"It Takes A Village, But We Ain't Got One"

What a strange day in the news. The New York Post ("It Takes A Village") and the New York Times ("Critic's Notebook: Let the Design Sprint Begin") both reported on the architectural plans announced yesterday as part of New York City's bid to host the 2012 Olympics.

What's so strange about that? All of the plans show the current architectural fashion for urban design that forgets everything New Yorker Jane Jacobs ever taught us about "urban removal" four decades ago in her great book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. We're right back to where we were when Starchitects like Jim Stirling were building award-winning housing projects in Britain and America which became such behavioral sinkholes that they were dynamited within a few years of their construction.

In St. Louis, we had award-winning Pruitt-Igoe. In Britain, the housing authorities had so many complaints about Stirling's design that until they dynamited it, they used the housing like solitary confinement for their worst tenants.

Early Modernists had the virtue of ignorance and good intentions on their side. Not being able to build their designs for the middle class, they thought they would improve the lives of the poor by bringing Modernism to them. In retrospect, we can see this was experimenting on the the poor, not completely different than the the Russian radiation studies carried out on unsuspecting victims, or the American military’s secret program of giving LSD to enlisted men to see what happened. Modernist theories of architecture and urbanism were equally untested.

Today, after Pruitt-Igoe and Jane Jacobs, architects can't pretend to have the virtuous ideals of the early Modernists. They know what urban and social disasters these Megastructure and Towers in the Park schemes were. Yet the inhuman, alienating spaces of the schemes have to be seen to be believed - there's a slide show for each scheme at http://www.nyc2012.net/village_finalists/

Ironically, the Times had a long story the same day on Thomas Gordon Smith, the Classical architect and educator who transformed the architecture school at the University of Notre Dame into a center of Classical design.

Make no mistake, we’re talking about more than style.

Forget about the architectural fashion victim ideas like the "transparent" tower that every other so-called avante-garde seems to be using these days, including in the Olympic Villages and at Ground Zero (N.B., there is no such thing as a transparent tower – the towers have things inside of them like furniture, curtains, people, rooms, walls and floors). As Jacobs and fellow New Yorker Holly White showed decades ago, there are spaces that make us feel good and spaces that don’t work. And it is the type that don’t work that the fashionistas at work in the Olympic Villages are scurrilously reviving. While New York City is full of Modernist buildings which work in the city with no problem.

And for his part, Thomas Gordon Smith is also talking about something deeper than style. To quote the Times,

His specialty is quietly battling trends. While high culture often demands the shock of the new, and mainstream home builders erect endless variations on faux traditional, he builds houses, civic buildings and the occasional monastery with the irony-free rigor of an ancient.

Talking about the Ground Zero competition (but his comments apply equally to the Olympic Village schemes), "New York could use more of neo-Classicism's ‘stability, balance and harmony,’" Smith said.

That's the opposite of what the congenitally unhappy author of the Times' "Critic's Notebook" is usually looking for. He's famous for saying on a Charlie Rose program about museum architecture that what sets a good museum apart from the rest is a place for illicit sex.

Smith is all about trying to use timeless values, while Muschamp and his favorites at the Olympic Village are trying to relieve their tedium and achieve "unprecedented reality" and esoteric architecture. The irony is that their "unprecedented" work in "the spirit of our time," far from timeless, is firmly rooted in the Modernism of the 1940s and 50s.

It's easy to make the argument that they, not Smith and the Classicists, are the historicists.