D E S I G N
A R C H I T E C T U R
E : S U P E R B L O C K S
& S U P E R I D E A S
How does this concept relate to planning in
Weston? How does free architectural education contribute to
society? War Against Suburbia?
PARIS AS ENVISIONED BY
ARCHITECT-PLANNERS...at the top, above - click here for story.;
Her
New York
NYTIMES
By PHILLIP LOPATE
November 9, 2008
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE is, hands down, the dean of American architectural
criticism. In her many books and columns for The New York Times, The
New York Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal (where she
continues to serve as architecture critic), Ms. Huxtable has brought a
sharp, skeptical, receptive eye and a nuanced writing style to the
task.
Her latest book, “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century
of Change,” being published this month by Walker & Company, is a
hefty collection of keepers from the past five decades of criticism. It
tells the story of revolutionary upheavals in taste, from the triumph
of an austere modernism to an often frivolous postmodernism to the menu
of choices that exist today.
Ten days ago, in her sunny penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side,
Ms. Huxtable talked about the changing face of the city, the state of
its architecture, why Times Square dazzles and why an economic downturn
may not be the worst thing to happen to New York.
-----------------------------
Phillip Lopate: How did you get started as an architecture critic?
Ada Louise Huxtable: I was a graduate student in architectural history
at the N.Y.U. Institute of Fine Arts, and working at the Museum of
Modern Art part time. I decided after two years that I didn’t want to
keep working at MoMA forever. I had been studying Italian modern
architecture at school. So I applied for a Fulbright to go to Italy.
When I came back home, I started writing a few pieces for ARTnews on
New York architecture.
Lopate: How old were you at that point?
Huxtable: I was in my 30s. I was a late bloomer. Aline Saarinen had
been The New York Times’s chief art critic, but when she married Eero
Saarinen, she thought she should not write about architecture anymore.
The Times’s editors were upset; they said they needed to get someone
else, and so she recommended me. I went in all dressed up with my
clippings, and I remember saying: “All you’ve been doing is printing
the developers’ P.R. releases in your real estate section. You have
nobody covering this very important field.” So they created the post
for me of architecture critic.
Lopate: You grew up in New York.
Huxtable: Yes, I’m a native New Yorker. I grew up mostly at 89th Street
and Central Park West, in one of those Beaux-Arts buildings. I went to
Hunter College — all my schools were in New York.
Lopate: How do you think it has changed since your childhood? Is it the
same city?
Huxtable: The same, but different. That was a quieter, safer, more
secure time. The city was more a bunch of small-town neighborhoods.
There wasn’t the same greed, ambition, drive, short attention span.
Lopate: I think of the ’50s and ’60s as a period of great corporate
architecture.
Huxtable: Yes, that was when the great corporate headquarters were
built in New York and Connecticut, which we’re now trying to save.
Lopate: It’s ironic that for so long architectural critics, including
yourself, lambasted New York for being timid, being caught in an Art
Deco time warp, not having the guts to hire the international star
architects who were making waves elsewhere.
Huxtable: And now the developers have learned that they can make more
money by hiring a name architect. It’s the law of unintended
consequences. They build these hugely expensive oversized condos and
the star architect is supposed to make it palatable. The architects are
delighted to be used by the developers because they want to build, but
it’s the same money game. Still, I think it’s good, on the whole.
Lopate: Well, now we have Gehry’s IAC Building on the Hudson River.
Huxtable: I love it. I love it.
Lopate: I like it, too. We have the LVMH Building by Portzamparc on
Madison Avenue, a new Nouvel, a Norman Foster and so on, but I wonder
if it really makes such a difference to the life of the city. You
suddenly have all this undulating forms, but they still have to hew to
the street wall.
Huxtable: I like the size and elegant subtlety of the Portzamparc. I am
not happy with a lot of what is going on, and I am not happy with the
way the critics are assessing it.
Lopate: How so?
Huxtable: My view of architecture has not changed. It’s the current
scene that has changed. Architecture is a very real and important art;
it affects us all so directly. You must judge it in terms of
problem-solving in this uneasy, difficult combination of structure and
art. My feeling is that criticism is not looking at this — it is
treating architecture as eye candy. When you combine new technologies
with loosening all the dogmatic rules of modernism, you have opened the
world wide to greatness and horror. And that’s what we’re producing
now. It’s a terribly mixed bag.
Lopate: What do you mean by “eye candy”?
Huxtable: The “wow” buildings. Don’t blame it all on Frank Gehry. Gehry
is legit; what he did at Bilbao is superb. He showed us how to marry
all the arts in our time. But the lesson taken away from it was: We
need something that looks “iconic,” that’s going to put our city on the
map.
Lopate: A building that will knock your socks off. And probably not a
rectangle.
Huxtable: Yes, computers can produce these endlessly repeating,
beautiful curving, sculptural forms. Now we’re finally reaching the
stage where we begin to recognize, “Aha! Right off the computer!” and
we don’t accept it as readily. For a while the novelty was very great.
It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of functioning well for people
who use it. On the other hand, if it doesn’t take us to another place,
it’s nostalgia, and there’s an awful lot of nostalgia operating out
there today.
Lopate: You’ve been both a preservationist and a critic of that
movement.
Huxtable: I believe in reality, in the real world, and I think the real
world is constantly evolving. I think it needs vigilance, because you
can do terrible things with architecture. But without changing,
growing, developing, what kind of a city would we be?
Lopate: For instance, in the South Street Seaport they tried to
preserve all those lovely old structures, but they cleaned them up a
bit too much, whereas the little brick buildings just to the north kept
a funkier character.
Huxtable: They’re real. I remember too much, and I know what a fiasco
that South Street Seaport plan turned out. I remember when they
actually tore down the most important part of the seaport, Peck Slip,
which had the oldest and most wonderful buildings. And those were
demolished to make way for some Con Edison industrial addition.
