Archinect
anchor

Question about Charles Jencks' Declaration

Ryan002

Hi all, and thanks in advance for taking the time. 

I'm no architect,I just write the occasional freelance piece for ID. I'm interested in that famous declaration from Charles Jencks, proclaiming the exact time of death of Modernism (15th July 1972, 3.32pm in St Louis, Missouri). 

I'd like to ask:

(1) Why was the Pruitt-Igoe project considered such an important piece of Modernist work, such that it's demolition would signify "the death of modernism"?

(2) Is Modernism truly and completely dead in Architecture? If so, which aspects of it have been "recanted"? 

(3) A point of confusion. The failure of the Pruitt-Igoe project, from what I read, stems from social and political issues more than anything. Do architects consider these forces to be intrinsically tied to their work? As in, if an area seems to enhance class divide, is that taken as a reflection of poor architectural practice? 

(4) What exactly are the effects of Modernism's "death"? How did it affect designs that came later (examples are always welcome)?

Thanks in advance for your time folks!

*Salute*

 
Jul 11, 11 4:01 am

modernism is hardly dead, though a lot of the general public treats it as just another in a grab-bag of styles that can be applied. (not their fault.) 

pruitt-igoe was not all that impt to architecture (pre-demo) but, since it was by a noted firm, was celebrated upon construction because of its ambition, and because it appeared to represent a lot of the ideals of modernism, it gave jencks - a master provocateur - something to which he could tie his critique. thus it became impt to architecture - and catastrophically so. you're right that pruitt-igoe's failures were social, political, and economic, as well as architectural. (in effect, the social goal of providing accommodation for the most people possible resulted in taking it too far. that, and thinking the architecture could do all the work, without the requisite subsequent social and economic support.) 

for a decade or so after jencks' pruitt-igoe pronouncement, and for many other reasons besides jencks' irresponsibility, many 'clever' architects went through the exercise of reducing all architecture that had come before to cartoons - emptying the various past styles of their histories and context.

this isn't a simple if/then relationship and the profession didn't turn on a dime: there are books and books written that describe this period. 

we eventually got over it. architects either returned to working in the way we had learned to work - developing something which meaningfully addressed the problems we were given - or we bowed to the cancer we had introduced to the general public and agreed to apply anything anywhere based on someone's personal taste, whether it was relevant to anything or not. or both.

real arch historians can certainly describe all of this better. i don't know if you're planning to write something, but this is NOT a simple topic at all. a three-page magazine piece will, at best, summarize a deep history and give people other places to look if they're interested. at worst, it will further caricature the contemporary state of architecture.  

Jul 11, 11 7:50 am  · 
 · 
toasteroven

the demolition of pruitt igoe was more the result of failed planning (originally designed to have a mix of scales - but budget made all buildings the same), policy (nixon era cuts to social housing), lack of funding, and major problems in building management and unit application process.  IMO - it's more the "end" of modernist planning (whole-scale neighborhood destruction in the name of urban renewal, extreme compartmentalization of use and program, etc...) in concert with urban decline in the 70s than modern architecture and design - which at least the tectonic, aesthetic, and interior spatial aspects have definitely survived.

 

I agree with steven - this is an incredibly deep topic - you will inevitably have to touch on the current crisis within planning academia - the rise of urbanism movements like new urbanism and landscape urbanism, the sustainability movement (which includes social and economic sustainability), changes to public policy in terms of the built environment (and these vary wildly among different urban areas) - changes in the role of architects in project delivery - and so forth.  pinning failure of a movement on a particular aesthetic is incredibly superficial.

Jul 11, 11 9:24 am  · 
 · 
Ryan002

Thanks for all the details guys!

This really helps me a lot. It makes the reading easier, when I have some general idea before I start ploughing into the texts.

To be clear, this won't be a bite sized magazine article. I'm thinking of an academic paper, and my topic is a related quest between architecture and language. I liken the linguists' search for a universal language to the architectural search for a universal style. I am exploring imagery that intertwines the roles of linguist and architect. Namely, the Tower of Babel, computer architecture, and Victor Hugo's long discussions of Nortre Dame cathedral (the stone book). 

The parallel movement of modernism, in literature and architecture, is pretty much unavoidable. 

Jul 11, 11 11:15 am  · 
 · 
citizen

Steven's points are good ones.

Jencks is an architectural critic and provocateur, which is fine and useful.

At best Jencks is an amateur historian.  Most serious historians don't make grand pronouncements (though there are exceptions); rather, they perform research, interpret multiple sources, and do their best to analyze specific events, artificts and relationships in a fiendishly complicated context of social forces, economic imperatives, cultural constructs, and political currents.  This is hard to do and a lot of work; it doesn't lend itself to simplistic declarations.

I remember attending a colloquium at UCLA about twenty years ago.  Jencks and Gehry were there, among others.  This was just after Jencks's notoriety had faded and just as Gehry's was about to explode.  Jencks was very rushed, trying to shoehorn a twenty-minute presentation into a ten-minute slot, and apoplectic in trying to categorize Gehry's work with one of Jencks's silly invented terms (I can't recall it).  It was uncomfortable watching someone frantically trying to stay relevant as the guy who tells us all how to categorize different architects and buildings in his particular classification schema.  But, fine: that's the legitimate work of a critic and polemicist.  And it's a good way to sell books and get invitations to speak.  But it's not serious history.

