Veritas et Venustas

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly - Chelsea Barracks Update

The Good: "Local residents will get a chance of a decent scheme that sticks to the planners’ brief and feels like Chelsea instead of anywhere in the world. They should by rights get a say in what happens."

The Bad: "The ersatz traditional village [of Poundbury] is as phoney as a film set. It isn’t saying much that it is superior to the suburban developments of mass housebuilders. But its creepy atmosphere of the retired middle classes living in pseudo-peasant cottages has been widely mocked and reviled by architects." [emphasis mine, Gough thinks only the opinions of architects count]

Despite what Gough says, 9 out of 10 people who haven't been brainwashed by architecture school who visit Poundbury will find it good - it has been enormously popular. Trying to get his Chelsea Barracks plan passed, Richard Rogers tried to circumvent the public process, because the public have shown 2 to 1 that they don't like it.

And despite what Gough says, after the initial barrage in the press against Charles, regular journalists showed that it was Rogers' flouting of the planning requirements, rather than Charles's efforts, which led to Rogers' dismissal.

The Ugly

A Real Road Diet

DOT's would have us think you reduce traffic by building bigger roads. That's like "reducing weight" by buying bigger belts.

from Streetsblog Networks tweets

"You're not an environmentalist if you're also a NIMBY."

"As both Berkeley and Oakland debate their downtown plans, there is growing recognition that the fight against global warming requires greater urban density.

Global warming is changing far more than just the climate. It's altering the way environmentalists view development...."

East Bay Express

Baron Rogers: Let's not squabble about style (but New Urbanism is "tawdry pastiche").

AFTER THE PRESIDENT of the Royal Institute of British Architects promoted New Urbanism for England in 2004, Richard Rogers wrote to the Guardian,

Riba president George Ferguson is right to say we must put urban studies at the heart of the urban renaissance.... Since my Reith Lectures in 1995, I have maintained that the only sustainable urban form is the compact, multi-centred city, which mixes living, work and play, and benefits from well-connected, well-designed public spaces and buildings and environmental responsibility....

But these principles are not the sole preserve of "new urbanism". There is little new in this movement except for its blending of well-established urban design principles with a romantic neoclassical style that often tumbles into tawdry pastiche. This is no leap forward in the 21st century.

Instead of squabbling about style, [emphasis mine] we should focus on the need to restructure our professional education. Too many planners are still ignorant of how buildings and spaces interact in three dimensions, while many architects remain oblivious to communities, land values or land uses.

Architecture, landscape and planning should be studied together in a single undergraduate degree after which graduates would specialise. This approach works well in many other European countries and would create a holistic approach to the design of the urban environment and give us a common language.

Of course when he says there "is little new in this movement except for its blending of well-established urban design principles with a romantic neoclassical style that often tumbles into tawdry pastiche" he is squabbling about style.

In other words, cities may have any style they want, as long as it's modern, by which he means we may follow the precedents of 1920, if they express technology, but not the precedents of 1910, which express human values rather than technological ones. And somehow that will be a "leap forward into the 21st century."

On the other hand, show me a building by Rogers that is not a civic building that follows the "well-established" principles of urban design. I exclude the civic buildings, because they can be a object buildings that cry "look at me," like the popular Musée Beaubourg. But the Lloyd's tower, for example, should not. And Rogers's much-discussed Chelsea Barracks plan is a classic anti-urban Modernist scheme.

I'm sure that Rogers does know the difference between a good street and a bad one. He lives, after all, in a Georgian house on what I'm told is a beautiful street (which reminds me of this story about Rem Koolhaas*). But have any of his buildings made a street better?

V&V: One Problem With Richard Rogers's Architecture Is That It Isn't Really "New"

* From an interview in Der Spiegel, called "Evil Can Also Be Beautiful":

SPIEGEL: Some people say that if architects had to live in their own buildings, cities would be more attractive today.

Koolhaas: Oh, come on now, that's really trivial.

SPIEGEL: Where do you live?

Koolhaas: That's unimportant. It's less a question of architecture than of finances.

SPIEGEL: You're avoiding the question. Where do you live?

Koolhaas: OK, I live in a Victorian apartment building in London.

