Posts Tagged United States
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 20, 2012
Stuttgart launches a controversial redevelopment of its central station, Burgundy gets a new museum and Frank Gehry's Eisenhower memorial sparks a battle
The recession might be biting hard in Britain, but elsewhere in the world, things are clearly booming. The city of Stuttgart is so gung-ho about the €7bn redevelopment of its central railway station that it can afford not just to go ahead with the ambitious new plan designed by Dusseldorf-based Ingenhoven architects, but to demolish a large part of the existing historic building, a masterpiece by Paul Bonatz and Friedrich Scholer completed in 1928. As recently as 2009, Unesco was considering listing this magnificent building as a World Heritage Site.
The new design by Christoph Ingenhoven's team appears, superficially at least, to be rather fine. Well, have a look at this creamy Deutsche Bahn propaganda film (it's in German, but the visuals speak for themselves).
The trouble with this "Stuttgart 21" scheme is that it not only requires the demolition, starting this week, of the south wing of Bonatz's station, and the felling of 200 trees in the adjacent Schlossgarten, but it reduces the historic concourse to a meaningless architectural void, because all the important activity will take place below ground. Passions are running high: on the night of 12-13 January, 2,000 police were drafted in to clear protestors from in front of the south wing – although a recent referendum suggests that a narrow majority of local people want the project to go ahead.
A far distant fight, two millennia before the railway age – that of the 52 BC Battle of Alesia, when the Roman army under Julius Caesar defeated the Gauls – is commemorated in the fascinating Alesia Museum, Burgundy, which will open to the public on 26 March. Designed by Paris and New York-based Bernard Tschumi Architects, the cylindrical, timber-clad building rises from the spot where Caesar's army gathered. Inside, visitors will see interactive displays contextualising this critical battle. A second circular building, crafted in stone and also by Tschumi, will follow in 2015; set higher up, where the Gauls had their fort, this will house artefacts unearthed from the ancient battlefield.
While the Tschumi buildings are designed to be a subtle intervention in the rural Burgundy landscape, the design and construction company Capita Symonds has announced outlandish designs this week for the Kampala Tower, a 222m-high commercial phallus rising proudly from a new public square in Kampala, Uganda. The 60-storey tower will be the tallest in Africa – although it could just as well be built in Kowloon or Kuala Lumpur. Another country that is apparently booming in terms of new construction is New Zealand.
One architect you might think immune to recession or planning controversies is Frank Gehry. This week, however, Gehry's proposals for a memorial to Dwight D Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States and, from December 1943, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe ("Ike" oversaw the liberation of western Europe that took place with the D-day invasion of France in June 1944), have made the news because the Eisenhower family feels that the architect has underplayed the president's role as a war leader.
Gehry's design is for a memorial park in Washington DC framed by large metal tapestries showing scenes from Eisenhower's roots in Abilene, Kansas. Clearly, Gehry has picked up on Eisenhower's famous quote when he said, at the height of his career, "the proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene." Susan Eisenhower has told AP that "Just about everybody on the [Washington] Mall had humble origins. But, you don't get to the Mall because you had humble origins. You get to the Mall because you did something for which the nation is grateful."
The memorial, and the Mall, are not far from Washington's Union Station, Despite a rollercoaster history over the past five decades, the magnificent station remains intact. Perhaps Stuttgart could learn from Washington, or perhaps from Eisenhower's beloved Abilene, where the local station has certainly seen more productive days.
