the challenges of a transportation system are less technological then they are societal, governmental and political. The challenges facing the bullet train aren’t flawed technology, but rather logistical having mostly to do with property ownership and civil engineering.

Earlier in the 1960s over 400,000 people employed either directly by the federal government or by companies contracted with the federal government worked individually and in teams to rocket a man to the moon and back. It was a heavy lift. It was expensive, paid for by the American taxpayer, not at all a sure bet.  At government’s highest levels it was perhaps primarily motivated politically and ideologically (to best the communists), but the dividends since then have more than made up for the initial investments. The technology now firmly established the private sector (with typical fanfare bordering as always on hubris) has taken up the task of commercializing and popularizing space travel, once again ostensibly “for the sake of mankind” and justly to make money.

INVESTMENT IN EDUCATION The wisdom of the Americans from the founding of the colonies has been an on-going and consistent investment in public education. This more than anything has fueled our quality of life, the prosperity of our economy and our seemingly endless ability to remake ourselves. (Above: Boston Latin Public School the first public school in America established in 1645; Below: The Los Angeles Unified School District serves 750,000 students at 1,000 schools across 750 square miles).

This is an American story and not a new one. Abraham Lincoln got Congress to pay private companies to build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and expand the railroad system which in turn spawned the railroad industry, “civilized the west” and enriched highly performing and motivated individuals (of which Leland Stanford was one).  Taxpayers paid for roads and highways in the 1950s then, while General Motors, Ford and Chrysler thrived.  (Sometimes it worked in reverse: In the early 20th century Andrew Carnegie paid for hundreds of libraries across the country, while local governments ran them. And, in the early mid-century health care in America started out as a entirely private affair, led by innovative companies like Kaiser Steel--whose empire was built on America’s investment in WWII-- but now seems headed toward a public system, optional or otherwise). We now mostly honor innovation but never in this country has innovation occurred without the systemic framework of public investment.

INVESTMENT IN LIBRARIES One of two buildings first built on the UCLA campus almost one hundred years ago, Powell Library — like every library on every university campus in America — has been at the heart of the university ever since. Over the years that followed it expanded into a system of 10 libraries serving specialized communities across campus.

RE-INVESTMENT IN LIBRARIES Young Research Library, a mid-century bunker of a building, is the largest library on the UCLA campus. It requires some work to bring it to life, to become a place that’s more integrated into the life of the campus, a place where people want to be.

NEW LIFE FOR AN OLD LIBRARY The traditional idea of a great reading room such as that which can be found at Powell is here transformed into a glass membrane embedded in landscape and filled with light.

Around 1980 we began to believe that innovation was an entirely individual thing, that we didn’t need the supporting framework of public investment (“government is the problem not the solution”).  All we needed were highly motivated, highly performing, incentive seeking individuals and a “free” market to push innovation. We could do it all on our own and the market would make it so. This, we now know, is not supported by the evidence. Not even Bill Gates (who certainly made a profit off years of prior public investment) believes it to be entirely true especially in areas where he has focused his philanthropy — such as education and healthcare. (Although his billions are a mere drop in the bucket compared to what we as the public could invest and in turn achieve).

INVESTMENT IN SCHOOLS The LAUSD is so large with so many campuses that it by necessity engages in a perpetual building and rebuilding enterprise, renewing campuses on an equitable basis continuously over time throughout its sprawling service area. (Above: campus redevelopment with new classroom building at Canyon Charter School, a public school in an affluent neighborhood in Rustic Canyon between Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica.

As architects, how many individuals have we met through our work with government agencies—counties, cities, school districts—who do what they do because quietly and without much monetary incentive they want to make the world a better place?  How much innovative thinking within local government and school systems have we witnessed where the only incentives are wanting to do a better job?  How seemingly thankless is the job of a librarian or a teacher who must know but rarely gets to directly experience the influence of their work?  And yet, how many times have we heard from a tech billionaire or a prize-winning author that it was the local librarian or that special teacher that changed their lives?

INVESTMENT IN SOCIAL SPACE La Cienega Park in Beverly Hills, CA will soon reside less than ¼ mile from a major subway stop of the Los Angeles metropolitan subway system connecting downtown to Westwood. This will engender increased pressures on land development, land values and put a premium on open space. Open spaces in cities are vital for unstructured social interactions that strengthen the fabric of our communities.

INTEGRATION OF COMMUNITY The complex of recreation and community facilities planned for the redevelopment of La Cienega park will put in one place an array of activities so broad and so rich in social interaction that the place will become another center of life for the Beverly Hills community apart and distinct from its shopping district, performing arts center or even civic center. (Above top to bottom: aquatics, community center, recreation center, tennis center).

There are some systems—our social infrastructure—where the rules of the market do not apply, where unceremoniously and without celebrity innovation lives, free of market incentive, and where nevertheless, the foundations are laid for markets to thrive, where our society and our economy are made possible. Our systems of public education—our schools and libraries, our network of community, civic and cultural institutions—are perhaps foremost among them.  If architecture is a way to both reflect and enable our priorities as a society, then it is for this reason that we as architects have opted to do what we do and chosen with whom we do it. What is architecture as an art form if not, after all, mostly public?

WHY COMMUNITY This community center in Rancho Palos Verdes will never yield a profit, it will probably never pay for itself and yet dividends yielded to the community will benefit generations to come.

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.