One Problem With Richard Rogers's Architecture Is That It Isn't Really "New"

ONE SUMMER I was lucky enough to visit Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre and the under-construction Musée Beaubourg designed by Richard Rogers. I wrote about it here. Quoting myself,

Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre (Glass House) is a great house. Chareau designed it in the early 1930s, a time in Paris when Modernism was mainly in the future and its promise was great. By Modernism, I don't mean stylistic elements like flat roofs and glass block, but the promise of technology and even democracy.

When I first went to France 35 years later, it was still, along with many great things, the land of smelly Turkish toilets and unpotable water. But Chareau's bathroom in his first residential design was lyrical, with magical exposed pipes and tubs on display in the middle of the room like great works of art.

I was moved by Chareau's eloquence when I got to visit the house in 1977 as an architecture student. On the same day we saw the ham-fisted poetry of Richard Rogers at the Pompidou Center, still under construction. Rogers gave us a tour, and described a massive indent in a cavernous floor as "the poet's corner." Only a decade or two later, his giant and clumsy exposed pipes on the outside of the Pompidou had to be replaced at great expense. Putting them out in the rain had been a silly idea.

At the Maison de Verre, plumbing and technology were new, and Chareau's design was responsive and inspired. Forty-five years later, Richard Rogers rehash of the same ideas at the Pompidou Center sometimes descended into the insensitive and clichéd. Modernism was a tired ideology.

It would have been more accurate to say that in Rogers's hands Modernism was a tired ideology. Frankly, both Rogers's proclamations in the Battle of Chelsea Barracks and his designs seem heavy-handed and boorish.

Rogers talks about the importance of good urbanism, but his designs for Chelsea and the Lloyd's tower (which like Beaubourg had to be rebuilt at great expense when still new) are anti-urban. He makes object-buildings rather than buildings which make good streets for pedestrians.

The object-oriented site plan for Chelsea is straight out of the Modernism of the 1950s, when Rogers was in school. His emphasis on developing a personal style — with an emphasis on the "new" and "different" — is a fifty-year old cliche. His personal expression of these cliches seems just as tired.

Rogers would like us to think the Battle of Chelsea Barracks is about "style" and "nostalgia," because he's an ideologue who can only see architecture that connects to history and cultural achievements as backwards. But a good urban plan for the Chelsea site would start with the streets and the blocks and then allow the blocks to be filled in by a variety of architects and developers.

The criteria for selecting those architects and builders would be a demonstrated ability to make buildings and places that improve the city. Rogers only seems to be capable of making objects that call attention to their singularity at the expense of the city.

Baron Rogers tries to present these cliched ideas as an expression of our time (another Modernist cliche), and tries to present his ego-driven backroom deals as more democratic than the public dealings of Prince Charles. Charles is a prince, but he is supporting the ideas of the Chelsea Barracks Action Group, and polls show that public opinion is running two to one in his favor (here and here).

Sympathy for Rogers's top-down, back-room dealing is over. It is bottom-up planning of the sort that Charles supports that is new and democratic.

Related Tweets from me @jmassengale:

Despite what the Modernists say, the Battle of Chelsea Barracks is about urbanism and placemaking, not "style" or royal meddling.

Chelsea Barracks: Lord Rogers should design cities the way his wife cooks, with a nod to tradition and taste.

Chelsea Barracks: Baron "Bully Boy" Rogers says he wants an urban design debate with Prince Charles. He doesn't.

London Daily Mail: Lord Rogers is as mad as a hornet - Prince Charles is right to speak out against his barracks project
BD: Richard Rogers vs. Prince Charles
V&V: Lord Rogers, Bully Boy

Memorial Day

US Destroyer Escort (called a "Frigate" in the British Royal Navy)

MY PARENTS were part of Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation. The fall term of his senior year in college, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, my father tried to enlist in the Navy, but had some physical issue for which he was turned down. A few months later the world had changed and he left for the war during the middle of the semester. Harvard gave him and many others their degrees anyway.*

Dad was ready for war, but the Navy gave him a Sub Chaser and sent him to Miami. He was fired on once, by an American plane. He dropped depth charges once, but no sub surfaced. Meanwhile, my mother lived on Miami Beach, which must have had a long hot summer before there was much air conditioning. But obviously it was a much more comfortable life than most of their friends and contemporaries were having, even though it wasn't what my father had tried to volunteer for.

After a year or so, Dad was given command of a destroyer escort in the North Atlantic and told to report to his new Admiral in Boston. When he got there, he was told the Admiral's location was top secret and to report back the next day. After a few days of the same, a Chief Petty Office took pity on him and told him he might have better luck if he asked for the Admiral at the Philadelphia Naval Yard.