The arts in 2012: architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 30, 2011
Jonathan Glancey picks his highlights of the year ahead
Tate oil tanks
The cavernous old underground oil tanks beneath Tate Modern, the former Bankside power station, are due to reopen as performance and installation spaces in time for the Olympics. Connected to three new galleries, the tanks are the first phase of a £215m extension by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. July. tate.org.uk
Shard London Bridge
Designed by Renzo Piano for property developer Irvine Sellar, the Shard, towering over the capital at 310 metres, is now the tallest building in western Europe. Rising from London Bridge station, this steel and glass-clad spire houses offices, restaurants, hotel, flats and four floors of public viewing galleries: on a clear day you will be able to see for 40 miles. May. the-shard.com
ArcelorMittal Orbit
Britain's tallest and biggest sculpture, the bright red Orbit – designed by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, with engineers Arup and architect Katherine Findlay – is made of complex, calligraphic loops and whirls writ in steel. As a public viewing gallery overlooking the 2012 Olympics site, this is London's 21st-century answer to the Eiffel Tower. May. london.gov.uk
Caro goes to Chatsworth
In a move that will no doubt provoke widely differing reactions, 15 steel sculptures by Anthony Caro will be set against the restored south front of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, as well as gathered beside its sensational Emperor Fountain, designed by the great Joseph Paxton (creator of the Crystal Palace). Caro has often been inspired by powerful architecture, and there's no denying William Talman's baroque Chatsworth is a supremely confident building. 28 March to 1 July. chatsworth.org
Room for London
Imagine spending the night in an intriguing and isolated temporary house, designed by artist Fiona Banner and architect David Kohn, sitting atop the brutalist Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's South Bank. The tugboat-like building's first six months are already taken; bookings for July to December will be available in January for this project by Artangel and Alain de Botton's Living Architecture. January 2012. Details: living-architecture.co.uk
National 9/11 Museum, New York
A lofty, glazed atrium, sheltering two of the trident columns that once supported one of the twin towers, marks the entrance to the museum at the site of Manhattan's ground zero. Designed by Oslo-based Snohetta with local firm Davis Brody Bond, much of this long-awaited museum is underground. September. 911memorial.org/museum
Stay in your very own Frank Lloyd Wright house
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 17, 2011
Three of Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic houses can be seen on a day trip from Pittsburgh – and there's even the opportunity to spend the night in one of them
Frank Lloyd Wright was coming towards me in his trademark pork-pie hat and opera-goer's cape, frosty eyebrows raised, when I woke up. As a rule I don't dream of world-famous architects – never, so far as I recall, have I dreamed of Frank Gehry or IM Pei – but there were extenuating factors. I'd nodded off over a biography of Wright, reading about how he'd arrive unannounced at a house of his design to see how its owners were treating it. And the house where I lay, the Duncan House, an hour south-east of Pittsburgh, was an actual FLW, one of only half a dozen where Wright-lovers can stay the night.
Left in sole possession, my wife and I struggled that first evening to make ourselves at home. To begin with, we tried going for a walk. The house is at the end of a mile-long private driveway, set amid a 125-acre wooded estate. In October the trees were in their autumn finery, spanning the spectrum from deep red to palest yellow. Climbing a hill, we looked out over the rolling Laurel Highlands, one of Pennsylvania's prettiest landscapes and a favourite getaway for Pittsburghers, before following a trail to a secluded pond. On our return leg, we looked in on the estate's two other houses, both designed by a pupil of Wright's and bearing his influence.
Back at home base, we tried walking around the single-storey house, considering it from every angle: the horizontal bands of bleached mahogany, the gutterless eaves, the stonework of the chimney, and the carport (Wright hated enclosed spaces like garages, attics and basements). Inside the house was a vintage 1950s American kitchen, like the set of Happy Days, but instead of cooking we made a picnic at the living room table. This was our favourite space, the heart of the house with its cathedral roof and fireplace, and the expansive windows that allowed us to sit warmly inside without missing the magnificent foliage. It wasn't until we were ready for bed that we noticed another typical FLW feature – no curtains or blinds on the windows.