Then they decided the heart of the seaport was Schermerhorn Row. Then
they brought in the Rouse corporation to tie the place together with a
shopping center. And Rouse said you have to have so many contiguous
feet of shopping or it doesn’t work. So that meant that things had to
be moved, torn down, adjusted, and look what we ended up with. I am
exceptionally grateful for every inch that got saved. My basic
preservation philosophy is: Change it but don’t destroy it.
Lopate: Jane Jacobs always advocated a respect for the piecemeal. So
can’t we plan for the piecemeal?
Huxtable: It’s very tough. You know one example of planning, maybe not
for the piecemeal but for context and character, is Times Square. The
first plan was for four huge towers by Philip Johnson; thank God they
never happened. But even in their later form, the idea was to move the
lawyers and the finance firms in there.
Of course everyone who loved New York and Times Square, we didn’t like
quite so much porn, but we wanted to keep the lights, the action.
Zoning mandated those signs on the buildings. Fortuitously, the zoning
that mandated signs coincided with enormous advances in the technology
of light. So now you have a show down there that is fabulous and
thrilling.
Lopate: New York used to be able to build these beautiful
cities-within-a city, like Rockefeller Center. Why do you think it’s so
hard to do that now?
Huxtable: If you look at Rockefeller Center in detail, it’s a very
elegant plan: higher and lower levels that lead you from one to the
other, streets cut through to keep the human scale. You always feel
you’re going around a corner, not around a wind-swept plaza, into some
other area that has an inviting activity.
First of all, Rockefeller Center was privately planned. It was planned
for profit; it was a hard-nosed thing, and of course during the
Depression it had to be rejiggered completely because it lost its
anchor tenant, the Metropolitan Opera. But while Rockefeller insisted
on a certain return of profit, he did hire the best architects and let
them alone, and they combined Beaux-Arts and modernist principles into
a really complex, humanistic urban plan.
We don’t have that kind of development now. Everything in this city is
totally developer driven. You do not get Rockefeller Center-type
development unless you have some kind of leadership that will commit to
it; and these developers are so powerful and so wealthy and so sure of
what they want that you’re starting from a different premise. We’ve
had, I think, a very good mayor, who has done good things for the city,
but he doesn’t know the difference. Bloomberg’s a businessman: he
thinks development is planning.
Lopate: You say in your book, “Here we practice the art of the deal,
not the art of the city.”
Huxtable: Exactly. It’s your urban development corporations, state and
city, that are in charge of these things, not the planners. There’s
nobody in there that has any of this city-making programmed in their
heads; they have dollars and cents and time frames. It’s pure business.
Lopate: Not to get us too depressed, but can we talk about ground zero?
Huxtable: The first piece I wrote predicted what was going to happen.
People thought I was clairvoyant. No, I’d just been watching the city
for a long time. We all knew! The strange thing that came along was
this small group of bereaved families, who really knew how to operate,
and who did not speak for the rest of the group at all, but who began
to roll over the politicians.
If there’s anything a politician will roll over for, it’s this kind of
grief. After all the good things they vetoed or interfered with,
cultural institutions like the Freedom museum because they were worried
something unpatriotic might be exhibited there, they now have this
memorial, and nobody has any concept how overscaled it is. A huge
memorial, and these profit-making towers. Daniel Libeskind’s original
architectural inspiration has been stripped away, and the developer,
Larry Silverstein, got everything he wanted.
It is a horrible failure, as far as I’m concerned. We missed the chance
to make a 21st-century Rockefeller Center.
Lopate: One problem is that we’re too Manhattan-centric in our
planning. I sometimes feel that there’s not enough emphasis on the
other four boroughs.
Huxtable: In one sense they’re lucky they were left alone. But in
another sense it’s not fair at all. This takes me back again to the
Lindsay administration, which established special planning offices in
every borough. They were doing very interesting work. At that time we
attracted the best and the brightest into city planning. You had
wonderful Ed Logue running the state’s Urban Development Corporation,
and he put through Roosevelt Island and other worthy affordable-housing
schemes.
Lopate: You’ve lived long enough to see many times when New York was
counted out. In the ’70s and ’80s, there was much talk about the death
of New York.
Huxtable: Roger Starr had this idea of “planned shrinkage.” Remember
that? He thought you should let parts of the city die.
Lopate: From my perspective, there’s been a healthy shift from seeing
cities as basically dying to essentially buoyant, yet still requiring
help.
Huxtable: We’ve seen a reversal. Years ago there was white flight to
the suburbs, the inner cities were crime-ridden, there was a lot of
poverty. We still have poverty, but people started moving back to the
cities.
Lopate: There’s also been a shift in attitude regarding density.
Huxtable: Yes, urban renewal tried to get rid of density. It was viewed
as concentrating poverty and disease. Now there’s the awareness that
density is more energy-efficient and less destructive of the
environment than urban sprawl.
Lopate: I take it you’re for density but not for overbuilding.
Huxtable: How can I be against density? I’m a New Yorker! I grew up
with density. Still, in a way I’m glad for this downturn in the
economy. Because so much bad stuff was being built. This will give us a
chance to think, to take stock. I am so weary of these stupid alliances
between developers and cultural institutions in which the cultural
institution is given a block of space and the developers overbuild the
rest and make an enormous profit.
The Museum of Modern Art has become a real estate operation. I admit a
certain amount of nostalgia: I remember a street that was once one of
the best streets in New York, 53rd Street. Watching it change over the
years, I can’t help but view their new Nouvel tower as the last
destructive nail.
Lopate: You were fairly skeptical about Lincoln Center when it opened.
Do you feel more warmly toward it now?
