Novelty

Click here or on the photo to enlarge.

Buildings that lean! Buildings on stilts! Did grown men make these things!?! (Click here or on the photo to enlarge — the image above is too small to see it well.)

The Nero-Modernism that dominates academia and the architectural press wants novelty. Starchitects make the grade because they make building shapes no one has ever seen before. Obvious question: Why has no one seen these forms before? Could it be because they're ridiculous?

Novelty for its own sake, also known as "unprecedented reality," is obviously hard to sustain. And it suspends our ability to judge how to improve the designs because the choices are so arbitrary. Would the buildings above be better if they leaned 96 degrees instead of 97 degrees?

Most importantly, they focus on the "genius" of the designer instead of the good of the user, or the good of the community and the city.

The image on the left is from a Jersey City project I worked on for Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (drawing by Michael Morrissey). It shows a traditional, comfortable city street terminated by the vista of the Statue of Liberty. The design starts with the making of that street and the other streets and squares that form the public realm of the city. Next, the building types — rowhouses, apartment buildings, civic buildings — are used to make the walls that shape the public realm. The development of the design consists of juggling the streets and squares, the city blocks, the buildings that make the city blocks, and the "units" in the buildings until they all work well.

The familiar (and beautiful, I think) buildings in the drawing may or may not be what eventually gets built. What's important is that they will be the type portrayed (we call it "typology"), and that they will follow the urban principles of the design.

The image on the right shows what is important to the designer: the image and the Wow Factor. Novelty, in other words. Look at the way Daniel Libeskind is fighting to maintain the precise angles on the tops of the massive, banal, mirror-glass office buildings planned for the World Trade Center. The buildings will be bad, and no one but Libeskind will care that the tops are angled at precisely 4.2 degrees.

In the first image, the city and the citizen are more important than the individual buildings. In the second, the image and the Starchitect are what counts. Frankly, it looks like a human wasteland.