So, up at first light, we made the 40-minute drive south through the Laurel Highlands to Fallingwater. Wright built Fallingwater in the 1930s, when he was pushing 70, and such was its impact that he never again lacked for commissions. People have been visiting, photographing and writing about the place ever since but it still has the power to startle at first sight. The family who commissioned Fallingwater, owners of a Pittsburgh department store, anticipated something more conventional: a weekend cabin with a view of the falls. What they got instead was a bravura exercise in modern architecture and engineering – the core of the house resting on boulders with terraces of reinforced concrete cantilevered out over the falls. To their credit, they were content to foot the bill, which, in true Wright style, never ceased to climb.
Seven miles from Fallingwater and now under the ownership of Lord Palumbo, Kentuck Knob is another FLW favourite. Crowning the brow of a hill and shrouded by trees, Kentuck Knob is built around a hexagonal kitchen and its angles just keep getting odder. Wright hated the dark, Victorian houses of his childhood, calling their rooms boxes within boxes; one of his abiding aims was to break down those boxes and blur the line between inside and out. Built for local ice-cream barons, Kentuck Knob achieves these aims with considerable charm. Adding to its appeal, the house and grounds are dotted with modern art – works by Claes Oldenburg, Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Serra – from Lord Palumbo's collection.
Having toured these two houses, we returned for a second night at the Duncan House and found ourselves looking on "our" FLW with fresh eyes. Now that we'd learned a little about Wright's methods and motives, certain things made more sense: the absence of decoration (Wright abhorred "inferior desecrators"); the narrow gallery leading to the bedrooms (a mere passing-through space, to be minimized as far as possible); the built-in shelving; and the division of the house between living areas (spacious and open) and private spaces (smaller and darker, places to sleep and take shelter rather than for living).
FLW houses try to teach their inhabitants how their paternalistic designer would you to live: together, around the fireplace; in harmony with nature; simply and without clutter. If Americans have largely ignored his lessons, holding on to their garages and basements, preferring to live in bigger and bigger boxes on sub-divided estates, that isn't Wright's fault.
The Duncan House is no Fallingwater. In common with the other five Wright houses where you can stay the night (all in the Midwest), it's a Usonian. Usonians, designed and built in the last decades of Wright's life, were prefabricated houses that could be assembled according to one of a dozen blueprints. They were meant to be affordable, bringing good design within reach of middle-class America. (Though affordable was always a very relative term with Wright.)
The only way you'll ever get to experience Fallingwater is on a guided tour. Staying at Duncan House felt a bit like being able to take a Rembrandt home from the gallery – not a major work, a sketch, but a Rembrandt all the same.
We certainly got to like the place and were sorry to leave – perhaps, if we'd been allowed to stay, we'd have become better people! Lingering on our last morning, I took time to flick through the comments book. In the couple of years since the Duncan House opened, Wright aficionados from all over the world have stayed there, adding an extra, personal facet to their FLW tour. It's not cheap but very few were complaining. 'The dream of a lifetime' wrote more than one.
• The Duncan House, 187 Evergreen Lane, Acme (+1 877 833 7829) costs $425 per night (two night minimum); the house sleeps up to six – extra $50 per night for fourth, fifth and sixth guests. Fallingwater, 1491 Mill Run Road, Mill Run, (fallingwater.org; book tours several months in advance). Kentuck Knob, 723 Kentuck Road, Dunbar (kentuckknob.com; advance bookings recommended). Flights from London to Pittsburgh with various US airlines start at around £340, if booked via kayak.co.uk.
Are Hollywood and high art still compatible?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 20, 2011
Tinseltown has majestic monuments of the silent era, reminding us of a time when American film and art co-existed. Is that golden age gone forever?
The detritus of artistic ambition lies all over Hollywood like a wreckage of broken dreams. Grauman's Egyptian theatre on Hollywood Boulevard may sound like just another tourist stop, between the Walk of Fame and Universal City, but it is so much stranger than that. The Egyptian opened in 1922 as a temple of imagination and aspiration. Meticulously restored and now used to show independent films by the American Cinematheque, it oozes a serious attitude to cinema.