In Philadelphia he discovered that the Admiral's flagship was steaming up the Delaware to attend the Army-Navy football game. He also found out that the Navy had no more destroyer escort commands. That was probably lucky for the unborn me, because their duty was to escort the Merchant Marine across the North Atlantic, out on the flank, where they were frequently sunk in the freezing waters.

Instead, he was assigned to teach navigation at Notre Dame, which for the duration of the war was a naval college. My mother had cousins in South Bend, and they had a nice life, meeting people like Mrs. Studebaker, which probably made my father feel a little guilty. Like many of my contemporaries, I subsequently grew up with military references like "Don't act like a marine" – which means, "You're in the way" – and RHIP (Rank Has Its Privileges).

The schools where I've taught Classical Architecture and New Urbanism are Miami and the University of Notre Dame (the first two places to teach these). I was teaching at Miami when my mother died, and shortly afterwards I wrote a book review for the Wall Street Journal about a great Miami house. A professor at Miami lent me some vintage postcards with views of Vizcaya. One had been sent from Miami to Boston during the war. The card was unsigned, but I swear the handwriting was my mother's.

* Sixty years later, Tom Brokaw came and spoke at the Memorial Service for the Class. My father was dead by that time, but my mother and I were there. It reminded me of his 25th Reunion, when the Class was at a Boston Pops performance and the orchestra started playing The Stars and Stripes Forever. One of the wives grabbed a flag and started marching around Symphony Hall, to the cheers of everyone else. Soon there was a line of at least 200 marching around the hall.

Those were the parents of my friends. They were patriotic, hard-working, uncomplaining and honest.

My father, a Midwesterner, went on to practice corporate law in New York. At the end of his life in 1988, even though Lou Gehrig's Disease kept him out of the office, he made more money than he ever had before, because the nature of Wall Street was transformed by Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham. Suddenly, all the younger partners (my generation) thought they were supposed to be rich. Thirty years later we have the failure of Bear Stearns, the failure of mortgage-backed securities, and the biggest recession since the Depression in which my father grew up. He would be rather disgusted, I imagine.

Subchasers in Miami during WWII (from subchaser.org)

Live from New York - Starchitecture at Lincoln Center

Renovated lobby at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center

This is an iPhone photo of one of the hottest things in architecture, taken a few minutes ago in the renovated main lobby at Alice Tully Hall. It helped put its designers in Time's Top 100 Poobah list of 2009. But the experience of the building is a big "So what?"

The interest of the building is primarily intellectual, according to the rules of "autonomous architecture" taught at places like Columbia and Princeton. I don't know the rules and don't care about them, because they fail to produce what I think we need now, namely good public spaces and places.

Visiting it, I don't find it beautiful, exciting, comfortable or even uncomfortable. The people sitting in the cafe seem simply bored, unlike the animated crowd in a Starbucks one block away. The experience makes me think of a Starbucks in a glass office building lobby, near my office at Broadway and John Street. That simpler, more ordinary Modernism makes a place that is more comfortable to be in. Part of the problem here is that the architects seem to have no interest or understanding of things like good proportion or human scale that are keys to the experience of place.

Most likely, that's not part of their autonomous architecture. But it is something that humans intuitively respond to.

In the post below, Nothing New Under the Sun, I quote the reactions of a great Beaux-Arts trained architect to Modernism in 1931. Glass was the fashion then, and glass is the fashion now — and somehow we're supposed to think that's new.

But what is new is the intellectualism of the autonomous architecture of today. Its rules, like "twist the building" or "lift up the corner of the building," appeal to the mind that has learned them, rather than to the senses and emotions of the passersby. The rules relate to the esoteric, elitist rules of contemporary Modernist art. But since architecture is a public art that we all participate in (unlike contemporary art, which one can easily ignore by not going in contemporary galleries), that is a problem.

Facing cataclysmic climate change, peak oil and an economy that is the worst since the Great Depression, we need to make sure that what we build does what we need. We need our cities, and we need to make them places where we want to be. If we don't do that, to quote Jane Jacobs, we are in for a Dark Age Ahead. The age of patrons and intellectual follies is over.

And Yadda, Yadda, Yadda...

Charles Is Right About Architects

HE WARNED of a gulf between architects and society. Comments since then by architects and architectural critics show how many couldn't hear what he said, or understand how some of the principles they follow in their profession lead to the degradation of cities and society.

