Now that the World Trade Center towers are gone, will Tony Soprano still glance at them in his side-view mirror as he drives home on the New Jersey Turnpike? Or will The Sopranos' producers have him looking back at the now denuded skyline of Manhattan--at the squat residential towers of Battery Park City, all dressed up in frills and pink veneer?
Not likely. The twin towers were that rare entity in the Americanarchitectural fabric: a good, perhaps even a great, work of architecture.Everyone knows that few of the other towers on the southwestern tip of Manhattanare any match for what was lost. The towers' destruction has brought homesomething that perhaps had not been so obvious before: how critically importantbuildings are not only to our aesthetic sensibilities but also to our public andcommunal lives.
Minoru Yamasaki's soaring World Trade Center towers, finished in 1973, were theindisputable icon--sometimes beloved, sometimes vilified, but alwaysunavoidable--of America's greatest metropolis: The glinting, thin, verticalaluminum struts of the structural facade guided the eye seamlessly skyward, whileat ground level the towers' coupling made a noble (if imperfect) plaza. Now thata 16-acre hole has replaced that austere plinth, we are inevitably confrontedwith the question of what the built environment's public spaces could and shouldbe.
It is a truism to state that architecture composes the immediate physicalenvironment of our lives. But in this country, we too often forget thathigh-quality architecture is also a social good, one that more than repays theinvestment. European architecture has demonstrated this repeatedly.Public-housing complexes in the Netherlands, where thoughtful design and goodconstruction are the norm, consistently help to integrate marginalized groups(immigrants, minorities, and the elderly, among others) into their largercommunities with a combination of exciting forms and careful attention to thescale and proportions of the buildings in relation to their surrounding context.Innovative civic architecture such as the recent Vuotalo Cultural Center--ahybrid library, art gallery, theater, and café in Finland designed by thefirm of Heikkinen-Komonen--serves to draw people out of their homes and into thepublic realm, encouraging them to identify with their communities and become moreactive in them. Dignified and stimulating public buildings such as Jean Nouvel'sInstitut du Monde Arabe (a mixed-use information resource center in Paris devotedto Arab culture) and Peter Zumthor's Kunsthaus (an art museum, café,bookshop, and piazza in Bregenz, Austria) can help to instill respect,commitment, and--by fostering participatory action--sometimes even a healthyskepticism toward the institutions that they house.
It's not that Americans aren't interested in good architecture; after all,they often head to Europe on summer vacation. Europe has a longer history, morearchitectural monuments, and much denser and more richly textured cities. And ithas both the old built fabric and the new architecture--some of it designed byAmerican architects--that has captured the media's and the public's imagination:the Reichstag in Berlin, the grands projets of Paris, the new Tate Gallery in London, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. American tourists make a point of visiting these buildings. Can anything similar be said about Europeans--or Americans, for that matter--who travel around the United States? Europeans who come here go to New York City, where they marvel more at the collective height of the buildings than at their individual quality (the CitiCorp Building and a few others notwithstanding). If they go elsewhere, it is often to revel in the spectacle of kitsch architecture at Disney World. Or to make pilgrimages to the Grand Canyon and Yosemite.
Among practicing architects here and abroad, it is axiomatic that there ismuch more contemporary architecture of high quality to be found in Europe than inthe United States and that innovative, inspiring architecture--as well asarchitecture that is well built and long lasting--is constructed less frequentlyhere than almost anywhere in Europe. American architecture is, as a rule,conventional, bland, and dull. This is true almost across the board: from publicbuildings sponsored by federal or state governments to commercial buildings; fromprivately sponsored civic institutions, such as museums and concert halls, tolocal community centers and religious sanctuaries; from public-housing projectsto private housing. Our built environment delivers a clear message: We think thathigh-quality, thought-provoking, innovative buildings--whether institutional orcommercial, residential or private--are a luxury or a frivolity.
Why should this be? If Americans appreciate goodarchitecture abroad, whyis it so little valued at home? Why, to be blunt, is contemporary Americanarchitecture so bad?