The Egyptian theatre defies all the cliches of Hollywood vulgarity. Yes, it is over the top – very – but not in the crass, tawdry way beloved by European stereotypes of American culture. On the contrary: it speaks of passion, idealism, and sincerity. Like the Neoclassicists of the 18th century, Sid Grauman built his cinema in meticulous homage to an ancient Egyptian temple. In its forecourt, convincing mythological scenes and hieroglyphs are painted on massive blocks of yellow stone. The portico is supported by bulbous columns that seem copied from Napoleon's epic Description of Egypt. All this demands from filmgoers an attitude of awe and reverence: the religious architecture tells you the film showing inside must have the sublimity of some divine revelation.
Meanwhile, near Sunset Boulevard a half-timbered Tudor facade has survived among the motels, drive-ins and health clubs. Who, in the early years of the 20th century, sought to remember or flaunt his British origins by decorating his studio like an Elizabethan manor house? Charlie Chaplin, that's who. Today his studio is owned, and its historic exterior maintained, by the Jim Henson company, and on the roof stands Kermit the Frog dressed as Charlie.
.jpg){kind=link}
This was once a temple to art: in films from The Immigrant to The Gold Rush, Chaplin built on his balletic slapstick genius to create realistic, poetic visions of the modern world that fascinated the European avant garde as much as they delighted the box office. For his art film Ballet Mécanique, the painter Fernand Leger created a dancing Cubist "Charlot" puppet. By 1929, Dali and Bunuel would transfigure the language of film comedy in their surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou.
The eerie monuments of the silent era that still linger in Hollywood are reminders of an age when American film and high art seemed to be compatible. Is that golden age gone forever? It looks that way, when you notice hoardings around Hollywood for new releases like a prequel to the remake of The Thing – one previewer doesn't even appear to know the John Carpenter version was derived from a 1950s original.
Yet on the plane home, the films included The Tree of Life. In its extreme visual beauty and emotional grandeur, Terrence Malick's film resembles some legendary "artistic" effort of the silent age, with the addition of gorgeous colour. As he gets older, Malick seems less and less interested in dialogue, reducing his actors' speeches more than ever to tortuous inner voices, while the visual richness tells us all we need to know.
American film has always existed on the borderland of art and trash, and it has its geniuses today just as in the days when expectant crowds filed reverently into the Egyptian to worship the flickering gods of light.
The fading genius of the US post office | Gray Brechin
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 2, 2011
The superb post offices of the New Deal era are a monument to America's democratic ethos. Now we're selling off FDR's legacy
On 9 June, the General Services Administration threw Modesto's downtown post office onto the auction block. Like so many other postal facilities, the Renaissance-style palazzo had long served as an anchor for downtown stores of the California town, a public space where citizens met to exchange news as well as transact business in an ennobling lobby of polished travertine and marble beneath murals of local farming activities.
The federal government once designed its post offices to elevate and inspire the public whose assets it is now selling. An architectural journal in 1918 spoke of the tutelary value of post offices:
"They are generally the most important of the local buildings, and taken together, [are] seen daily by thousands, who have little opportunity to feel the influence of the great architectural works in the large cities."
President Hoover's administration built facilities such as Modesto's in a last-ditch effort to end the Depression, before Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal unleashed a far greater torrent of public works that succeeded where Hoover had failed (pdf). In less than a decade, the Roosevelt administration built over 1,100 post offices, distinguished by fine architecture, materials and detailing, as well as by a lavish programme of public art that, for the first time, reflected back to patrons and workers their regional identity.
Mandated by the US constitution as a service vital to democracy, the post office has fallen victim to structural adjustment as well as to electronic communication. Congress has successively demanded that the US Postal Service run itself more like a business since making it a quasi-corporation in 1971. Required to provide universal service, even as the internet and private carriers cut into its profit centres, the USPS has spun into a death spiral, raising its rates as it slashes employment and service. It's now stripping its assets, as well.