On the whole, journalists have sided with the architects. They heard the mantras of Modernism growing up, and they tend to think that leaders in their field like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster are people who should be listened to when preparing a story. In times of changing paradigms, they're more likely to give respect in their news coverage to the establishment than to the challengers.

More and more, however, we are getting articles like the one I cited by Edward Rothstein, or the one below by Simon Jenkins. Jenkins is a former editor at the Times and the Economist who sees that there is a good deal of common sense in what Charles (and New Urbanists) say. He is someone who believes what he sees and experiences rather than accepting the pronouncements of the establishment leaders.

Charles should stick to his guns. The carbuncle crew are still hard at work
Simon Jenkins, guardian.co.uk,Thursday 14 May 2009 21.00 BST
The glass boxes, blobs and phalluses thrown up now by architects show little has changed since the prince's 1984 speech

So is it over? The culture war between the Prince of Wales and the doyens of modern architecture has been running for a quarter century. It was supposedly ended on Tuesday night at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London where the massed ranks of the profession sat in dark suits and politely applauded.

The prince's 1984 "carbuncle" speech depicted architects as self-obsessed popinjays strutting the streets of Britain, smashing and sneering at anything traditional and erecting cheapjack glass and steel memorials to their egos. It caught a public mood, not just for who he was but for what he said. It also struck a professional nerve. Those who consider themselves artists hate their work being discussed (as opposed to adored) by laymen, even when the work is as public as architecture. Architects see themselves as surgeons gathered round the body of the urban environment, unquestioned in their authority over it.

The shamelessness of the prince's attack sustained decades of visceral hatred. Architects insulted him as archaic, luddite, whimsical, lost in translation from the middle ages. They seldom addressed his argument but claimed that he had lost them fees, and without being elected. He replied, in as many words, that they had lost him whole cities without being elected.

The prince must be the last public figure to take architecture seriously. Perhaps that was why the RIBA audience received his half-kiss and make up so warmly. To a profession that often seems interested only in icons and cash – witness magazines such as Architects Journal and Building Design – he ruminates on style, tradition and context. In among the herbivore organics and ­holistics, he is clearly plugged into a public mood.

So is the clash of the titans over? I think not. Tuesday's speech was an attempt to forge a consensus between the prince and those architects who win big public commissions and city centre renewals. The prince duly apologised for having, 25 years ago, "kick-started some kind of style war between classicists and modernists". All he wanted, he said, was to "value the lessons of history", to plead for an architecture of context, of "natural patterns and rhythms … that respected courtesy, consideration and good manners".

I cannot see why the prince should apologise. His carbuncle speech was the call (among others) that saved Trafalgar Square from not one but two frigid glass boxes, and spurred a genuine debate about urban design, the better for being often bad-tempered. He made the British talk about beauty, a subject they hate. Architects, like Tate artists, revel in the barren thesis that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and the RIBA). It is not. It is in the eye of everyman.

The debate has never died. It is kicking dust down at the old barracks site in Chelsea, where a proposed cluster of towers in a park by Lord Rogers, in the style of postwar Roehampton, is pitted against a terrace by Quinlan Terry in the even older style of Wren. In support of the latter, the "unelected" prince has written to the unelected owner of the site, the Qatari royal family, while the unelected architects have written to the unelected press. Never has the concept of franchise been so abused.

Despite a plea for a few joint seminars, a hopeless gulf still separates the prince's argument from that of the modernists. The best line on Tuesday was from the RIBA's president, Sunand Prasad, that his profession had put behind it the postwar obsession with ugliness, traffic and grandiose planning as so much "car-bungle". But I see no RIBA truth and reconciliation commission, no inquiry into system-building or deck-access, into traffic separation or street-in-the-sky. Architects who welcomed the destruction of Georgian and Victorian neighbourhoods even tried recently to get the "brutalist" Robin Hood estate in east London preserved, as one of theirs. They know no irony.

The energy-guzzling glass boxes, lumps, blobs and phalluses now emerging from architects' computer programmes show how little has changed. They stand empty in London's Docklands and the City, their cranes waving idly in the wind, like Shelley's trunkless legs of stone. Rogers's latest work, a bling apartment block for the Candy brothers in Knightsbridge – shrieking money – is wildly overbearing for its site. I doubt if today's Westminster planners know what that means.