Huxtable: Yes, of course I feel warmer towards it; it’s become such a
part of New York. As the city has changed, it’s become an anchor. At
the time it was built, many of us thought that it would make more sense
to spread your cultural facilities, which would strengthen different
neighborhoods. So much is changed that even though a complex like
Lincoln Center is static, it in a sense changes, too.
Through its functioning, it’s become a beloved institution, and one
reason is that open space. Whenever you go there on a night with
different events, or the spring festival, with the kids dancing, it’s
terrific. It’s still not great architecture, but by now it has acquired
a nostalgic quality of a certain kind of romanticized, popularized
modernism.
Lopate: Whenever your name comes up, what I hear is: How old is she?
Huxtable: And that will be the first line of this piece, which I think
is so unfair. It’s O.K. to mention it, but don’t make it in the first
line! It makes me into this strange curiosity: “She’s still alive. How
old is she?” Yes, she’s old! And she’s cooking with gas. And she has
strong opinions, and she’s still writing because they want her to. As
long as they ask me to do it, I’ll do it.
Lopate: So how old are you?
Huxtable: I’m 87. I’m not ashamed of my age. But I don’t want to be
judged by my age. Fair?
Architecture Review | Cooper Union for
the Advancement of Science and Art; The Civic Value of a Bold Statement
NYTIMES
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
June 5, 2009
We’ll have to wait to find out exactly what the end of the Age of
Excess means for architecture in New York. Yes, the glut of
high-concept luxury towers was wearisome. But some great civic works
were also commissioned in that era. And given the hard economic times,
they may be the last we see for quite some time.
The new academic building at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of
Science and Art is yet more proof that some great art was produced in
those self-indulgent times. Designed by Thom Mayne of the Los Angeles
firm Morphosis, it is not a perfect building, but it is the kind of
serious work that we don’t see enough of in New York: a bold
architectural statement of genuine civic value. Its lively public
spaces reaffirm that enlightenment comes from the free exchange of
ideas, not just inward contemplation.
Perhaps more important, the building seems to strike just the right
tone for this time in New York’s history. A wholly contemporary work,
it has a bold, aggressive profile that says as much about the city
we’ve lost as it does about the future we are building. It proves that
a brash, rebellious attitude can be a legitimate form of civic pride.
The building occupies a contentious site at Cooper Square, between
Sixth and Seventh Streets, in the East Village. The area has
experienced a particularly painful process of gentrification in the
past decade. First, generic glass boxes began popping up along the
Bowery. Then CBGB closed. For me the final straw was the opening in
2005 of Gwathmey Siegel’s undulating glass luxury apartment tower at
Astor Place, a vulgar knockoff of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Glass
Skyscraper project and a symbol of the era’s me-first mentality.
Mr. Mayne’s building does not shy away from this debate by trying to
fade into the background. Seen from the old Cooper Union Foundation
building across the street, its big concave facade is enveloped in a
glittering perforated metal screen, like armor, so that it’s hard at
first to get a grip on the building’s scale. A big vertical slot is cut
out of the facade’s center, as if it had been ripped open.
Yet the more you look at the building, the more it looks right at home
in its surroundings. From certain angles the facade’s concave form
seems to exert a magnetic pull, as if it were trying to embrace the
neighborhood in front of it. The curve of the corner, which lifts up to
invite people inside the lobby, has an unexpected softness. Even the
bulky exterior mirrors the proportions of the Foundation building — a
friendly nod to its older neighbor.
The effect is tough and sexy at the same time. One of the most
overlooked strengths of Mr. Mayne’s designs is his feel for material.
He is not a finicky designer; you don’t look to his work for refined
details. He tends instead to extract beauty from the crudest industrial
materials: raw concrete, steel I-beams, metal screens. The connections
between materials are always clearly expressed, never smoothed over, so
that you can feel the memory of the workers’ hands. It is what makes
his buildings — like the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, Calif. —
so approachable.
This strategy is social as well as aesthetic. Here the big V-shaped
columns that line the sidewalk not only support the building, but they
also create small pockets of space where students can hang out along
the street. Behind them the lobby is clad entirely in glass. Just
inside, a narrow staircase runs along the base of the window down to a
basement gallery and theater. Other views open down to the gallery from
Seventh Street.
The idea is to create a series of interlocking social spaces, many
undefined, and to allow for the kind of casual encounter that is a
central part of urban life. And it reflects Mr. Mayne’s ambivalence
over the Modernist obsession with transparency. To the Modernists
transparency equaled truth. To Mr. Mayne’s generation, which formed its
ideas in the 1960s, it could also mean uniformity. Like other radical
architects of his age, he is more interested in the dark, hidden
corners where people can loiter, get into mischief, escape from
authority.
The social heart of the building is a vast internal staircase, which
sweeps from the lobby all the way to the fourth floor. The staircase,
20 feet wide at its base, has a classical grandeur, as if the Met’s
front stairs had been pulled inside the building. The stair narrows as
it rises, creating a forced perspective that exaggerates its length. A
big window frames the top, allowing light to spill down into the lobby
and drawing you up into the space.
From the top people will filter around to each side and climb a
smaller, asymmetrical spiral stair to the upper floors. When I first
looked up through this space I immediately thought of the Baroque domes
of Guarino Guarini, except that the complex order of Guarini’s domes
represents divine order. In Mayne’s version that world has been set off
balance, as if to allow for imperfections, and it is inhabited by
students.
The building’s flaws, though, lie not in a failure of vision but in
questions about its execution. The most serious of these have to do
with circulation. I expect there will be complaints, for example, about
the main elevators, which only go up to the fifth and eighth floors.
The system is based on a design by Le Corbusier, who used it in his
1952 Unité d’Habitation housing block in Marseilles. Since it
eliminated the need for corridors on every other floor, he could create
big, floor-through duplex apartments with windows on both sides. But
here it doesn’t make much sense, because the building is made up of
standard, single-story offices and classrooms. Most students will have
to walk an extra flight up or down to get to their classes.
