GEOG 340: Day 17 Presentations

Housekeeping Items Today we will finish off Katie and my questions. If either Zane or Jesse are ready we will hear from them, and then We will watch at least part of “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” by William H. Whyte, the famous path-breaking American sociologist.

Architectural Traditions Neo-Classical Design. One could argue that neo-classical design sought to impose a moral order. I would say, rather, it sought to legitimize the new bourgeois ruling class. Whatever its functions, at least it was beautiful. This overlapped the Beaux Arts style on display at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 as part of an emerging City Beautiful movement which influenced the design of American cities until the rise of the automobile and the emergence of the ‘City Efficient’ movement. In the late 1800s, the technology to build skyscrapers had also emerged and was being acted upon.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, MICH,82-DETRO,22- Source: Wikipedia

Architectural Traditions This period coincided loosely with the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements, inspired by William Morris, which effected a simpler, more vernacular style. This was soon replaced by early modernism, led by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and, in Europe, the Bauhaus movement, featuring Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe..

Architectural Traditions Le Corbusier (“crow-like”) in French was a radical modernist who wanted to demolish the historic sections of Paris and replace them with a few tall skyscrapers and freeways, and to regiment everything, making everything a subject for standardization and mass production..

Architectural Traditions Whereas Le Corbusier wanted extreme alienated density, F.L. Wright wanted each family to have a home on its own 5-acre home- stead. As indicated by his design for Falling Waters, his architecture was more in tune with nature..

Architectural Traditions Minoru Yamasaki, the architect behind the Twin Towers of 9/11 fame, designed the housing project in St. Louis, Pruitt- Igoe, that proved so dysfunctional that it eventually had to be dynamited..

Architectural Traditions Some have seen the New Urbanism that has emerged in the last thirty years as merely nostalgia for the past – bland, elitist, and not actually reducing car dependence or promoting walking (not entirely true)..

Architectural Traditions Tendency in the U.S. towards “homeless- proofing” (Mike Davis’ ‘bum-proof seats’) and “skate-boarding-proof” public infrastructure and creating more gated communities. Though other architectural traditions have come in, modern- ism is still dominant in many ways..

The Characteristics of Modern Architecture Functionalism- support (along with planners) for single-use zoning and for buildings with minimal ornamentation. Belief that “form should follow function.”

The Characteristics of Modern Architecture Formalism- ‘magazine cover’ approach to buildings (emphasis on formal design, sometimes to the detriment of function). Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao For further examples, see ggreatest-modern-architects-of-our-time/

The Characteristics of Modern Architecture Elitism- Le Corbusier was of the opinion that city planning was altogether “too important to be left to the citizens” – that architects and other experts had to decide.

The Characteristics of Modern Architecture Economism- the belief (quite evident in Nanaimo) that the most important consideration is economic profitability. Where is the beauty in the modernist equation?

Palimpsest “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing.” In North America and increasingly China, the heritage of cities is being wiped out, and there is no longer any layering of different historical periods, though this is not uniform. Continuity with the past is part of what makes our lives meaningful; it gives us a context into which to set future actions, and a sense of place. In Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, this sense of continuity still largely present. European cities, in some cities even rebuilt their historic cores exactly as they had been after the devastation of World War II.

Palimpsest It can even consist of something as ‘trivial’ as the image of a 1920s ad that is revealed on a building when the building next to it is demolished.

The built environment and values The built environment codes messages about what society values – materialistic consumption, spirituality, individual competition, social solidarity, functionality, beauty, making money, the needs of cars, the needs of people, the grandeur of society’s rulers (be they aristocratic, plutocratic, or ideologically correct), the subordination of the individual to absolute authority, or the respect we accord to or don’t accord to nature. On this latter point, see the film in the VIU Library: “Biophilic Design.” We also need charm.. To inspire care, places must – according to William Howard Kunstler – possess charm: “The word charm may seem fussy, trivial, vague. I use it to mean explicitly that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about. It is not a trivial matter, for we are presently suffering on a massive scale the social consequences of living in places that are not worth caring about. Charm is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation between private space and public space, or the sacred and the workaday, or the interplay of space...”

The built environment and values

Cities of the Future?