Jul 11, 11 11:28 am  · 
 · 
won and done williams

Ryan002: (3) A point of confusion. The failure of the Pruitt-Igoe project, from what I read, stems from social and political issues more than anything. Do architects consider these forces to be intrinsically tied to their work? As in, if an area seems to enhance class divide, is that taken as a reflection of poor architectural practice? 

toasteroven: the demolition of pruitt igoe was more the result of failed planning (originally designed to have a mix of scales - but budget made all buildings the same), policy (nixon era cuts to social housing), lack of funding, and major problems in building management and unit application process. 

I completely disagree with toasteroven on this one. P-I was a failure of architecture. Many architects tend to pass the buck on issues like this, saying it's planning's fault or policy's fault. Issues like this still come up in practice and too often architects will blame someone else (usually the client) for having to design something that is ethically offensive. "If I don't do it, someone else will." Even worse, in the case of P-I, is that the ideology that created P-I was largely created by architects, going back to Corbusian planning principles. Yamaski, like most modern architects, had bought in hook-line-and-sinker. I adamently believe that architects need to take far more responsibility for their designs; we, as much as anyone, are culpable for the degradation of the built urban environment that has occurred over the last century.

Was P-I the end of modernism? No, it lives on as an aesthetic, largely divorced from the social imperative that created P-I in the first place. Frustratingly, rather than confront the social problems inherent in modern architecture, post-modernism instead got lost in semantic games  while the social problems that architecture could have had a role in addressing have largely been ignored.

Jul 11, 11 12:31 pm  · 
 · 
elinor

i completely disagree, won.  here in new york, for example, there are market-rate developments like stuyvesant town, co-op city, etc. which are very similar in planning and design to tower-in-the park social housing, without any of the attendant social ills.  in addition, most of the former communist block lives in this kind of housing, and it's considered middle-class, safe, and desirable.  it is completely misguided to blame the architecture for pruitt-igoe's failings. the failure of such projects, in my opinion, has much to do with the scale of operations and the necessity of an overseing authority able to operate on such a scale...something which is difficult to achieve in this country because of the nature of american cities' public infrastructure and the cultural emphasis on the nature of private ownership.  simply put, take every level of command over the environment from the inhabitants, put it into the hands of a distant, messy, disorganized agency somewhere with no direct human investment in the outcome, and you will have a social housing disaster.  in countries where the social infrastructure plays a more important role in the society, or in a situation where the residents are given a measure of ownership, as in a co-op, the situation could be very different.

 

 

 

Jul 11, 11 1:11 pm  · 
 · 
elinor

pruitt-igoe is not considered that important as a modernist work in itself, but is  rather an example of a type, the 'radiant city' or 'tower-in-the-park' planning vision, which was an important invention of the modernist ideal...a utopian vision intended to relieve overcrowding and provide air, light, and green to urban residents.  modernism is far from dead, though i think architects have conceded that its emphasis on uniformity sometimes makes it difficult to successfully introduce the kind of programmatic, spatial, and social diversity that makes for a good public space. like most things, it can be done well or very, very badly, and much depends on other social and economic factors...as a side note, i visited lafayette park in detroit over the weekend, and was blown away by how gorgeous it is...from what i hear it is a very successful, racially and economically diverse community.  definitely an example of a successful modernist development.

 

 

 

Jul 11, 11 1:28 pm  · 
 · 
elinor

sorry for triple post (new archinect does NOT work well w/firefox) but i don't think one should underestimate the value of the image in this argument.  for a postmodernist like jencks, a provocateur for sure but also a champion of style and element as nothing but image, the sight of the ville-radieuse towers coming down was surely a propagandistic opportunity that was not to be missed...

 

Jul 11, 11 1:37 pm  · 
 · 
toasteroven

won - pruitt igoe suffered from major mismanagement - and when the problems started accelerating was when they relaxed their screening process for new residents (because they overestimated the market in St. Louis for this kind of housing and couldn't fill enough of the units) and coinciding when the federal (and local) government drastically decreased funding and oversight.   other similar public housing projects elsewhere in the US (as elinor points out) never had the same problems.

Jul 11, 11 1:39 pm  · 
 · 
won and done williams

Elinor, at one time in my life, I would have posted almost verbatum what you posted above. But I'm to the point where I'm done making excuses for unsuccessful projects. Yes, there have been successful modern tower-in-the-park projects. I in fact live in one in Detroit. But Lafayette Park like Stuyvesant Town is, as you say, a market-rate development, not a public housing projects. They are completely different than P-I. Sure, P-I was a public project that needed to go through the "bureaucratic" public process, but that is no excuse for poor design. At the end of the all of the bureaucracy, there is a building. That building should do nothing to make the living conditions of its inhabitants worse and should strive to make them better. Seems pretty obvious. P-I was not successful in that respect.

Jul 11, 11 1:40 pm  · 
 · 
won and done williams

P.S. Glad you enjoyed your visit to LP!

Jul 11, 11 1:41 pm  · 
 · 
elinor

is that where you live?