It is not for lack of talented American practitioners. Students from allover the world apply to our top architecture schools and come here in everincreasing numbers for their training. And young American firms emerge almostyearly with important visions or novel sets of ideas about how we might live, howwe might participate in our public realm, or how our cities could be improved.The problem is that we execute too few of these ideas.
Critics and architectural historians often trot out fuzzy cultural-historicalfactors to explain why Americans live in a low-quality built environment.Europeans, having lived in the cities and countries that they do--places whereGothic cathedral spires share airspace with 1960s-era skyscrapers--are moresensitive to the cultural weight of history and its built artifacts. Americansare philistines, the theory goes, capitalists focused narrowly on their immediateprivate interests. But however much truth there may be to such views--and nodoubt there is some truth to them--they only exacerbate the problem by obscuringthe fact that most of American architecture's problems stem from threeintertwined failings: regulatory schemes that do not protect the public'sinterests, a poor system for selecting architects, and inadequate demand.
Regulations that shape the character of our public realm are inappropriatelypermissive in some cases and overly restrictive in others. Examples abound.Because of loopholes in federal and state legislation, approximately 90 percentof our private housing is designed not by licensed architects but byarchitecturally incompetent real-estate developers in collaboration with theircontractors. Similarly, the conceptualization and the appearance of many of ourlarger privately owned buildings, such as hotels, shopping malls, and officebuildings, are often determined by engineers rather than architects. And eventhose high-end projects that are designed by architects face their own, oftencrippling, problems.
However democratic the public-review process in this country was in originalintent, for the last several decades it has gotten to be nearly impossible to geta good project through the system, what with architects facing multiple reviewsof their projects by state and local preservation commissions, community groups,planning and zoning boards, wetlands commissions, and so on. Here we have anotherexample of what Isaiah Berlin called a liberating idea turning into a"suffocating straightjacket": The public-review process has become obstructionistand conservative, if not reactionary.
In most cases, the mechanisms for selecting architects to design publicbuildings in this country are deeply flawed. With the exception of thehighest-profile projects commissioned and administered by the U.S. GeneralServices Administration (which has had a successful Design Excellence Program inplace since 1994), when the federal government needs a new post office or a cityneeds a new library the process typically goes something like this: A group ofwell-meaning volunteers or bureaucrats get together and bandy about the names ofarchitectural firms they happen to know. A short list of candidates is drawn up.A building committee composed of lay people who have little knowledge of how toanalyze or assess the merits of an architectural vision or a constructed buildingconducts the interviews. Because the evaluators are not competent to judge theprofessional expertise of the candidates, these committees are rarely willing totake a chance on young or small firms--precisely the kind that tend to devote theextra energy to the design and construction process that yields good buildings.Instead, and understandably, the committee focuses overwhelmingly on howpersonally compatible they are with a candidate and on the firm's perceivedcapacity to complete a project on budget and on time. Because we rely on thesemethods to select architects, we inhabit a built environment that, at best, feelsaffable, efficient, and familiar--nothing more.
This is not how many European countries handle the public commissioning ofarchitecture. In Europe, contracts to design public buildings are awarded as theresult of competitions. Consultants trained in architecture, engineering, andurban design are hired to serve as a jury. In the case of a "limitedcompetition," these consultants--drawing on their professional knowledge of therange of practitioners in the field and their understanding of the needs andcharacter of the institution--compile a list of firms that they deem appropriatefor the job and invite them to submit proposals describing how the project mightbest be approached. In an "open competition," officials issue a broad publicrequest for proposals; then professionals representing the public interest(ostensibly, at least) select the winning scheme.
This process is not immune to failure and corruption, but it is far preferableto the way most architectural contracts are awarded in this country. It givessmall, young, and innovative firms a fighting chance, since contracts are awardedon the strength of a proponent's architecture rather than his or her socialconnections. The results--in terms of the buildings that are ultimately selected,erected, and used--are unequivocally superior.
