This weekend the NY Times Magazine will issue its annual architecture issue. The one article that has been published online, The New, New City, as the title suggest, is more about cities than buildings. Still, its focus is architects and not planners. This is not unusual, but curious to me. I know Koolhaas and many of the others interviewed in the article are experienced and trained in urban design and presumably have planners on staff. But the difference between designing a building and urban districts seems to be lost all the while referring to the failures of Modernism, specifically Le Corbusier, to create successful urban design.
Referring, almost exclusively, to development in Asia the article has some great insights. Some of the things that caught my interest were related to the struggle to create a new city that resists the tendency of “modernism” to ignore context and create a sense of place without resorting to cliché or creating a theme park, as “postmodern” design often does. Specifically the article mentions efforts in China to understand “how people carve a living space out of seemingly inhospitable environments, hoping to develop an urbanist model more deeply rooted in the spontaneity of everyday life.” This is what cities are to me.
In China it might be extreme, but the same can be said of many places closer to home. This doesn’t imply that life is intolerable or even that it lacks happiness. Quite the contrary. Some of the places that appear to be inhospitable are actually innovative solutions to the “problems” of urban life. Even in the “slums” of South America, or any developing country, there is beauty in the everyday solutions to city life.
We have this in my neighborhood too. But it is easier to associate it with the negative activities that receive more attention and concern. But living together within a community, rather than as an “pioneer” it is easy to see that the ugly, gritty, and unsafe aspects of urban neighborhoods are in fact its essence. For me, and as one person in the article aptly points out, the trick is to “to extract the essence of its character without romanticizing the squalor.
Squalor is probably too intense of a word to describe anything close to home, but it is probably perceived as such. I know we aren’t going to be designing anything at the scale of China or UAE, but even the small scale developments that we see popping up are likely to create what the article refers to as instant cities. At least something that might be in a location that we are familiar with but in a manner and character that is entirely devoid of its context.
1 Comment
06/07/2008 at 3:31 pm
Thank you for the heads-up. I probably would have missed it, and it sounds like interesting reading.