Another subtle but important problem is the depth of the treads on the
grand staircase. The stairs in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
are 14 inches deep, which is what makes them such a nice place to sit,
rest, chat with a stranger. Mr. Mayne’s stairs are a standard 11
inches, like a conventional fire stairwell. They are hard to sit on,
and they gave me vertigo when I began my descent from the third floor.
Does this sound picky? Not in a design that is all about the informal
use of public space. It is the difference between a very good building
and a great one.
Still, Mr. Mayne has created a serious work of architecture. And when
we look back on this era, the new academic building will stand out with
a handful of other designs — the New Museum, perhaps, and the
renovation of Alice Tully Hall — as projects that we, as a city, can
feel proud of. They leave you with the comforting thought that even in
egotistical times, a spirit of generosity can assert itself.
Design: Typography Fans Say Ikea
Should Stick to Furniture
NYTIMES
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
September 5, 2009
Maybe the mistake that the Ikea people made last month when the company
released its 2010 catalog was that they didn’t follow their own
instructions.
They should have first taken everything out of the carton and made sure
nothing was missing and that they weren’t mixing up, say, a Bjursta
with a Leksvik or a Muddus. Then they should have taken a look to see
how it all would fit together (serifs, strokes and counters), and only
then should they have taken the many parts (stems, extenders, legs,
spurs and chins) and started to jostle them into place, making sure
they had enough help for heavy lifting when anything resembling pressed
board was involved.
Instead they violated their aesthetic and their method: they went cheap
(O.K., that’s part of Ikea’s appeal) but they also went pre-fab,
ready-made. They even jettisoned their own distinctive, Swedish-owned
design for something generic, multinational and bland. What good is
designing furniture with coy names few outside your country can
properly pronounce if you print a catalog describing those items using
a font designed by Microsoft?
Yes, it’s fonts that we are talking about here, and as anyone who has
seen the documentary
“Helvetica” or fiddled with computer programs can tell you, there’s
a big difference between Wingdings and Bauhaus. And there are many
people who care deeply about the ways letters are given shape, how they
descend below the line, where they get thicker or thinner and how
elaborately they are ornamented.
So when Ikea casually abandoned its version of the famed 20th-century
font Futura that had served it for 50 years and replaced it for 2010
with the computer-screen font Verdana, professional outrage was immense.
We tend to think of text as semantically invisible, the letters being
mere tools used clearly to display words, which convey the true
meanings. But no one who actually wants you to pay attention to those
meanings risks thinking that way: advertisers, logo designers, magazine
and book publishers and catalog creators spend millions on fonts
because they know the medium has a message.
The design blog idsgn.org presented examples of the Ikea catalog’s
look, before and after. At a quick glance they are more similar than
distinct; after all, Ikea didn’t replace its own font, known as Ikea
Sans, with anything like Comic Sans. But the differences rankled
readers. “Yuck,” “sad,” “idiots,” “repulsive,” the comments read. “Do
they want to look cheaper?!”
When the change was noticed, toward the end of August, Twitterers
twitted mercilessly: “Words can’t describe my disgust,” read one from
Melbourne, Australia. The comments grew even more heated on Typophile
(typophile.com/node/61222). An online petition pleading with Ikea to
“get rid of Verdana” has a steadily growing list that on Friday
contained more than 5,000 signatures, having nearly doubled in a week.
“We’re surprised,” the Ikea spokeswoman Camilla Meiby said. “But I
think it’s mainly experts who have expressed their views, people who
are interested in fonts. I don’t think the broad public is that
interested.”
And what, after all, is the fuss about? All this, just because the Ikea
catalog now looks a bit more like a paste-up job you could do yourself
on a computer screen? What is the grand offense? And why care so deeply
about a catalog even if the company says it went to 199 million
households last year?
Ikea explained that it was abandoning its own version of the Futura
font because it wanted one that would be effective in many different
languages and on the Web, and that Verdana was designed for just that
purpose. Microsoft released Verdana in 1996 as a versatile font for new
technologies. On the screen, for example, differences between the
lowercase i, j and l and the number 1 have to be clear. And the font
has to be crisp even at the smallest sizes.
“The
Verdana fonts,” Microsoft explains, “are stripped
of features redundant when
applied to the screen. They exhibit new characteristics, derived from
the pixel rather than the pen, the brush or the chisel.”
Verdana, designed by Matthew Carter, serves technology not by seeming
technological but with its leanness, height and loose spacing; it is
bland, but efficient. The Ikea spokeswoman called it “a simple,
cost-effective font.”
Ikea’s abandoned font, Futura, on the other hand, has a long and
distinguished heritage. It was created by the German designer Paul
Renner in the 1920s, and oddly was meant to herald the same crisp
possibilities of an efficient technological future that Verdana now
claims to serve. Futura was Stanley Kubrick’s favorite typeface, used
in the titles and advertising of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It was the
first font to land on the moon, on a plaque left there in 1969. The
idsgn blog contains images of company logos and brands that have
embraced Futura: Absolut, Domino’s, Best Buy, Costco, Red Bull.
But even Futura has had its enemies. In the Type Directors Club annual
publication Typography, one playful protest against the font’s
dominance at the time of the Persian Gulf war slammed it as “the most
overused typeface in advertising history.” Using Futura Extra Bold
Condensed, the protest proclaimed: “IMAGINE IF SADDAM HUSSEIN WERE A
TYPEFACE.”
Yet it can’t be denied: Ikea is trading away a font with a tradition of
modernist design, having elaborate associations, for one that has only
one major association: with the computer screen. This is so offensive
to many because it seems like a slap at the principles of design by a
company that has been hailed for its adherence to them. It is,
detractors say, an embrace of homogeneity and globalization, betraying
all allegiance to the Ikea warehouse style that coats its version of
modernity with a veneer of Swedish idiosyncrasy.