 

 

Jul 11, 11 1:44 pm  · 
 · 
elinor

guess that's probably too personal a question for the internet...but if so, consider me jealous.  :)

 

Jul 11, 11 1:59 pm  · 
 · 
darrensnow

The failure of Pruitt-Igoe was more related to the 'death' of modernism, in that it tied the social neglect and poor maintenance there to modernist architecture, in the public consciousness. In fact many successful social housing developments in Asia, especially Hong Kong, still incorporate the specific features Jencks outlined as modernist failures. They are however well maintained house a broad social mix. 

He also seemed, with many architectural critics - though not all - not to realise that post modernism is a strand of modernism and as such could not follow the death of it. 

 

Jul 11, 11 2:43 pm  · 
 · 
toasteroven

That building should do nothing to make the living conditions of its inhabitants worse and should strive to make them better. Seems pretty obvious.

 

my current firm was in one building for 10 years - we recently moved because the new owner wasn't keeping the place up.  we loved the space, but couldn't take broken HVAC system, a security guard who left the door unlocked, etc - it became unsafe and unhealthy... according to your logic this is a failure of design and the architect's fault.

Jul 11, 11 2:50 pm  · 
 · 
toasteroven

And, I wonder, how many housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe have been built since the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe. 

 

this is a bit misleading - there have been hundreds of "public" housing projects built since Pruitt and Igoe under programs such as section 8 - but nothing has been at the scale before or since - primarily because cities after the 70s no longer had overcrowding problems and as many issues with substandard housing conditions (like lack of running water, sanitation, electricity, etc...).  these days there is more attempt to integrate smaller scales of low-income housing into existing neighborhoods - and if you do see developments, it's usually individual high-rise or new-urbanist style village with a mix of housing types (including some affordable units).

Jul 11, 11 4:23 pm  · 
 · 
brooklynboy

Stuy Town started as subsidized housing for the middle class. It was not market rate until very recently, and I believe many apartments are still rent stabilized, if not rent controlled. It was probably more desirable then than it is now.

Won, what were the architectural design problems of Pruitt Igoe that made it different from successful tower-in-the-park developments?

Jul 11, 11 5:01 pm  · 
 · 

i think you go the wrong end of the stick won.  pruitt-igoe became the standard bearer for haters of modernism as a result of jencks' texts and as a result of that some more careful people looked into the actual causes because lets face it style was obviously never ever the problem.  There are documentaries and articles galore pointing to social issues and management issues and financial issues, some of which had an impact on the design, but it was never primarily an architectural problem.

i live in similar place in tokyo.  middle class and amazing place, with waiting list to move in.  different from P-I and most places in the usa actually because it mixes income groups with 4 or 5 distinct typologies and has policies designed to bring folks into the same area (rental units mix with units for sale, ,etc).  The planning is also very impressive.  At that level I can see where design matters, but it isn't an architectural  style thing.  not remotely.

Jul 11, 11 5:48 pm  · 
 · 
elinor

i find 'defensible space' to be a very interesting relic of its time...the old city center of naples also has a high crime rate, in a decidedly non-modern, low-rise urban setting, where many of the ground-floor residences spill right out onto the street and you can't move without being stared at by absolutely everyone who lives there.  detroit has a high crime rate, in neighborhoods of single-family detached houses.  the first time i went to central LA, i really couldn't merge my new york-centric mental picture of a 'ghetto' with what i was seeing there...everyone had their own pastel-colored house with a yard and a driveway and a palm tree out front...you can probably contrive a book like defensible space around every urban configuration out there.

 

Jul 11, 11 6:05 pm  · 
 · 

people looked into the actual causes because lets face it style was obviously never ever the problem.

But see, style is the problem.

It's not so much about the 'skin-deep style,' but style does impart certain elements into a building when it comes to particular features. While Pruitt-Igue had operable windows, those windows, due to the modernist styles, were ineffective, expensive and difficult to service.

The choice of the window was the responsibility of the architect.
The cost schedule of the window was the responsibility of the managing body.
Allowing the windows in the first place was the responsibility of the planner.

With many of these projects, "blame" is never really bared by a single entity.

However, the architect, Minoru Yamasaki, severely underestimated how quickly people can turn and how destructive they can actually be. He spent his early career working in office buildings, campuses and civic centers.

Why is this particularly important?

Because there was a significant amount of research going on at the time that poor people actually had different social interactions and personal motivations that differed greatly than wealthier people. As someone point out, Stuy Town didn't turn into a horrendous dump because from the initial inception of the project, it was designed as public housing for the middle class.

Herberle,1960, found that the intensity of social interaction significant decreases the wealthier someone becomes. Another study by McCarthy (1953) shows little correlation at scale with the exception that higher educated people typically have more positive interactions with their neighbors while most poor people's friends live within the immediate vicinity.

The poor are more likely to show a significant amount of interdependence on one another than any other social class. This also means that this demographic is self-organizing forming their own social and moral codes and fracturing to groups closely associated with age, sex, ethnicity and physical proximity.

Yamasaki was obviously familiar with these developing theories in planning and architecture. His original design was a mixed-use, mixed-density and somewhat mixed-income development that proved to costly for the Public Housing Authority. Instead of resigning from this project, he proposed the second plan.

And because most of his work had been done for wealthier clients or working with different social groups, he never questioned the appropriateness of the style or the difficultly that came with the materials, their upkeep and operation.