There is no meeting of mind or eye between such icons and the prince's plea for context and courtesy. There is no meeting of wood, brick and stone with cold steel and plate glass. There is certainly no meeting of skyscraper and curtain wall with Britain's urban vernacular of high-density, low-rise streetscape. It is as if Jane Jacobs, 1960s champion of the privacy and social cohesion of the city street, had never written.

The prince is unfair in appearing to blame architects alone. All are subject to planning and thus to a political process. It is not architects who should be blamed for the carbon-wasting destruction of acres of central Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere. The current Pathfinder demolitions in the Midlands and north, championed by Yvette Cooper as housing minister, were the result not of architects (though they were eager consultants) but of too much public money and political arrogance.

Nor can the prince, whose constitutional power is zero, be said to "abuse his position" in commenting on style. He commands publicity, but so do architects, whose peerages, publicists and influential access have been deployed against the prince. As adviser to the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, Rogers vigorously fuelled the poor man's obsession with architectural virility. Like Lord Foster, he leaves the prince far behind as a master lobbyist.

Provincial city fathers are often persuaded that a crazy skyscraper will somehow bring life to miles of run-down derelict land, yet the public votes for a quite different architecture when allowed to choose for itself. On the executive estates beloved of John Prescott as planning minister, they crave neo-Georgian, neo-Tudor, neo-traditional. They are derided by richer professionals who can afford the real thing for opting for "pastiche", yet they are seeking within their price range precisely the qualities espoused by the prince. Democracy is about choice. If architects were democrats, they would be with the prince.

Many modern designers have worked well within the rhythm of existing city streets, from Terry Farrell's Covent Garden triangle to Richard McCormack's new BBC. Most do not merit naming, because their essence is discretion not ostentation. It is big money that seems to drives architects crazy, as it does bankers and politicians.

The solution lies, as always, in debate and transparency. I am not aware of any choice of design being offered for the Chelsea barracks site to the public bodies which discuss it? Yet these are not esoteric games for drawing-room argument. They are the public realm.

We can avert our eyes from most art forms, but not from modern architecture. Too much of it has devastated Britain's cities, making too many mistakes for the RIBA's Prasad to dismiss them as history. The profession's refusal ever to confront its past remains a scandal. It is not for the prince to make his peace with architecture. It is for architecture to make its peace with people.

Who's to blame?

An excellent article in this week's New Yorker talks about the our current financial state:

This crisis is the culmination of events and trends reaching back, depending on your perspective, four, seven, seventeen, twenty-two, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, sixty-five, or a hundred and two years. The subprime-mortgage meltdown, the subsequent collapse of the wider real estate market and then the securities based on real estate, and of the firms and funds holding those securities, and of the companies selling insurance against the failure of those firms, and, potentially, of the insurers' counterparties, and so on: you could say that all this is merely the finale to a multi-decade saga set on Wall Street and Main Street, in Washington, Riyadh, and Tokyo. The causes are technological, mathematical, cultural, demographic, financial, economic, behavioral, legal, and political. Among the dozens of contributors and culprits, real or perceived, are the personal computer, the abandonment of the gold standard, the abandonment of Glass-Steagall, the end of fixed commissions, the ratings agencies, mortgage-backed securities, securitization in general, credit derivatives, credit-default swaps, Wall Street partnerships going public, the League of Nations, Bretton Woods, Basel II, CNBC, the S.E.C., disintermediation, overcompensation, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, Phil Gramm and Jim Leach, Alan Greenspan, black swans, red tape, deregulation, outdated regulation, lax enforcement, government pressure to lower lending standards, predatory lending, mark-to-market accounting, hedge funds, private-equity firms, modern finance theory, risk models, "quants," corporate boards, the baby boomers, flat-screen televisions, and an indulgent, undereducated populace. All these factors, very few of them mutually exclusive, conspired to make possible skyrocketing leverage, misperceived risk, and spectacular risk.

It's interesting how little importance it gives to peak oil and sprawl, although it certainly talks about real estate and mortgages.

Cheap mortgages and cheap oil inspired many to "drive to price" and buy their first house or their first McMansion. When hit by the double whammy of high oil prices and exploding mortgages, they could no longer afford their houses. And it happened so quickly that before they could sell their exurban house it was worth less than they had paid for it, because so many found themselves needing to sell. Check out foreclosure maps and you'll see that they're in exurbia.

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