Since January, the US Postal Service has closed 280 post offices, despite community resistance and the objections of local business people horrified to watch downtown magnets decamp for peripheral strip malls and trailers. Those closures were only a warmup for what was coming. On 26 July, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe listed nearly 3,700 more, saying "The Postal Service of the future will be smaller, leaner, and more competitive." Those facilities constitute well over a tenth of the nation's post offices, buildings that once physically embodied government honesty, efficiency and even culture. Perhaps, that is why they must go.
The distinguished Modesto building, like many other New Deal post offices, has earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places, but a buyer could still demolish it to utilise the real estate beneath it. In that case, law requires the developer to donate its murals to the federal government. But as Congress and the White House hack ever deeper into the services that Americans until recently took for granted, no one may be at home in Washington to find lodging for such art other than that for which it was made.
New Deal critic Amity Shlaes has claimed that "It's not really the government's business, art, is it?" Roosevelt shared with other New Dealers a considerably more expansive notion of what the US could achieve. He forecast that "one hundred years from now, my administration will be known for its art, not for its relief." The New Dealers envisioned a new Renaissance. Its successors are knocking that legacy down to the highest bidder, and with it goes what we once were and might yet be.
Aspen Ideas Festival: How the vineyard style trumped the shoebox
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 2, 2011
Yasuhisa Toyota, the world's foremost acoustician, explains the design that let audiences see and hear great orchestras
What is the source of the rich, beautiful sound of a great concert hall? Even those who make their living from designing and building some of the world's best concert halls confess that it is – despite computer aided design and modern acoustic techniques – still a mystery.
Take New York's Carnegie Hall. "Nobody knows why it sounds so good – if they did they would copy it," says architect Richard Olcott, who has designed Stanford University's new Bing Concert Hall and worked on the restoration of Carnegie Hall itself.
Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustician behind the acclaimed Walt Disney Concert Hall clad by Frank Gehry's masterpiece in Los Angeles, says acoustic quality remains a mystery as much as music itself:
Many people talk about acoustics as a mysterious thing – I would agree but it's a more complex thing.
If a concert hall is empty and there's no music, then we can't hear the acoustics. When we evaluate acoustics we need musicians on the stage – and then we are having a discussion about music. And isn't music a mysterious thing?
Olcott agreed: "We can do all the computer modelling in the world but it can never replicate the human experience."
Toyota and Olcott were speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on the concertgoing experience, one that has been radically changed by modern design.
Concert hall design used to be simple enough: the classical shape known as the "shoebox" with an orchestra at one tall, narrow end and the audience facing them in seried ranks.
Various attempts to tamper with the shoebox's simplicity never quite succeeded acoustically: London's Royal Festival Hall and the Verizon Hall in Philadelphia's Kimmel Centre being two of the unhappier attempts.
But in the 1960s came the "vineyard style", a ground-breaking design pioneered at the Berliner Philharmonie hall and later at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo.
Suddenly, the orchestra was opened up and surrounded by the audience on all sides in boxes around the central stage, but without the acoustic problems of earlier attempts, the boxes reflecting the sound back towards the stage.
Rather than just hear the orchestra, as the shoebox favoured, the vineyard style allowed almost every seat a clear view of the stage. "It's amazing," Toyota said. "This is what we never experienced in the conventional seating style."
And while traditionalists might prefer the Musikverein of Vienna or its modern incarnation, the McDermott hall in Dallas, purists could not fault the acoustic quality of the new designs.
Toyota is undoubtedly the greatest exponent of the vineyard style, as the acoustician behind the Suntory Hall – "a jewel box of sound," according to von Karajan – as well as the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the extraordinary Kitara in Sapporo.
"I think the vineyard style hall has big advantages, not only for acoustics" which justified it above the "simpler" shoebox style, said Toyota, describing his "psycho-acoustics" that benefited the audience as much as the orchestra:
Concerts are competing with CDs or DVDs. What's the choice? To purchase a CD or a concert ticket. But the thing about a CD, the sound is so clear, it's not necessary to be seated in a concert space.