The general public knew that this project was a pile of shit, looked like shit and probably even smelled like it.

That's why at no given point was Pruitt-Igoe ever at the capacity required to sustain the project financially and this inability to attract tenants, business or new development lead to a problem that quickly spiraled out of control.

 

Jul 11, 11 7:36 pm  · 
 · 
vado retro

http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/

 

Jul 12, 11 12:05 am  · 
 · 

exactly, JJ

 

the "style", if there is such a thing, called for mixed planning, no skip floors, etc etc, and then it was all cut by the govt.  the place was also segregated, whites in one section and blacks in the other.  it is understandable that the architect was in some ways complicit with all that bullshit but it was not a style thing.  segregation was a crime against society sure, but an architectural decision?  no i don't think so.  same for much of the rest....

the problem was poverty and bad management.   it isn't like covering the boxes with pastiche would have changed a damned thing.  like elinor points out behavior is not conditioned by architecture.  that kind of positivist thinking is what makes architects and planners seem like such a waste of space sometimes.  When it comes to behavior, at best (and worst) what architects and planners do is enable.  and in many cases the design decisions that matter are mandated from above. 

so i really don't buy the story Jencks laid out.  It's a good image and in that regard perfect for what he wanted to say, but he was not really interested in the people that lived there was he?  post-modernism is about charles jencks when it comes down to it.  unless there is a chapter in his book on civil society that i forgot....

anyway, as i recall pruitt-igoe worked fine for about 5 years.  it may have been less than perfect but the problems did not start until it became a dumping ground for the mentally ill and maintenance was stopped, etc.

 

Jul 12, 11 12:10 am  · 
 · 

segregation was a crime against society sure, but an architectural decision?  no i don't think so.

Actually, housing in Missouri was desegregated before Pruitt-Igoe even came into being. So, at this point, the segregation here would be a toss up between de jure and de facto segregation.

And generally for this time period, you can often replace the words "poor people" with "black people." And this is not something I think you can solely blame on the government or agents of the government (planners, hired professionals such as architects). I do believe the government often acted maliciously when it came to several social programs and still does to this point— for instance, treating homelessness is often more expensive than "curing" homelessness; you can give someone a market rate single-bedroom apartment for much cheaper than it costs them to give them access to shelters, food stamps or direct cash assistance.

I would say the segregation in this issue in not purely limited to race though as it was all socioeconomical. Referring to my previous point about being poor being synonymous with black, governments here skirt the issue of indirectly dealing with race and therefore can play the innocence card.

My point with style being an issue is that modernist style is wholly dependent on technology.'

You can 'train' a robot to carve laurel leaves and dart-and-egg motifs all day long. You can't train a person to flatten glass 8' by 8' by hand or shape steel girders without tools.

Modernism is dependent on technology and access to said technology. When it really comes down to the most extreme examples, a person can easily make enough lime for stucco or plaster with a camp fire, some pebbles and a mortar-and-pestal. A person, however, can't make drywall by hand.

A skilled craftsmen can easily make a wood window. Only a machine can fabricate curtain wall framing.

Modernism is simply not tangible to the greater humanity even though it was designed to be so. Probably the only successful example of modernism is IKEA and a design style and a design process for the proletariat by the proletariat has quite some serious issues when the man behind IKEA has one of the largest wads of cash in the entire world.

Jul 12, 11 1:00 am  · 
 · 
Ryan002

A thought occurs to me, after exit wound quoted the bit about good form leading to good content. 

From the 1500's - 1600's, the architects who designed cathedrals (such as Nortre Dame) laboured under the impression that a good cathedral would create good Christians. I know some people will dismiss this as farcical, but I don't think it is, and it's irrelevant to the fact that it did happen. 

So I'm just wondering if there's something of a holdover here. If architects believed, all the way back then, that good architecture could make good Christians, is it the same principle that (most) modernists were holding on to? 

I suspect the mystic side of architecture resides somewhere here, and there's probably some truth to it (else it wouldn't perpetuate itself). 

Jul 12, 11 1:54 am  · 
 · 
jmanganelli

if architecture could make people do things, even the least of us would be very much in demand

Jul 12, 11 2:07 am  · 
 · 

too true jmanganelli. 

 

that's the point isn't it. 

buildings don't make people good or bad.  what we make is important but it can't be justified because of its coercive power.  that kind of thinking is just ego.  wishful thinking even? 

 

reality often gets in the way of that stuff anyway.  it's likely apocryphal but isn't the story that cathedrals open to all kinds of craziness before they got all holier than thou and stopped letting people take their cows inside?  i mean really if a building wasn't powerful enough to keep the cows out what was it good for? 

 

not sure what your point is about modernism and craft and technology jj.  most of the early modernist stuff was hand crafted up the wazoo and the tech look was largely aspirational.   does that make it ok?

 

Jul 12, 11 7:24 am  · 
 · 

to  jump's point: i've worked on renovations of a lot of pre-70s modern buildings and many were not made of industrial parts, necessarily. they were made by the same methods as many other things of their time, i.e., hand-made or shop-machined and definitely NOT standardized.

interestingly, if you look at contemporary construction, it often takes more customization and hand-making to make a modern building than it does to make your conventional suburban builder home with multiple gables, cornices, and keystones. faux-'traditional' house elements have been standardized so that they can be bought off the shelf and used indiscriminately, while to make something modern often demands greater care and craft. 