One exception to the general inferiority of the process in the United Stateslies in the realm of privately commissioned civic institutions--in particular,museums. Important and in some cases even visionary architects and firms such asWill Bruder, Diller and Scofidio, Zaha Hadid, Herzog and de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas,Machado and Silvetti, and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien are all currentlydesigning or constructing major works. Museum directors better understand thevalue of good architecture and line up professional architectural consultants tohelp them in the selection process. But most of our built environment is notshaped by architects at all.
Moreover, the cultural barriers that separate architects from the publicinhibit any real dialogue. In most of the leading architecture programs in thiscountry, students are schooled to be guardians of the public realm and aretrained to navigate between the private needs and interests of their clients andthe public good. Yet all too often today, people perceive architects as out oftouch with the public's needs--or see them as boutique designers who provideluxury goods at enormous cost with little added benefit.
How did we get to this state of affairs? The answer is complex. Historicalfactors such as the urban-planning and social-housing disasters of the 1960s,which soured the public on architects and planning experts, are partially toblame. (This also partly explains the thicket of local review boards throughwhich American architects, unlike their European counterparts, typically have toshepherd their projects.) And American architectural schools tend to emphasizedesign without providing the proper training in engineering and mechanicalsystems that architectural students from Europe who attend our universities havereceived at home as undergraduates; this, too, contributes to the public image ofthe American architect as a delicate butterfly, capable of taking on only themost precious of commissions.
But the single biggest factor in the diminution of architecture in thiscountry is the indifference of the citizenry. For who among even the culturati,let alone the general public, knows very much about architecture? Whereas mostEuropean schoolchildren can name the greatest architects of their country andcite many examples of architectural masterpieces, surveys have found thatalthough Americans are familiar with names such as Michelangelo, Leonardo daVinci, Monet, Picasso, and Jackson Pollock, most cannot name even three importantarchitects.
Such ignorance is a direct result of our educational system,especially the nation's secondary schools: Although art classes are a familiarstaple, architecture--arguably a far more important part of our social and civiclives, and certainly a more insistently present part of our daily routines--israrely taught. An uneducated public translates into incompetent and conservative,if well-meaning, clients. Patrons will always be largely responsible for theshaping of our public environment. And too many of them simply don't know whatthey are doing.
This problem is not insurmountable. Designing a building is such amultifaceted challenge that teachers could target most of Howard Gardner's sevenintelligences and engage the interest of a broad spectrum of students. How dobuildings stand up and why do they fall down (logical-mathematical intelligenceand bodily-kinesthetic intelligence)? What impact did the invention of theelevator and the flush toilet have on the American landscape(logical-mathematicaland linguistic)? What makes a building ugly or beautiful, boring or interesting(linguistic and visual-spatial)? How does walking into the subway, the town hall,or the local historical society make you feel (visual-spatial,bodily-kinesthetic, and linguistic)? If you were an architect, how would you goabout designing a building type you knew little about (interpersonal)? Why do thehomes we live in look as they do?
A nationally accessible architecture curriculum for secondary schools wouldincrease the demand for good architecture and go a long way toward facilitatingenlightened patronage in the United States. So would the commissioning ofarchitecture through well-organized competitions run and judged by professionalsin collaboration with clients--a policy, in the case of public buildings, thatcould be mandated by law. And so would a revamped regulatory system that requiredbuilders to use professional architects for a wider range of public and privatebuildings; that made private developers more answerable to the needs of thelarger public good; and that mitigated the impact of often reactionary localregulatory forces.
Ground zero in Manhattan is a test and an opportunity. When it comes time toget down to a master plan, and then again when it is time to build an appropriatememorial to the dead and to construct new office buildings, new transport hubs,new residential complexes, and new retail spaces, the Port Authority of New Yorkand New Jersey, the site's principal owner, should announce national or, better,global architectural competitions. It should select professional architects,urban planners, and other experts to serve on public-spirited juries. And increating New York City's new downtown, it should make the process as well as theproduct a model to show future generations the kind of public realm they deserveand should demand.
Meanwhile, start educating our kids.