Being able to see the orchestra so clearly, as the vineyard style allows, added to the "concert experience" that couldn't be matched by recordings.
But for all that, even Toyota says the quality of performance must trump even the best acoustics. Offered the choice between hearing a student orchestra in a great acoustic venue, or a great orchestra such as those of Vienna or Berlin in a "bad space," Toyota doesn't hesitate: "Between those I would choose the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonic."
High Line park on disused railway in New York opens second section
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 9, 2011
Elevated freight railway conversion has attracted an estimated $2bn in private money to the Meatpacking District
When the elevated freight railway that runs above the west side of Manhattan was built between 1929 and 1934 it became known as the "lifeline of New York" – a gritty industrial artery carrying carcasses into the literally named Meatpacking district.
Eighty years later this stretch of steel and gravel on stilts has become a lifeline of the city all over again, except this time the carcasses that trundle along it are alive, and human. The second phase of the High Line, the railway turned into a city park, has just opened, doubling its length and quadrupling the joy of this very modern public space.
The full length of the High Line now runs from Gansevoort Street in the south to 30th Street in the north. For a railway that came close to being torn down in 1999 when local businesses – backed by the then mayor Rudy Giuliani – denounced it as a blot on the landscape, it has come to be one of the most resounding examples of a city's rebirth.
The new section, beginning at 20th Street, includes the first stretch of lawn on the High Line. "Grass to lie on in New York city with no animal products to deal with [dogs are not allowed in the park] – are you kidding me?" said local resident Susan Hamburger who was out for her morning jog: "This is an incredible resource away from the city traffic."
Another attraction of the new phase is the "Falcone flyover", a raised portion above the raised railway that allows visitors to look down on green areas landscaped to replicated wooded hillocks. The High Line has been planted with 210 species of trees, shrubs and grasses selected for their native relevance and hardiness.
Already, the two-year-old southern portion is a riot of vegetation in greens and muted purples. The flourishing of the plant life is like a metaphor for what the High Line has done to the neighbourhood as a whole, which has exploded economically since the park opened.
For an investment of just $115m (£70m) to convert the rusty tracks of the railway into an elegant walkway, the city authorities have attracted an estimated $2bn in private money to the neighbourhood.
As far as 28th street the railway is now lined with gleaming structures in polished steel and turquoise green glass as hotels, residential property developers and high-end fashion retailers have piled into the area. The flanks of the park have been dubbed "architects' row" in recognition of the new buildings that have sprung up by internationally-renowned designers such as Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Neil Denari.
More development is certain to spread north as the economic ripple effect continues. By 30th street the High Line is surrounded by what remains a wasteland of empty warehouses and dusty parking lots, but already the cranes are busy laying the foundations of new buildings.
In 2015 the area will receive a further shot in the arm when the Whitney will open its new lower Manhattan museum at the southern end of the High Line, rounding off an extraordinary transformation from urban decay to post-industrial renovation.
• New York's High Line park - in pictures
High Line park in New York opens second section – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 8, 2011
The disused elevated railway became a park in 2009, with the opening of the second phase doubling the length to one mile
Jane Jacobs was the seer of the modern city | Ben Rogers
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 19, 2011
Jane Jacobs' classic book on urban living is 50 this year. Our current leaders would do well to read it
Who was the pre-eminent urban thinker of modern times? In his fascinating history of modern urban planning, Cities of Tomorrow, Sir Peter Hall devotes chapters to the likes of Ebenezer Howard (founder of the garden city movement); Patrick Geddes, the champion of self-governing city regions; and the great, utterly disastrous Le Corbusier.
But what of Jane Jacobs, whose most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is 50 years old? Hall accords the book only a few paragraphs – "one of those classic cases of the right message at the right time" – and its birthday is going almost completely unmarked in the UK (apart from an event at the RSA this week). But it must be a lead contender for best and most enduring work on urban planning of the last century. Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow and Le Corbusier's La Ville radieuse are period pieces. But Jacobs' masterwork still feels relevant.