Jul 12, 11 8:40 am  · 
 · 

that is pretty true out here too steven.

 

Jul 12, 11 10:21 am  · 
 · 
won and done williams

if architecture could make people do things, even the least of us would be very much in demand

This seems naive to me. Architecture makes us do things all the time. It makes us go upstairs. It determines how many of us are sitting in a room together. It makes us turn on lights (or not). It makes people interact with each other (or not). I could go on, but I think you get the point. And this goes to the heart of my frustration, architects too often downplay these aspects of design in favor of the aesthetic (how does it photograph?) and when confronted with failures of design, are not culpable, blaming it on "planning" or "management" or what have you. I find it stunning that the architects who make these fundemental decisions do not take greater responsibility for their actions. Personally, I believe this has a lot to do with why architects are becoming less relevant.

[Sorry if this has swung too far away from Jencks; if anything I agree with Jencks' critique, if not the outcomes of postmodernism.]

Jul 12, 11 10:27 am  · 
 · 

This is what modernism looks like 74 years later. This is a cherry picked example.

It's actually mildly interesting to see how the residents of Tel Aviv have changed these buildings over the course of decades.

The point about modernism, technology and craft is that people in the 20th-century are largely poor due a lack of access to technology. Why would you even begin to house them in a style wholly-dependent on technology? How would you even expect them to maintain something that from that perspective where they would be incapable of even creating it in the first place?

@Steven, we're not talking about one-off modernism— every aspect of modernism is the result of a machine.

Even if we take the iconic Bauhaus building, one should note that the windows are primarily a result of technological forces: float glass had yet to be invented and Gropius spent an extraordinary amount of effort to make the windows appear as one continuous mass.

But even Gropius design, while limited in size, was only made possible by the cast-plate glass method. Those windows would have looked quite different if the only access to glass Gropius had was crown glass.

Cast-plate glass could have only been made economically possible by using a relatively modern furnace design that allowed for a continuous production cycle— the Siemens tank furnace.

In addition, cast plate glass cracks without annealing and here is another technological innovation— annealing. Annealing wasn't even really possible without the invention of the mechanized thermometer which relied on the bimetallic strip, although invented in 1602, was not turned into thermometer until 1828. And one of the mentions of using temperature-controlled annealing wasn't for another 20 years until the process was refined and patented in 1848 as a way to strengthen train wheels.

Even in with hand-made modernism, the hardened steel necessary to even cut wood with appreciable precision wasn't even invented until 1848 with the introduction of the Bessemer process. And it wasn't really until close to the turn of the 19th-century had the quality of steel changed due to progress made in refractory coatings in 1878 and 1897. In 1907 that the first arc furnace came online which allowed metal manufactures quite a bit of flexibility to make even better steel.

Even dimensional lumber is a relatively modern invention. Despite the first mechanical plane being invented in 1796, it wasn't until the 1870s that sawmills began using mechanical planes to produce relatively straight and perfect boards. And driving force behind finished lumber was purely economic— uniform lumber was lighter in weight and cheaper to ship.

Marcel Breuer's Bauhaus Chair, 1922, would have been rather impractical create just a hundred years prior to its creation. It's one the reasons why the previous two centuries worth of furniture feature relatively few straight lines because of the difficult of creating said perfect straight lines.

If you GIS around for examples of 17th-,18th- and even 19th-century furniture, you'll find that the more utilitarian furniture is all highly irregular much like this below:

Jul 12, 11 11:00 am  · 
 · 
Arcigor

What I think Charles Jencks meant was that modernism had been riding a wave of overly enthusiastic developers that blindly followed what the modernist where doing. The "white gods" were mortals after all. Bauhaus to our House by Wolfe does a good job of describing the rise and fall (plateau) of modernism in America. I think the I-P's demolition was a physical manifestation of this fact. Modernism is not dead........ and I believe we should take more responsibility in what we do and what we don't do. I agree with won but it has little to do with why it was declared the death of modernism..... architects of all times and styles have behaved irresponsibly and they continue to work and build and demolish.

Jul 12, 11 1:16 pm  · 
 · 
toasteroven

Architecture makes us do things all the time. It makes us go upstairs. It determines how many of us are sitting in a room together. It makes us turn on lights (or not). It makes people interact with each other (or not).

 

you need people to activate the space - and you can only predict what people will do in that space based on your understanding of culture and human behavior.  I can put a toilet in a certain corner of the bathroom - i can predict that people will use the toilet for its intended purpose- but the design of the house or bathroom doesn't make you use the toilet - it's learned behavior.  if you've spent enough time around a little kid who isn't toilet trained you'd understand.

 

I'm not saying that design of space isn't important - we definitely can attempt to use space to encourage and/or discourage certain behaviors.   but if people are determined to behave a certain way, there's really not much we can do except make it easier or harder for them physically - and if P&I were filled with buddhist monks, do you really think the long corridors and lack of semi-private space would cause them to start being violent toward one another?