The result is also inconsistent. Such change is not unusual: companies
have often altered, say, their logos to match their evolution. In 2003
UPS, for example, shed the classic 1961 logo that was designed by Paul
Rand (who also created brilliant logos for I.B.M., Westinghouse and —
gulp — Enron): a simple monochrome shield topped by a package tied in
string proclaiming safety and dispatch. But string is now discouraged
by UPS because it can damage processing machinery, and the company
itself has changed; hence the new logo, which sacrificed the charm and
wit of the old for sheen and swoosh.
But this is not true of Ikea. Its logo is unaltered, and its overall
approach remains unchanged. So why use Verdana to sell Lerberg shelves
or a Torbjorn swivel chair? It may be more economical, but the pieces
don’t fit cleanly; they are forced into place.
Actually, though, this sense of something cobbled together is not alien
to my own experience. I have always found the idea of Ikea, and the
experience of buying things there, much more appealing than actually
owning the objects or laboriously putting them together. Ikea’s
furniture is decidedly low-tech, the construction is not terribly
refined, and the required effort not always as slight as claimed.
So I can’t get too upset about the catalog. Why not look simple,
patched together and cost-effective? It’s a sales pitch, bluntly
delivered in difficult times.
The War Against Suburbia
by Joel Kotkin, NewGeography blob
01/21/2010
A year into the Obama administration, America’s dominant geography,
suburbia, is now in open revolt against an urban-centric regime that
many perceive threatens their way of life, values, and economic future.
Scott Brown’s huge upset victory by 5 percent in Massachusetts, which
supported Obama by 26 percentage points in 2008, largely was propelled
by a wave of support from middle-income suburbs all around Boston. The
contrast with 2008 could not be plainer.
Browns’s triumph followed similar wins by Republican gubernatorial
contenders last November in Virginia and New Jersey. In those races
suburban voters in places like Middlesex County, New Jersey and Loudoun
County, Virginia—which had supported President Obama just a year
earlier—deserted the Democats in droves. Also in November, voters in
Nassau County, New York upset Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, an
attractive Democrat who had carefully cultivated suburban voters.
The lesson here is that political movements ignore suburbanites at
their peril. For the better part of a century, Americans have been
voting with their feet, moving inexorably away from the central cities
and towards the suburban periphery. Today a solid majority of Americans
live in suburbs and exurbs, more than countryside residents and
urbanites combined.
As a result, suburban voters have become the critical determinants of
our national politics, culture, and economy. The rise of the Republican
majority after 1966 was largely a suburban phenomenon. When Democrats
have resurged—as they did under Bill Clinton and again in 2006 and
2008—it was when they came close to splitting the suburban vote.
But now, once again, things have changed. For the first time in memory,
the suburbs are under a conscious and sustained attack from Washington.
Little that the administration has pushed—from the Wall Street bailouts
to the proposed “cap and trade” policies—offers much to predominately
middle-income oriented suburbanites and instead appears to have worked
to alienate them.
And then there are the policies that seem targeted against suburbs. In
everything from land use and transportation to “green” energy policy,
the Obama administration has been pushing an agenda that seeks to move
Americans out of their preferred suburban locales and into the dense,
transit-dependent locales they have eschewed for generations.
As in so many areas, this stance reflects the surprising power of the
party’s urban core and the “green” lobby associated with it. Yet, from
a political point of view, the anti-suburban stance seems odd given
that Democrats' recent electoral ascendency stemmed in great part from
gains among suburbanites. Certainly this is an overt stance that
neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton would likely have countenanced.
Whenever possible, the Clintons expressed empathy with suburban and
small-town voters. In contrast, the Obama administration seems almost
willfully city-centric. Few top appointees have come from either red
states or suburbs; the top echelons of the administration draw almost
completely on big city urbanites—most notably from Chicago, New York,
Los Angeles, and San Francisco. They sometimes don’t even seem to
understand why people move to suburbs.
Many Obama appointees—such as at the Departments of Transportation and
of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and at the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA)—favor a policy agenda that would drive more
Americans to live in central cities. And the president himself seems to
embrace this approach, declaring in February that “the days of building
sprawl” were, in his words, “over.”
Not surprisingly, belief in “smart growth,” a policy that seeks to
force densification of communities and returning people to core cities,
animates many top administration officials. This includes both HUD
Secretary Shaun Donovan and Undersecretary Ron Sims, Transportation
undersecretary for policy Roy Kienitz, and the EPA’s John Frece.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood revealed the new ideology when he
famously declared the administration’s intention to “coerce” Americans
out of their cars and into transit. In Congress, the president’s
allies, including Minnesota Congressman James Oberstar, have advocated
shifting a larger chunk of gas tax funds collected from drivers to rail
and other transit.
In addition, the president’s stimulus—with its $8 billion allocation
for high-speed rail and proposed giant increases in mass transit—offers
little to anyone who lives outside a handful of large metropolitan
cores. Economics writer Robert Samuelson, among others, has denounced
the high-speed rail idea as “a boondoggle” not well-suited to a huge,
multi-centered country like the United States. Green job schemes also
seem more suited to boost employment for university researchers and
inner-city residents than middle-income suburbanites.
Suburbanites may not yet be conscious of the anti-suburban stance of
the Obama team, but perhaps they can read the body language.
Administration officials have also started handing out $300 million
stimulus-funded grants to cities that follow “smart growth principles.”
Grants for cities to adopt “sustainability” oriented development will
reward those communities with the proper planning orientation. There is
precious little that will benefit suburbanites, such as improved roads
or investment in other basic infrastructure.
