extra complexities to the tasks of the architectural
and planning professionals that rarely existed in the
work of their British counterparts. But even without
the
race factor, it took a long while for these profes-
sionals to appreciate the disparity between initially
good intentions and terrible results. One reaction to
these urban injustices was a groundswell of radical
community activism by younger designers. In America,
‘advocacy planning’ opened a new revolutionary
paradigm of democratic populism for architects and
planners, with young professionals directly serving
small community-based organizations from store-
front offices. Using their expertise and idealism, they
helped communities oppose government bureau-
cracy, often by direct political confrontation rather
than by alternative design work. In Britain a very
similar phenomenon
developed under the rubric
‘community architecture’.
In graduate school in the late 1960s in England,
one of the authors became immersed in community
architecture, and attempted to complete his urban
design studies by means of community activism in an
underprivileged city neighborhood. His professors
informed him that this kind of work did not consti-
tute urban design; if he wanted to graduate, he
should get down to some ‘real design.’ Retiring his
activism to evenings and weekends, the author duly
produced a half-hearted urban megastructure that
obligingly obliterated the community to the liking of
his professors. No questions
were posed to him con-
cerning the social consequences of the design.
This pedagogical slant was by no means unusual in
British architectural schools of the period. In this
context, books that criticized modernist doctrine,
such as Jane Jacobs’
The Death and Life of American
Cities
(1962) on a social and planning level, and
Gordon Cullen’s
Townscape
(1961), from an urban
design perspective, were routinely dismissed as flawed.
Jacobs’ book was belittled as being merely the writ-
ings of someone who was not a designer and there-
fore simply didn’t understand architecture and
planning. Her gender was also invoked as another rea-
son to diminish her arguments. Even Lewis Mumford,
a hero of progressive planning in the USA, belittled
her ideas as ‘Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies’ in a
scathing review of
the book in the New Yorker
magazine (Mumford, 1962).
Cullen’s work, based upon subjective visual experi-
ence, was criticized on the grounds that it was too
‘romantic’ and lacked scientific rigor. A similar
charge had been lodged by Le Corbusier in 1929
against Camillo Sitte and his important book
City
Building According to Artistic Principles
published in
1889. Sitte’s book was a closely researched effort to
establish an empirical basis for the aesthetics of public
space in older European cities. Sitte focused on the sen-
sory experience of being in a place, and documented
the plans of hundreds of urban squares in an effort to
distill some defining principles for a spatial order of
pragmatic irregularity rather than the ubiquitous rec-
tangular geometries of nineteenth-century
speculative
urban development.
However, for Le Corbusier irregularity was merely
romantic and shallow picturesqueness, something he
considered a false ambition in urbanism. Writing
in
The City of Tomorrow
, the young Swiss architect
extolled the virtues of orthogonal planning in dogmatic
opposition to Sitte’s carefully studied variety. In his
opinion, picturesqueness was ‘a pleasure which quickly
becomes boring if too frequently gratified,’ and that,
by contrast, ‘the right angle is lawful, it is part of our
determinism, it is obligatory’ (Le Corbusier, 1929:
pp. 210, 21). Le Corbusier
admitted being initially
‘subverted’ by Sitte’s ideas as a younger man before
returning to the true path of reason. In the Foreword
to
The City of Tomorrow
Le Corbusier wrote:
I read Camillo Sitte, the Viennese writer, and was
affected by his insidious pleas in the direction of
picturesque town planning. Sitte’s demonstrations
were clever, his theories seemed adequate; they
were based on the past, and in fact WERE the
past, but a sentimental past on a small and pretty
scale, like the little wayside flowers. His past
was not
that of the great periods, it was essentially
one of compromise. Sitte’s eloquence (turned)
architecture away, in the most absurd fashion, from
its proper path … When in 1922 … I made my
panorama of a City of Three Million Inhabitants,
I relied only on the paths of pure reason … .
(Le Corbusier; 1929: p. xxv)
Despite decades of intellectual antipathy towards
experiential urbanism, always dubbed picturesque
and romantic by its opponents, as if these were some-
how irredeemably negative traits, the more human-
istic ideas and the vocabulary of human-scaled spaces
contained in that approach
gradually began to win
converts among the design and planning professions
during the early 1970s. In Britain, Garden City style
planning had continued through the New Town pro-
gram after World War II, and the environments in
these new ‘garden cities’ were much more popular
with the public than the architectural heroics of
urban redevelopment. The ‘picturesque’ revival
CHAPTER ONE
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PARADIGMS LOST AND FOUND
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