Urban Design

Edited by Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders

University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 392 pp., $25 paperback

In 1983, Klaus Herdeg wrote a careful yet searing appraisal of the damage that Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) had inflicted on American architecture. “Today, more often than not, a building is an attention-seeking object that glorifies its owner and architect and is oblivious, if not outright injurious, to its physical, and often its social, context,” Herdeg declared in the opening sentence of The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy.

He attributed much of what was wrong with contemporary US architecture to the teaching philosophy of Harvard’s design school — the nation’s premier such institution — and especially to the influence of Walter Gropius, who had reshaped Harvard into an exponent of modernism. You might think that by now all this would be ancient history. Gropius arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1937, and his period of guiding Harvard students came to an end the same year that Stalin died, 1953. But a new book, Urban Design, edited by Harvard urban design professor Alex Krieger and Harvard Design Magazine editor William S. Saunders, reveals — without meaning to — that Harvard is still a long way from renouncing all the errors of mid-20th century modernism.

Urban Design is a collection of writings and other comments by architects, planners, urban designers, and historians, many of whom convened at Harvard in 2006 to discuss how urban design had changed since 1956 — the year that José Luis Sert, head of the school, had organized an international conference on urban design. The book casts light on efforts of modernists such as Sert to place more emphasis on how communities can serve pedestrians and enhance everyday life. Whether Sert accomplished much in this regard is doubtful; modernist architects and planners went on designing many deadly-dull urban spaces in the years leading up to Peter Blake’s acerbic 1978 book Form Follows Fiasco and afterward.

The writers in Urban Design worry about what the role of urban design should be. Should it pursue economic and social justice as well as a more attractive built environment and more prosperous centers? Should landscape architects have a greater say — and architects less say — in the decisions? Some of the questions are thought-provoking. An essay by Krieger skillfully lays out the many competing goals that have been prescribed for urban design.

Step right up, take a shot at New Urbanism
New urbanists are underrepresented among the commentators. Architects and critics who don’t know much about New Urbanism — except that they intensely dislike it — get to flog New Urbanism at regular intervals. Rodolfo Machado, a Harvard GSD professor whose firm designed the ungainly One Western Avenue academic building, tarnishing Harvard’s expansion into the North Allston section of Boston, charges that New Urbanism is “usually houses for white people in the South.” Apparently he’s unaware of HOPE VI projects, transit-oriented developments, regional plans, and other undertakings that new urbanists have carried out across the US.

Charles Waldheim of the University of Toronto complains about “the reactionary cultural politics and nostalgic sentiment of ‘New Urbanism.’” Michelle Provoost and Wouter Vanstiphout from the Netherlands accuse Andres Duany and other new urbanists working in New Orleans of choosing “an urbanism that filters out all painful aspects of the old city.” (Do the Dutch really believe New Orleans will ever be pain-free?) New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger praises fellow design critic Michael Sorkin for making “deft comparisons between New Urbanism and religious fundamentalism.” Sorkin chastises New Urbanism for being “without environmental innovation.” He’s apparently unaware of Doug Farr, Tom Low, Marcy McInelly, Mary Vogel, and others who have labored to mesh New Urbanism and environmental sustainability.

So many pages, such skewed understanding. That’s the consequence of stacking the deck with those who are intolerant of traditional forms and styles. The GSD has never shaken free of the baleful influence of Gropius, Siegfried Giedion, and others who wanted to toss the past into the trash bin.
For my money, the best thing in this book is the shortest — a trenchant three-page essay in which Emily Talen of Arizona State University declares, “It is time to wrestle urban design away from the bad parenting of architects.” Architects crave originality, Talen observes. “And when architects look to urban design as the outlet for their creative genius, it tends to make them desperate, even hostile.”

“New Urbanists still believe that urban design has a legitimate role to play in the achievement of social goals,” Talen emphasizes. Look at neighborhood diversity, Talen urges. “Design can help make diversity viable … by showing how multi-family units can be accommodated in single-family blocks, by designing links between diverse land uses and housing types, by creating paths through edges that disrupt connectivity, by increasing density near public transit,” and by many other methods, all of which have been advocated and employed by new urbanists.

The next time Harvard’s GSD assembles a book about urban design, it should give new urbanists a role other than designated devil. Students of urban design might learn something useful.