But ultimately it will be sticks and not carrots that planners hope to
use to drive de-suburbanization. Perhaps the most significant will be
new draconian controls over land use. Administration officials,
particularly from the EPA, participated in the drafting of the recent
"Moving Cooler” report, which suggested such policies as charging tolls
on the Interstate Highway System, charging people to park in front of
their homes, and steering some 90 percent of all future development
into the most dense portions of already existing urban development.
Of course, such policies have little or no chance of being passed by
Congress. Too many representatives come from suburban or rural
districts to back policies that would penalize a population that uses
automobiles for upwards of 98 percent of their transportation and
account for 95 percent of all work trips.
But the president’s cadres may find other ways to impose their agenda.
New controls, for example, may be enacted through the courts and
regulatory action. There is already precedence for this: As EPA
director under Clinton, current climate czar Carole Browner threatened
to block federal funds for the Atlanta region due to their lack of
compliance with clear air rules.
Such threats will become more commonplace as regulating greenhouse
gases fall under administrative scrutiny. As can already be seen in
California, regulators can use the threat of climate change as a
rationale to stop funding—and permitting—for even well-conceived
residential, commercial, or industrial projects construed as likely to
generate excess greenhouse gases.
These efforts will be supported by an elaborate coalition of new
urbanist and environmental groups. At the same time, a powerful urban
land interest, including many close to the Democratic Party, would also
support steps that thwart suburban growth and give them a near monopoly
on future development over the coming decades.
Glimpse the Future
One can glimpse this future by observing what takes place in most
European countries, including the United Kingdom, where land use is
controlled from the center. For decades options for new development
have been sharply circumscribed, with mandates for ever-smaller lots
and smaller homes more the norm for single-family residences.
In Britain the dominant planning model is widely known as “cramming,”
meaning forced densification into smaller geographic areas. Over the
past generation, this has spurred a rapid shrinking of house sizes.
Today the average new British “hobbit” house, although quite expensive,
covers barely 800 square feet, roughly one-third that of the average
American residence. Even in quite distant suburbia many of the features
widely enjoyed here—sizable backyards, spare bedrooms, home office
space—are disappearing.
But these suburban hobbits will be living large compared to the
sardines who would be forced to move into inner cities. In London,
already a densely packed city, planners are calling for denser
apartment blocks and congested neighborhoods.
This top-driven scenario may be playing soon in America. Following the
proposed edicts of "Moving Cooler," the urban option increasingly would
become almost the only choice other than the countryside. Unlike their
baby boomer parents, the next generation would have few affordable
choices in comfortable, low- and medium-density suburbs and
single-family homes.
Ownership of a single-family home would become increasingly the
province only of the highly affluent or those living on the fringes of
second-tier American cities. Due to the very high costs of construction
for multi-family apartments in inner cities, most prospective
homeowners would also be forced to remain renters. Although widely
hailed as “progressive,” these policies would herald a return to the
kind of crowded renter-dominated metropolis that existed prior to the
Second World War.
Are Suburbs Doomed?
The anti-suburban impulse is nothing new. Suburbs have rarely been
popular among academics, planners, and the punditry. The suburbanite
displeased “the professional planner and the intellectual defender of
cosmopolitan culture,” noted sociologist Herbert Gans. The 1960s
counterculture expanded this critique, viewing suburbia as one of many
“tasteless travesties of mass society,” along with fast and processed
food, plastics, and large cars. Suburban life represented the opposite
of the cosmopolitan urban scene; one critic termed it “vulgaria.”
Liberals also castigated suburbs as the racist spawn of “white flight.”
But more recently, environmental causes—particularly greenhouse gas
emissions as well as dire warning about the prospects for “peak
oil”—now drive much of the argument against suburbanization.
The housing crash that began in 2007 added grist to the contention that
the age of suburban growth has come to an end. To be sure, the early
phases of the subprime mortgage bust were heavily concentrated in newer
developments in the outer fringes. In part due to rising home prices, a
disproportionate number of new buyers were forced to resort to
sub-prime and other unconventional mortgages.
The outer suburban distress attracted much media attention and
delighted many who had long detested suburbs. One leading new urbanist,
Chris Leinberger, actually described suburban sprawl as “the root cause
of the financial crisis.” Leinberger and other critics have described
suburbia as the home of the nation’s future “slums.” The favorite
images have included McMansions being taken over by impoverished
gang-bangers and other undesirables once associated with the now
pristine inner city.
Others portray future suburbs as serving at best as backwaters in a
society dominated by urbanites. In contrast to a brave new era for “the
gospel of urbanism,” the suburbs are expected to contract and even
wither away. According to planner Arthur C. Nelson’s estimate, by 2025
the United States will have a “likely surplus of 22 million large lot
homes”—that is, residences on more than one sixth of an acre.
City boosters, however, largely ignore the real-estate crisis impact on
urban condo markets throughout the country. Like the new developments
on the fringe, the much hyped apartment complexes in central cities
such as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver came on line
precisely as the housing market crashed, with similar devastating
effects. Many remain unoccupied and others have been converted from
high-end condos to more modest rentals.
Yet fundamentally the attack on suburbia has less to do with market
trends or the environment than with a deep-seated desire to change the
way Americans live. For years urban boosters have proposed that more
Americans should reside in what they deemed “more livable,” denser,
transit-oriented communities for their own good. One recent example,
David Owens’ Green Metropolis, supports the notion that Americans
should be encouraged to embrace “extreme compactness”—using Manhattan
as the model.
Convinced Manhattanization is our future, some “progressives” are
already postulating what to do with the remnants of our future
abandoned. Grist, for example, recently held a competition about what
to do with dying suburbs that included ideas such as turning them into
farms, bio-fuel generators, and water treatment plants.
What Do the Suburbanites Want?
