Have Contemporary Architects Forgotten About Urban Design?
Though criticized for their flawed vision, Modernist architects tried to engage and improve the broader city -- something some say their contemporary counterparts have completely neglected to address.
Modernist architects, who reigned from the middle of the 20th century into the 1970s, roughly, created no shortage of stirring buildings. But their attempts to rewrite the rules of the modern city were about as successful as the Hindenburg, with which modernism shared German roots.
The nadir -- and architects are really sick of this story by now -- was the attempt by American cities to remake slums according to the principles of such leading modernists as Le Corbusier: Crisp high-rise housing projects sprouting out of green yards announced a new era in America's treatment of its poor. Yet by the late '60s these buildings were widely seen as disasters -- hyperconcentrated loci of crime and despair
Still, give architects like Le Corbusier and Yamasaki points for trying, suggests the eminent sociologist Nathan Glazer in his new book, "From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City" (Princeton).
By contrast, today's architects create stirring additions to cityscapes -- like Boston's new Institute of Contemporary Art, designed by the firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, or Frank Gehry's Stata Center at MIT -- but shy from a broader engagement with cities.
"You wouldn't want a city made up of buildings by Gehry, [Rem] Koolhaas, or [Daniel] Libeskind," Glazer says in an interview, invoking three of today's leading-light architects. "That would be a World's Fair. It wouldn't be a city."
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Glazer On New Urbanism
"Glazer finds it [New Urbanism] promising but of limited use outside certain low-rise neighborhoods."
Glazer is wrong about that. One of the earliest New Urbanist projects (covered in Peter Katz's The New Urbanism) was a relatively high density proposal in Brooklyn, which was not build because of NIMBY opposition. More recently, Duany has proposed a high-density project in (as I remember) Jersey City, and Duany's transect ranges from low density to high density.
A defining features of New Urbanism is a continuous street system with small blocks and buildings oriented to the sidewalk, which applies in cities as well as suburbs. It is just the opposite of conventional modernist planning, with buildings in superblocks turning their backs to the street, which also was applied to cities as well as to suburbs.
(But Glazer is very right to say that a city designed by starchitects would be a world's fair rather than a city. I am glad to see someone else realizes that the starchitects are producing theme-park architecture.)
Charles Siegel