The story is well known – a classic David and Goliath. Jacobs, a housewife, mother and part-time architectural journalist, had been drawn into the campaign to prevent New York's dictatorial planning boss Robert Moses – who had already ripped up swaths of the city – from driving a highway through her native Greenwich Village. She decided to write a book. But her book did not just dwell, negatively, on the harm New York's car-obsessed, modern-minded planners were doing. Building on close observation of her own and other neighbourhoods, she mounted a thorough and original defence of traditional city forms against both the garden city movement and modernist city planning. She argued that dense, mixed-income mixed-used neighbourhoods, designed around short city blocks with busy amenity-lined streets and small parks, had a huge range of benefits unappreciated by modern urban planners, who mistakenly associated the old city with all the evils of the 19th-century slum.
Of course Jacobs did not get it all right. She exaggerated the importance of urban form in shaping larger social developments – but so do most planners. And she thought urban conservation would always serve the interests of the working class, when too often it has become a middle-class nimbyist cause. As Edward Glaeser argues in his new book Triumph of the City, working-class people have largely been squeezed out of the sort of urban neighbourhoods Jacobs defended, and the middle class who now dominate them are too often allowed to stop developments that might enable poorer people to move back in.
But time and experience has vindicated most of Jacobs' claims. Her arguments that relatively dense, lively city neighbourhoods tend to discourage crime, foster inter-generational and inter-ethnic integration and promote "social capital" have become received wisdom – though it took the police and local authorities a long time to catch up with her and not all of them are there yet. (Jacobs would have hated gated communities and commercially owned "public realm", just as she would have opposed the spread of CCTV. She would have been appalled by the poor quality and mean character of many of the flats that have been built in the last decade.)
While Jacobs did not explicitly make the case for the environmental benefits of density – this was 1961 – it was implicit in what she said. At a time when everyone thought the only way to promote road safety was to separate pedestrians from vehicles, she sensed, rightly, that this would only make roads more dangerous.
But Jacobs was not just the first to articulate these now relatively obvious points. She argued for the indispensable role that cities play in fostering all forms of creativity, innovation and economic development. Here again, she has been vindicated. Though technology has rendered face-to-face contact unnecessary, urban economists like Richard Florida and Glaeser have shown that most economic innovation still takes place in cities. If poor people around the world flood to cities it is because they rightly see that that is were economic opportunity lies.
Indeed there is something almost eerily contemporary about Jacobs' work. Ours is an age increasingly wary of both unregulated markets and large bureaucracies – and increasingly hungry for an alternative. Research continues to underscore the importance of relationships and reciprocity, membership and belonging to our wellbeing.
New Labour's preoccupation with civic renewal and community building, Cameron's "big society", and the "red Tory" and "blue Labour" movements are all responses to this. But Jacobs was there first, and with a hard-headed, modern understanding of the sort of relationships that are needed in modern life, and the sorts of community that contemporary cities can offer. Her belief that urban planners and architects should not be realising visions, but creating and preserving resilient, inclusive and adaptable neighbourhoods – places which can largely look after themselves – still resonates.
Britain's city leaders would do well to read or re-read the Death and Life of Great American Cities in this anniversary year.
Skyscrapers aren’t always about corporate pride before a fall | Owen Hatherley
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 13, 2012
From the Empire State to the Burj Khalifa, skyscrapers predict recession. But not all towers are built by phallic capitalism
Tall buildings inviting accusations of hubris is as old as the Tower of Babel. The report this week from Barclays Capital merely puts an official stamp on the latest permutation of the myth, via a theory that has been around for at least a decade – the skyscraper index, which places the completion – or the proposal, it's not entirely clear – of a "world's tallest" tower as the sign of an incoming recession or financial crisis.