 

and I'm not saying that the architect isn't entirely inculpable for a shitty building (and it's important to note that a couple of the buildings at P&I didn't have the same problems as the others) - but in THIS SPECIFIC CASE - the primary issues were bad planning and bad management.  What I'm taking issue with is this assertion that somehow ONLY the buildings were to blame.  it's far more complicated - the result of a lot of bad decisions and assumptions by a lot of people.

Jul 12, 11 2:33 pm  · 
 · 

I recommend you check this book by Francis Fukuyama "The End of History and the Last Man." There are some conceptual bases to your questions.

Jul 12, 11 2:41 pm  · 
 · 
toasteroven

From the 1500's - 1600's, the architects who designed cathedrals (such as Nortre Dame) laboured under the impression that a good cathedral would create good Christians. I know some people will dismiss this as farcical, but I don't think it is, and it's irrelevant to the fact that it did happen. 

 

Notre Dame was built in the 12-14th centuries - not during the height of reformation - but even the cathedrals built during the gothic period were primarily used by the catholic church in order to express power and political clout.

 

but your point about dogmatism within architecture is interesting (not completely relevant to the reality of P&I - but maybe more relevant to this particular discussion and Jenck's statement itself) - but if you're headed down that road, you might as well throw in a critique of randian objectivism too...

Jul 12, 11 3:47 pm  · 
 · 
won and done williams

you need people to activate the space - and you can only predict what people will do in that space based on your understanding of culture and human behavior.

Absolutely, it is part of the architect's job to understand how people will use the spaces he is creating. Yamasaki was not designing for Buddhist monks; he was designing for low-income public housing project residents. The density of the development, the long interior corridors, the space between buildings, the lack of retail amenities, etc. were all inappropriate for the user group. Architects repeated the same mistakes in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, etc. Jencks was spot on; it was a utopian modernist form that was repeated over and over again that was never going to achieve its utopian intentions.

The more we as architects try to pin blame on planners, the more insignificant we make ourselves in the built environment.

Jul 12, 11 4:07 pm  · 
 · 
won and done williams

BTW emergency exit wound, I appreciate the Jencks quotes to give this discussion some context.

Jul 12, 11 4:09 pm  · 
 · 
toasteroven

Yamasaki was not designing for Buddhist monks; he was designing for low-income public housing project residents. 

 

this may be true - but he was not designing for criminals and drug addicts.

Jul 12, 11 5:27 pm  · 
 · 
Emilio

The planning of the project and design (and height) of the buildings in the case of Pruitt-Igoe cannot be separated as two issues (and in other similar projects as well), they are interpretations of the Ville Radieuse and are of one conception (high rises far apart with lots of open space).

At the time, Yamasaki surely thought he was designing a better environment for the poor, as did lots of other architects.  Let's get the chronology straight:  PI was commissioned in 1950; The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the first real critique of the Ville Radieuse concept and the housing projects it engendered, was published in 1960, and Oscar Newman's Defensible Space, which pointed out the serious flaws in such projects in a serious study, was not published until 1972. 

Throughout those years, there was mounting criticism of those types of projects as low income housing as the flaws became evident in the projects themselves.  There would have been little excuse for Yamasaki to design that project as he did in 1972, but not in 1950 (unless he could clearly see the future), and saying so is rewriting history to fit present criticism and knowledge.

Jul 12, 11 7:33 pm  · 
 · 
Emilio

And what toasteroven said above is true:  even the neighborhoods that Jane Jacobs praised, with their "eyes on the street" and corner stores, become hell on earth when taken over by drug addicts and criminals.

Jul 12, 11 7:39 pm  · 
 · 
Ryan002

Thanks Orhan. I have indeed looked at Fukuyama's book. (I do wonder if he's re-thinking things these days; it's becoming a fad to bash democratic peace theory, and anything vaguely related to it : / )

Thanks also to toasteroven, for pointing out my history typo (facepalm). Too many long hours. 

Jul 12, 11 10:59 pm  · 
 · 

the idea that architects should be responsible for bad behavior in buildings is slightly weird no?  If people behave well do we get to take credit for that too?

there was no looting and no fighting after the earthquake that hit japan not so long ago.   compare to new orleans.  surely you can't say the architecture made them do it?  or that the architecture kept everyone sane in tohoku.  have you seen a typical Japanese school gymnasium?  they ain't so nice (very crappy modernist boxes usually ).  but apparently the mullions hold the key to preventing wackos from urinating on their neighbors sleeping bags.  it's a big idea to swallow.

 

culture always wins out over design when it comes to behavior.  that doesn't make us irrelevant it just means we aren't gods.  whats the problem?

Jul 13, 11 12:57 am  · 
 · 
won and done williams

whats the problem?

I agree that the factors that influence behaviour are incredibly complex, but to downplay the role of architecture allows architects to remove themselves from the civic responsibility of the built environment. Have you driven around recently and looked at recent projects? I'm not only taking about the starchitect-designed museums and government buildings, but also the more mundane architect-designed work of office buildings and factories. Too often, I'm left asking myself, "What was the point of this building?" It functionally may satisfy the needs of its owner, but any builder can accomplish that. It may look "interesting" or even "sexy" (rarely "beautiful") to somebody, usually the architect, but for the most part, I don't think anyone else really notices or cares. And while minimally satisfying function and form, few buildings actually take any sort of responsibility for their role in a urban or ecological context. For all of its faults, at least within its little prescribed box, LEED tries. And while I think New Urbanism is deeply flawed, at least it tries.

