Do we think of the city we live in as our home? Rooms and hallways constitute what most of us think as a home and were we to think of a city as our home the corollary might be squares and streets. But how many of us do? It is more likely that we think of a city as a home base, a marketplace of relationships and acquisitions, an environment in which we go about our business of work and play. Our perpetual transience, mechanized mobility and the geographic extent of the environments in which we daily circulate hardly encourages the kind of intimacy we attach to our home.
Reyner Banham, an Englishman, landed in Los Angeles in the 1960s and in 1971 published his appreciation of a city he considered our “post urban” future. Banham is of a particular kind of transplanted European or East Coast ex-pat who projects onto California the fantasy of a clean slate, the promise of release from traditional western culture and its moribund cities. “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” described environments—the beach, flats, freeways, and hills. Banham celebrates the wide-open geography, the physical and (supposed) cultural freedom of Los Angeles which while it had buildings was not defined physically or otherwise by them.
Michael Dennis, a native Texan and Professor Emeritus at the MIT School of Architecture and Urban Design began thinking about cities in Europe around the same time that Banham arrived in Los Angeles. He lived in Italy and Greece for five years beginning in 1962 and arrived at Cornell University in 1968 where Colin Rowe, an Englishman, had in 1963 established its program in urban design. In the moment that Steve and I were in architecture school in the early 1980s, Michael and a few of his colleagues from Cornell were there. That moment turned out to be an inflection point in our trajectory as students and practitioners.
In Michael’s most recent book “Architecture and the City” he makes a simple argument, one that took decades to distill with clarity and confidence: a city is more than an environment. The architecture of a city is its architecture. It is made up of buildings of a height mostly scalable on foot and so compactly arranged that they merge into one another. Only special buildings stand apart and there are few. The spaces between accreted buildings (blocks) and the streets that connect them are like rooms and hallways—a home—navigable on foot. Anything less is not a city.
Wait, what? LA is a city. New York is a city. What about Salt Lake, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta? These are places where people feel at home, they do not look anything like what Michael describes, we call them cities and here chronology (less so geography) is key. These places would be unrecognizable to anyone alive in the first half of this nation’s existence, the pre-mechanized era, and only to those of the latter half, the industrial and post- industrial eras.
I grew up in the 1960s in a small town that became a suburb of San Francisco by the time I left. I, like 99.9% of Americans, had never experienced a piazza (town square) or vicolo (narrow pedestrian street) until I landed in Florence while in college in 1976 and then studied it and other “traditional” cities in architecture school shortly thereafter. I used to joke it took me about an afternoon to realize that a piazza is a good thing.
As Californians, Steve and I are thankfully free of the understandably distressing associations harbored by many of those from those European cities with their history of wars, plagues, stultifying traditions, suffocating tourism and bad plumbing. And therefore, as unlikely as it is in California in our lifetime that the model of the city that Michael Dennis describes will materialize, we readily, dispassionately accept that it is on balance still a better way—physiologically, psychologically, sociologically and environmentally -- than any other in which to arrange how we live.
If even only book-learned and sporadically experienced (and mostly while in school or on vacation), it is nevertheless self-evident to us that cities that were built in the 4,900 years prior to the last 100 are neither irrelevant nor quaint and our regard for them neither nostalgic nor romantic. It is possible, especially as Californians, to disassociate the cultural baggage from what are objectively sound principles earned over millennia of experience and it is for this reason that we prefer the word “experience” over “tradition.”
The Los Angeles of the 1960s is unrecognizable today. It bears witness to Banham’s romanticism and the unsustainability of the vision he promoted. We will someday mature in our relationship with our machines and our technology and we look forward to the day when we apply them to improve and innovate time-honored and hard- won practices of city planning and urban design toward the creation of cities that look and work like home. Meanwhile, as practicing architects, we will not wait for just the right circumstances nor will we surrender to our circumstances or dwell on semantics. We will instead, in the place we call home, put into practice those principles however illusive or illusory the results.