In their assessments, few density advocates bother to consider whether
most suburbanites would like to give up their leafy backyards for dense
apartment blocks. Many urban boosters simply could not believe that,
once given an urban option, anyone would choose to live in suburbia.
Jane Jacobs, for example, believed that “suburbs must be a difficult
place to raise children.” Yet had Jacobs paid as much attention to
suburbs as she did to her beloved Greenwich Village, she would have
discovered that they possess their own considerable appeal, most
particularly for people with children. “If suburban life is
undesirable,” noted Gans in 1969, “the suburbanites themselves seem
blissfully unaware of it.”
Contrary to much of the current media hype, most Americans continue to
prefer suburban living. Indeed for four decades, according to numerous
surveys, the portion of the population that prefers to live in a big
city has consistently been in the 10 to 20 percent range, while roughly
50 percent or more opt for suburbs or exurbs. The reasons? The simple
desire for privacy, quiet, safety, good schools, and closer-knit
communities. The single-family house, detested by many urbanists, also
exercises a considerable pull. Surveys by the National Association of
Realtors and the National Association of Home Builders find that some
83 percent of potential buyers prefer this kind of dwelling over a
townhouse or apartment.
In other words, suburbs have expanded because people like them. A 2008
Pew study revealed that suburbanites displayed the highest degree of
satisfaction with where they lived compared to those who lived in
cities, small towns, and the countryside. This contradicts another of
the great urban legends of the 20th century—espoused by urbanists,
planning professors, and pundits and portrayed in Hollywood movies—that
suburbanites are alienated, autonomous individuals, while city dwellers
have a deep sense of belonging and connection to their neighborhoods.
Indeed on virtually every measurement—from jobs and environment to
families—suburban residents express a stronger sense of identity and
civic involvement with their communities than those living in cities.
One recent University of California at Irvine study found that density
does not, as is often assumed, increase social contact between
neighbors or raise overall social involvement. For every 10 percent
reduction in density, the chances of people talking to their neighbors
increases by 10 percent, and their likelihood of belonging to a local
club by 15 percent.
These preferences have helped make suburbanization the predominant
trend in virtually every region of the country. Even in Portland,
Oregon, a city renowned for its urban-oriented policy, barely 10
percent of all population growth this decade has occurred within the
city limits, while more than 90 percent has taken place in the suburbs
over the past decade. Ironically, one contributing factor has been the
demands of urbanites themselves, who want to preserve historic
structures and maintain relatively modest densities in their
neighborhoods.
Multicultural Flight
Perhaps nothing reflects the universal appeal of suburban lifestyles
more than its growing ethnic diversity. In 1970 nearly 95 percent of
suburbanites were white. Today many of these same communities have
emerged as the new melting pots of American society. Along with
immigrants, African-Americans have moved to the suburbs in huge
numbers: between 1970 and 2009, the proportion of African-Americans
living in the periphery grew from less than one-sixth to 40 percent.
Today minorities constitute over 27 percent of the nation’s
suburbanites. In fast-growing Gwinett County outside Atlanta,
minorities made up less than 10 percent of the population in 1980; by
2006 the county was on the verge of becoming “majority minority.” In
greater Washington, D.C., the Northeast’s most dynamic region in
economic and demographic terms, 87 percent of foreign migrants live in
the suburbs, while less than 13 percent live in the district, according
to a 2001 Brookings Institution study.
Perhaps most intriguingly, this diversity is itself diverse, including
not only African-Americans but also Latinos and Asians. Suburban areas
such as Fort Bend county, Texas, and the city of Walnut, in the San
Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, already have among the most diverse
populations in the nation. And this is not merely a California
phenomenon: Aurora (outside Denver), Bellevue (the Seattle suburb), and
Blaine (outside Minneapolis) are becoming ever-more diverse even as the
nearby city centers become less so. By 2000 well over half of
mixed-race households were in the suburbs, a percentage that continues
to grow.
Today the most likely locale for America’s new ethnic shopping centers,
Hindu temples, and new mosques are not in the teeming cities but in the
outer suburbs of Los Angeles, New York, and Houston. “If a multiethnic
society is working out in America,” suggests California demographer
James Allen, “it will be worked out in [these] places . . . The
future of America is in the suburbs.”
A War Not Worth Fighting
If most Americans clearly prefer suburbs then why would our elected
representatives choose to pick a fight with them? Perhaps the most
widely used explanation lies with densification as a means of reducing
greenhouse gases. But this rationale itself seems flawed, and could
reflect more long-standing prejudice than proven science.
For example, a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences found
that a nationally imposed densification policy would at best cut
greenhouse gas emissions between less than 1 and 11 percent by 2050.
Other research suggests that, by some measurements, low-density
development can use less energy than denser urban forms.
Although automobile commuting now consumes more energy resources than
well-traveled traditional urban rail systems, the future generation of
low-mileage cars may prove more efficient than often underutilized rail
systems that are now seen as critical elements of fighting climate
change. A public system running at low capacity—commonplace in many
regions—may actually produce more emissions than the coming generation
of personal vehicles.
Moreover, tall buildings may not be as green as some advocates suggest.
Recent studies out of Australia show that townhouses, small condos, and
even single-family homes generate far less heat per capita than the
supposedly environmentally superior residential towers, particularly
when one takes into account the cost of heating common areas and the
highly consumptive lifestyle of affluent urbanites (with their country
homes, vacations, and frequent flying). In terms of energy
conservation, the easiest and least expensive option may be to retrofit
single-family houses and wood-shaded townhouses.
Two- or three-story homes or townhouses often require only double-paned
windows and natural shading to reduce their energy consumption; one Los
Angeles study found that white roofs and shade trees can reduce
suburban air conditioning by 18 percent. Such structures are
particularly ideal for using the heat- and water-saving elements of
landscaping: after all, a nice maple can cool a two-story house more
efficiently than it can a ten-story apartment.