Empirically, it's true enough; skyscrapers were born of crisis in 1870s Chicago and New York, and most famous towers can be instantly tied to a collapse of some sort. The "Empty State Building", as the Empire State Building was dubbed, was finished in the Depression's deepest depths; the World Trade Centre and the Sears Tower neatly coincided with the end of the postwar settlement; the Petronas Towers accompanied the Asian crash of 1997. The current tallest, the Burj Khalifa, is self-explanatory in that sense, as its name – formerly the Burj Dubai – immortalises the bailout that the emirate received from Abu Dhabi when its bubble burst. Yet the skyscraper index has been around for so long that skyscraper designers are surely partly conscious of it. The largest residential tower in the world, also in Dubai, was quietly completed a couple of years ago. It was named the Index.
The reason why it is skyscrapers, as opposed to say, cathedral spires or telecommunications towers (which are frequently taller) that form the index are to do with what makes a skyscraper, and what differentiates it from a mere tower, office block or high-rise. The skyscraper came into being through a combination of innovation and accident, in a cauldron of unregulated capitalism. It became so tall because of rising land values on the tight, dense grids of New York and Chicago (the two cities still dispute ownership of the first skyscraper). It could get that tall because of two already extant inventions, the elevator and the steel frame, the latter used from Liverpool to Sheerness in the first half of the 19th century.
As to why these non-load bearing walls, merely tacked onto the frame, needing little craftsmanship, easily prefabricated, were so seductive to developers – well, one theory has it that the first skyscraper coincided with a strike of Chicago building workers. The towers were invariably offices, often for financial institutions, so were uniquely closely pegged to boom and bust. It bears repeating that in the middle of all this, nobody had ever deliberately intended, let alone "designed" the skyscraper – it was an effect, not an expression, of unstable financialised capitalism. This is, incidentally, one reason why the 1945-79 period was heavier on famous residential high-rises than luxurious corporate skyscrapers, at least in Europe.
Of course, there were soon attempts to consciously create skyscrapers, to make them into coherent pieces of architecture; in the 1880s, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan aimed to make of them a "proud and soaring thing", stripping off prefab baroque and applying his own original, deliberately height-emphasising ornament – but this "Chicago school" was always outnumbered by the mere stacking of Venetian, gothic or baroque detail up to 50 storeys. The result was the weird, retro-futurist towers that now appear as fascinatingly cranky as all obsolete technology, although at the time they were the ruthless expression of unmediated commercialism.
A couple of decades after Sullivan, Le Corbusier tried to create a becalmed "Cartesian skyscraper", largely for housing, leaving green space rather than traffic canyons underneath it. Not sufficiently flashy, the Cartesian skyscraper was eventually given the lumpy, prosaic English name of tower block. Accordingly, if you look at the current south London skyline, the ludicrously overpowering, overscaled, overpriced Shard is a skyscraper in its purest form; the Guy's hospital tower, next to it, is a mere high-rise. It's made of concrete, it's inexpensive and, worst of all, it serves a useful function.
All the record-setting buildings seem to have been equally useless, no matter how seductive their architecture. In the late 1940s, eight very tall skyscrapers in Europe were built, the tallest in the continent for three decades. They didn't coincide with any crisis, any financial exuberance, though their steel frames caked in pseudo-historical ornament immediately evoked 1910s New York. They were, respectively, housing towers, a university, a couple of ministries, a hotel and a "palace of culture"; the point was to build them, not what went in them, but in the process, the skyscraper stopped being stacked speculation. These skyscrapers, in Moscow and Warsaw, were an expression of ruthless dominance, but had certain curious differences. Some were and are open to the public. They were supposed to stand as points of orientation in the city, carefully planned. They were surrounded by squares and public space. Stalinists over stockbrokers might not seem like much of an improvement, but these ex-record breakers might remind us that the skyscraper need not be a combination of corporate phallus and crisis prediction instrument.
Architecture, Art and design, Burj Khalifa, Comment, Comment is free, guardian.co.uk, United States, World news
No Comments