All of which is to say that while the utopian modernist model may have died with P-I, I wholeheartedly agree with the modernist notion that architecture has an urban and civic responsibility well beyond the limits of a project's finite scope. Architects in my view should embrace this rather than find excuses for why it's not their problem.

Jul 13, 11 8:49 am  · 
 · 
Emilio

"....architecture has an urban and civic responsibility well beyond the limits of a project's finite scope.   Architects in my view should embrace this rather than find excuses for why it's not their problem."

No one would (or should) argue against architects having an ethic responsibility to look at those larger implications of any project they are designing, and you're right, not enough of us do because we just want the commission, and, you know, gotta pay those bills. 

But that's very different from arguing that any one project or plan causes, solely by the way it's designed, anti-social behaviour and crime and the inevitable destruction of said project.  I'm not saying it can't or hasn't happened, just that it's very difficult to prove a direct cause and effect.  (Defensible Space was one such attempt to prove cause and effect, but some of the same design issues that Newman points out as cause factors have actually worked in many cases and have not perpetrated crime or decay , which could mean the real cause lies elsewhere).

 

 

Jul 13, 11 9:40 am  · 
 · 
toasteroven

won -  are you prepared to embark on the level of research, studies, interviews, community meetings, etc... that would go into a successful civic project?  this stuff takes years - takes expertise well beyond our training - lots of compromise - political/legal wrangling - and often the result is not something that is built.  I'm not sure any private client would agree to this - and usually this is what city planning departments and other government agencies are supposed to do - but more often than not this tends to be initiated from engaged and organized communities and civic leaders (and we as design professionals should be included on this list).

 

very few firms do real in-depth planning/programming studies - and to come into a project pushing superficial "civic" or "sustainable" amenities just because you believe it's the right thing to do is just as disingenuous and naive as what Jencks is criticizing about top-down planning and programming practices in the 50s and 60s.  If your assumptions about what a neighborhood/community actually needs are not challenged repeatedly during the research process you are being just as dogmatic and totalitarian as Jencks' modernists.

 

it's not "architecture" that has an urban and civic responsibility its ARCHITECTS that have this responsibility - we have a unique perspective of the built environment, but we also need to participate in the public process on both sides in order for our expertise to be acknowledged and for us to learn anything.

Jul 13, 11 10:27 am  · 
 · 

Saying Yamasaki didn't know better in 1950 is pish-posh for 3 main reasons:

1. The garden city movement dealt with many of the same issues
2. There was quite a bit of established public housing and public housing types already in use particularly in New York and London
3. There had been some investigations already regarding the effects of the visual arts on the psyche

 

Garden city:

There are two main themes relevant to this issue particularly present in various books (Howard, Sennett et al) regarding the utopian nature of garden cities— access to light and air promotes health and crowding leads to various unpleasantries such as crime and disease.

One main distinction made here is the avoidance of pauperism. The old city and it's associated slums were seen to encourage pauperism— a condition as defined as being reliant on government assistance and to be a member of the working poor.

The idea with housing projects from this era was that they could disrupt this cycle through divorcing the pauper from their ideal environment, moving them to a new location and provide them with a more 'suitable' home that would encourage them to be 'productive' members of society.

 

Public housing already in existence:

London, in particular, has had a history of public housing and public welfare projects that extend all the way back to the 12th-century. There were principally two types of public housing:

The almshouse:
The almshouse was typically a small house, provided by the church or government, given to people typically incapable of working (elderly, children, widows). It was more or less nothing significantly different than other housing types in a given location. But the difference with almshouses was that they typically were created to give a sense of dignity and independence towards their residences.

The workhouse (better known as the poor house):
After the Protestant Reformation, charity for charity's sake was more or less viewed as a sin. Protestant beliefs in England often tied hard work with piousness. And this idea of life as living suffering towards God took charitable housing projects to a very dark place in a matter of a century or two.

The workhouse was more-or-less a not-for-profit motel that provided its residence with basic living amenities in exchange for labor. These were relatively successful up until the 19th-century. Between the 1820s to the 1850s, budgets were tightened on workhouses and they started becoming exceptionally plain and relatively devoid of humanity.

By the 1850s, these houses began imposing various rules from behavior to aesthetic on their residents. If it looks like a prison, if it acts like a prison and you must dress up as a prisoner... it probably is a prison. The reform, passed in 1834, on workhouses heavily criticized their use of architecture as they believed providing these individuals with respectable architecture only made them more inclined to be criminals, paupers and other untouchables.

 

Visual arts on the psyche

This one, oddly enough, was borne from architecture. At the time, it was widely believed that the decorative arts were causing poverty due to their relatively low output and non-industrialized production.

Adolf Loos, Austrian-Hungarian architect, as you all know wrote an essay titled Ornament and Crime that railed the value of added ornamentation as something that suppressed the masses and made society as a whole incapable of moving forward with technology. Much of Loos thinking was not entirely original either as the principal idea of aesthetics, their creation and employment was something that was also heralded by the Arts and Crafts movement.