Of course, density advocates can and do produce their own studies to
justify their agenda. But there seems enough reasonable doubt to focus
on more efficient, and less intrusive, ways to create greener
communities by improving energy efficiency of automobiles and changing
the way suburbs fit into metropolitan systems.
Turning Deadwood into Greenurbia
The “green” assault on suburbia also largely ignores changes already
taking place across the suburban landscape. In a historical context,
the latest suburban “sprawl” may be compared to Deadwood. That
rough-and-ready mining town on the Dakota frontier was developed
quickly for the narrow purpose of being close to a vein of gold. But
over time these towns developed respectable shopping streets, theaters,
and other community institutions.
One change already evident can be seen in commuting patterns. Density
advocates and the media often characterize suburbanites as people who
generally take long commutes to work compared to the shorter rides
enjoyed by city-dwellers. But with the continuing dispersion of work to
the suburbs over the past two decades, suburban work locations actually
enjoyed shorter commutes than their inner city counterparts in
virtually all the largest metropolitan areas.
This is true even in New York. Although Manhattanites enjoy short
commutes and can even walk to work, most people who live in New York
City and work in Manhattan suffer among the longest commutes in the
nation. In fact, residents of Queens and Staten Island spend the most
time getting to work of all metropolitan counties. Residents in suburbs
and particularly exurbs actually endure generally shorter commutes, in
large part because of less congestion and closer proximity to
employment.
Such pairing of jobs and housing will shape the suburban future and
represents among the easiest ways to cut transportation-related
emissions. Even more promising has been the continuing rise in
home-based employment. According to Forrester Research, roughly 34
million Americans now commute at least part time from home; by 2016
these numbers are predicted to swell upwards to 63 million.
Oddly, despite these tremendous potential environmental benefits, the
shift toward cyberspace has elicited little support from smart-growth
advocates. Indeed most reports on density and greenhouse gases
virtually ignore the consideration of telecommuting and dispersed work.
One reason may be that telecommuting breaks with the prevailing
planning and green narratives by making dispersion more feasible. The
ability to work full time or part time from home, notes one planning
expert, expands metropolitan “commuter sheds” to areas well outside
their traditional limits. In exchange for a rural or exurban lifestyle,
this new commuter—who may go in to “work” only one or two days a
week—will endure the periodic extra long trip to the office.
Yet although it may offend planning sensibilities, the potential energy
savings—particularly in vehicle miles traveled—could be enormous.
Telecommuters drive less, naturally; on telecommuting days, average
vehicle miles are between 53 percent and 77 percent lower. Overall a 10
percent increase in telecommuting over the next decade will reduce 45
million tons of greenhouse gases, while also dramatically cutting
office construction and energy use. Only an almost impossibly large
shift to mass transit could produce comparable savings.
Ultimately, technology will undermine much of the green case against
suburbia. If we really want to bring about a greener era, focusing
attention on low-density enclaves would bring change that conforms to
the preferences of the vast majority of people.
Think Twice Before You Act
Ultimately, the war against suburbia reflects a radical new vision of
American life which, in the name of community and green values, would
reverse the democratizing of the landscape that has characterized much
of the past 50 years. It would replace a political economy based on
individual aspiration and association in small communities, with a more
highly organized, bureaucratic, and hierarchical form of social
organization.
In some ways we could say forced densification could augur in a kind of
new feudalism, where questions of land ownership and decision making
would be shifted away from citizens, neighbors, or markets, and left in
the hands of self-appointed “betters.” This seems strange for an
administration—and a party—whose raison d’être ostensibly has
been to widen opportunities rather than constrict them.
Indeed it is one of the oddest aspects of contemporary “progressive”
thought that it seeks to undermine even modest middle class aspirations
such as living in a quiet neighborhood or a single-family house. This
does not seem a winning way to build political support across a broad
spectrum of the populace.
Of course suburbia is not and will not be the option for everyone.
There will continue to be a significant, perhaps even growing, segment
of the population which opts for a dense urban lifestyle or, for that
matter, to live further in the countryside. But unless we see a radical
change in human behavior and social organization, the majority will
likely settle for a suburban or exurban existence.
Given these realities, it seems more practical not to work against such
aspirations but instead to evolve intelligent policies that would
reconcile them with our long-term environmental needs. Suburbanites
like their suburbs but would also like to find a way to make them
greener as well as more economically and socially viable. Right now
neither party has developed such an agenda, and so the suburbs, now
clearly leaning right, remain up for grabs. To win suburbanites over,
politicians first have to respect the basic preferences while offering
a realistic program for improvement. This remains a key to building a
sustainable electoral majority, not just for the next election, but for
the decades to come.
This article first appeared at The
American.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of
NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban
futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global
History. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will
be published by Penguin Press February 4th.
MARCEL BREUR, DESIGNER
OF FURNITURE. GERTRUDE STEIN PORTRAIT (by Picasso - her quote
re: Picasso's abrupt style changes (Blue Period, Pink Period,
etc.) - "And then he emptied himself"
New occupant of this Bauhaus architect's 1966 design to be the
collection (which includes some of my favorite paintings and
watercolors by American artists) oef
modern art from the Metropolitan Museum.
NYC's Whitney Museum of
American Art to move downtown
Published 05/16/2011
12:00 AM
Updated 05/13/2011 06:22 PM
New York's Whitney Museum of American Art plans to give up its Madison
Avenue building to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But officials
at both institutions say that won't happen until the Whitney moves into
its new home in downtown Manhattan in 2015. The Whitney has
occupied the landmark building designed by Marcel Breuer since 1966.
The Whitney's new $720 million home in Manhattan's Meatpacking District
was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano.
The Madison Avenue structure will offer the Met badly needed space for
contemporary art from around the world.