What Loos and the Arts and Crafts movement failed to understand was that the decorative arts was what was keeping many of the cities in the U.S., Germany, the U.K. and France financially alive during this time period. As we see the movement away from and the collapse of the decorative arts in the coming decade followed by World War I, industry in much of Europe and the United States was pretty much lost forever and the modernist promise failed to provide the jobs that the decorative arts had supplied.

Jul 13, 11 12:33 pm  · 
 · 

The only reason I particularly brought any of this up is that architecture is perfectly fine with making the claim, whether it is valid or not, that architecture can effect people on both physical and emotional levels positively.

But if architecture can elate, improve or restore its users ...

... it can also depress, injure and cause otherwise malaise to its users.

And most of us know, or should know, that Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design that it is an actual 'effective' strategy of controlling behavior when it comes to architecture and urban planning.

CPTED also has the unfortunate side-effect of making people feel anxious, uncomfortable and otherwise stressed— even a dog trainer can tell you that an anxious animal is the most dangerous animal because their behavior is unpredictable and spastic.

Jul 13, 11 12:54 pm  · 
 · 
Emilio

Oh, I see, Yamasaki was irresponsible because he didn't look at British almshouses and workhouses and didn't read Loos....please.

The USA was the first country to allow planning on the scale of Ville Radieuse to be actually built, and it was through its public housing projects (the USSR may have been doing them, but I doubt that a lot of information as to their results was available).  The design of such projects was cutting edge thinking, through Le Corbusier, but also through practically every architect, planner, politician, critic and anyone else you can think of, and the old inner city, with its close together row houses and crowding, was thought of as a cancer to be cut out (in fact, if you look at the problem of tenement buildings in NY and other cities, the main problems were incredible overcrowding and lack of open space, and lack of basic amenities for each unit, problems which these new housing projects in actually addressed). 

Wrong philosophy? Absolutely, as it turned out, but don't come at me with your moldy references, which are nothing but 20-20 hindsight.  At the time, Yamasaki was doing not only what was cutting edge in planning and design of housing, he, like many others, probably thought he was solving many of the ills of the inner city - as in fact thought LeCorbusier -  and to look at what he did now and see some kind of willfull irresponsibility in his design is a load of caca.  (Again, the problems inherent in those ideas became apparent, in the US at least, in the next couple of decades, as I mentioned in a post above.)

Jul 13, 11 1:04 pm  · 
 · 

The design of such projects was cutting edge thinking. But the fact is it wasn't. It was unchecked futurism gone awry!

Before the Ville Radieuse was even in existence, we have the panopticon in the mid 18th-century. And before the panopticon, there was the quadrangle. And before the quadrangle, the watchtower. And before the tower, the sentinel.

The idea of consolidating power at a central vantage point, through observation, is almost as old as society itself whether it's as literally as the Roman crux or figurative as the Egyptian Eye of Horus. The problem with all of these plans is that they never work or the efficacy has a limited lifespan as people outsmart the system.

The reason for the moldy references was primarily that Toasteroven said that Yamasaki's work predated the modern criticisms (from people like William Whyte and Jane Jacobs) that either directly show or hypothesize that projects like Pruitt-Igoe don't work.

While you right that these were never tried on a scale of this size, projects similar to this have been tried on smaller scales and those projects failed just as horribly as Pruitt-Igoe. So, there were precedents. And not only were there precedents architecturally, there were planning and management precedents as well.

And the scale here is important, too. We're talking about a project that costs, in 2011 dollars, $303,000,000. That's a staggering $105,000 a unit. Nearly double the cost of an average middle-class single-family home in 1950.

So, could have or should have Yamasaki known better? Yes. Were there precedents? Yes. Were there precedents that ran contrary to popular architectural beliefs? Yes. Even one of the founding fathers of the garden city movement, Federick Law Olmstead, never went as far as to recommend entire reconfigurations of cities like this because he understood that domination and institutionalization was inefficient and expensive compared to the alternatives.

He believed people should have access to sanitation and nature. Know why? Because people in that time believed that pollution caused disease [miasma theory of disease]. This idea persisted until even after it was disputed by germ theory of disease but the idea behind sanitation lead many to discover that germs caused disease and by providing adequate drainage and sewerage would prevent most widely known diseases.

So, the whole idea behind fresh air and access to sunlight was already hogwash before Le Corbusier even recommended it.

Jul 13, 11 2:17 pm  · 
 · 
toasteroven

st. louis lost half it's population between 1950 and 1970.  the main problem this project was supposed to help resolve - urban overcrowding, was circumvented by a massive decrease in population.  are you saying that if the designers would have only designed a garden suburb they could have somehow stemmed the tide of suburbanization and all the problems associated with urban decline and high long-term vacancy?

 

are modernist public housing projects the reason we have strip malls and mcmansions?

Jul 13, 11 2:55 pm  · 
 · 
Emilio

Good God, this is wearying....you know what, you're right, you convinced me, Yamasaki should have known the complete history of every housing project in the history of mankind and stepped away from the project, being able to predict that it would become hell on earth for its residents and would meet the wrecker's ball in 22 years.  And the Twin Towers are his fault too, he should have been able to predict that with that height of course people would want to run planes into them...the irresponsible creep.

Jul 13, 11 3:14 pm  · 
 · 

Block this user


Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?

Archinect


This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.

  • ×Search in: