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JULIAN BEINART: We're going to deal
with three major topics between now
and the end of the semester.
The first one is today's.
And that is what is the relationship between the way
a city is made and its form.
Is there a relationship between the way a city is made
and the form that it takes?
Next week, we will start with an examination
of the relationship between social structure and spatial
structure.
I'll do case studies for a number of cities next week,
probably Jerusalem and Johannesburg.
After that, we will look at contemporary form models
selectively until the end of the semester.
What would be nice would be if you could use the material
that we've done, which I suppose is a kind of a history,
as a reference to some of the questions
that we're going to be asking of current events.
Today I'm going to spend a bit of time talking
about the process by which the World Trade Center in New York
was replaced by the Freedom Tower.
I don't know if any of you know this story--
in broad terms, perhaps not in detail.
In one of the pieces of reading, you
will find a comment by Margaret Crawford who
used to teach urban design at Harvard when
the article questions whether, after Robert Moses,
there's a process by which New York is still
going to produce great things.
She says, "The story of democracy
is one of constant improvement.
To look for perfect answers is the wrong way
of looking at it."
So if she's correct, the important thing
is that the result of a struggle to produce a certain form
is contingent and, most importantly,
to be oriented towards the conditions of the struggle
and the education and learning that takes place even
if the product isn't perfect.
That argument would mean that the society is constantly
in a state of change and is much more
likely to be associated with the model of buildings which
can change at the same rate as society wishes to change,
the Russians being very intrigued by this relationship.
Am I being far-fetched?
Do you imagine that Melnikov's project for the Pravda building
which has three rotating cores has something
to do with the speed at which decisions are made
and communicated to the public?
It's a bit far-fetched.
We don't perhaps engage in the relationship
between social process and form making
in as direct a relationship as that.
But some people looking at is Skidmore, Owings,
and Merrill's Freedom Tower, which, by the way,
is 1,776 feet high, 1776 being an important date
in American history, tries to connect the imperial quality
of a building by its height.
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is taller.
It's over 2,000.
And I don't think there's any attempt in that society
to link its height to a particular event in Islam.
But we play games.
I've listed nine ideas about the relationship between form
and social process.
And I'm only going to spend our time on a few of them.
I want to talk about the concept of relying on a super figure
and using the case of Robert Moses in New York.
Anybody read Robert Caro's book?
OK.
Well, so we use ignorance as all of us.
In the case of making decisions, I
will use the example of the process by which the World
Trade Center was replaced in some detail, the various five
stages of its procedure.
You are free to take part in this discussion.
I'd like to hear your opinion as to some of the assertions
I'm going to make.
Briefly, I'm going to deal also with the concept of educating
citizens.
If you see form and people as two items,
you can argue that if you change people,
you change their way of understanding
the form of places.
And the number of projects that I
want to look at very briefly with you,
which focus on changing the nature of people,
rather than to--
you'll again look back to last Tuesday's class.
One of the great concepts of the young Soviet urbanists
after 1918 was that they had a new clientele who
could be shaped to live up to the qualities
of the Soviet society which was newly being formed.
One of the problems of the industrial city
was the fact that the client structure was so fossilized.
There had been a number of attemps to use urbanism
to try to educate people and to change
this quotient, this relationship.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time
on redressing social imbalance.
I'll just mention it and give an example of it from Boston
and spend less time on confronting
the system as a way of changing the society and its form.
Kevin Lynch argues that the real issue in the contemporary city,
and he's really talking about the American city,
is that they are a host of agent families, industrial firms,
city agencies, developers, investors, regulatory
and subsidizing agencies, and so on and so on and so on, who
produce a process which at best is fragmented,
plural and bargaining.
The public in this case has a number of ways of acting,
typically.
First of all, they are public works.
The public may build infrastructure and buildings
at will.
It can do so in an uncontested manner.
He doesn't have to deal with the market.
In some societies, as in great--
well, not in Great Britain.
In some societies, or certainly in Soviet Russia,
all land was belonged to the state and private ownership
of land only became a slower--
I think it's now about 50% of total urban land.
The public can engage with the private sector
in many kinds of relationships.
These relationships have modified and been
exhausted almost in the range.
They range from the classic Seagram Building
in New York, which traded off, which the public ceded
floor area ratio increases in return
for setting back the building to provide public space.
There are many more current trade-off off situations.
There are many in Boston.
The one that I'm thinking of is the new hotel
on the waterfront--
I forget its name--
which has a terrace which runs up against the public garden.
The trade-off is that the city has allowed the hotel
to use the terrace for the service of alcohol
and so on, in return of which the private firm maintains
the garden.
There's a lot of maintenance switches.
If you look after my house while I'm going on holiday,
I will pick up your mail when you come back.
This really operates more extensively on a smaller scale
as do most urban design decisions in current urbanism.
The third thing that the public sector can do
is create the incentives.
The building of most of downtown office building in Boston
was created by 121(d) legislation,
which gave tax breaks for the building of new office
buildings.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: No, no, no.
There was no building of a new office building in Boston
during the '50s and '60s, and this comes
late John Hancock building.
The first John Hancock building probably
dates from about 1960 or so.
They are older buildings, but the spate
of new office development was promoted largely
by this public sector deciding that one of the ways
to incentivize private market activity
was to use the tax system.
The public sector has enormous power
in playing around with the tax system,
because it's a negative system of cost.
You lose what--
I don't want to go into the economic detail.
It's complicated.
And there are a lot of theories about whether it's good or bad.
But this is just an example of where
it was used to build a skyline for a city which
had no particular attraction to office development.
At times, the city--
and I'm using Boston, because there
are a lot of local examples, rather than San Francisco,
which is used the trade-off of public-private relationships
quite remarkably in rebuilding the waterfront.
And there's a building on the river which houses factories
for making pillows.
It's between-- I don't know what the bridge is called,
and the other bridge.
It's where you come off the freeway.
It's next to where Harvard's Business School starts.
You know the building.
It looks like I don't know what.
I mean I can't describe it.
You could say that this could be the argument.
The public sector says, we cannot afford to lose jobs.
These properties are within the municipality of Boston,
not of Cambridge.
It pays us to yield a site to a corporation, a site which
it prefers because of the publicity that it gets,
in order to stop it from leaving Boston and going
to another city, where it may equally prosper or prosper
even more.
So if the policy is that the river is
a sacrosanct public entity which provides enormous benefit
to the city, hidden and real, it should not sacrifice its land
on the river for purposes which are not closely associated
with human activity.
Not factories.
You don't put factories on a modern river,
but you put factories on a modern river
in order to keep those jobs.
This is the kind of complicated way in which the city is made.
I think it's a very silly, stupid decision of short term.
There's no body authority which maintains
the rights of the river.
There are grassroot organizations
which are friends of the river and try
to protect the river from pollution, and so on.
But the river is not taken up by the city
and then used as a sacrosanct commodity, even
economic commodity.
It's willing to trade off all kinds of short-term benefits,
keeping Biotene--
I don't know if it's Biotene.
I don't know what the company is, the drug company that--
anyway, let's move on.
The public has two other propositions in its power.
It can regulate activity.
It can write bylaws.
Those are both for protection and for the possibility
of incremental change.
For instance, it could tax land, which was--
at the moment, parking lots in the downtown
are used as investment centers, waiting for the market
to reach a point where you could capitalize on the land fully.
In Johannesburg, you tax the value
of land at a higher rate than only land itself.
You assume the potential of building
as a function of the cost of the land,
or the value of the land, not the cost of the land.
And so the public here intervenes
by making sure that land doesn't lie fallow for too long.
So the public can speed up development or slow it down.
Kevin Lynch, in the Place Utopia,
talks about different speeds of development.
This would be one of the tools.
An interesting thesis which looked at urban agriculture
in Brooklyn argued that urban agriculture
was one of the modalities of land use which could easily--
which was very flexible.
It could either remain agriculture and produce goods,
or it could give way to more dense development
without having to replace buildings.
I want to go on.
The last function that the public has in this game
is education and marketing.
In Italian towns in the early Renaissance,
towns produced books which are called praise books, which set
out to advertise their town.
There's a nice little book written
by an Italian woman on these books,
and there's a parallel literature in Islam
called the Fada'il books.
I think there are three Fada'il books about Jerusalem,
which set out systematically what the attractions are
of the city.
It's like "I Love New York" or a version of making
the public possibility that the city has
into a marketing device.
So the public has an enormous number of powers.
And I'm assuming the society is a market society, as I'm
assuming that most of the propositions which I'm going
to be examining will be propositions
in a democracy in which power will be distributed
through systematically, and people
will be able to take part in various processes
to influence the way the public and the market act.
We'll examine this in the World Trade Center story.
We'll look at what the New York Times, what role the New York
Times played, what role CNN played.
But we'll get to that in a minute.
I'm not going to talk about the planning technology of decision
making.
It's arcane and complicated and doesn't
deal with physical form.
It idealizes certain techniques in decision making,
and thank you very much.
It's not of great interest to me.
What we've come to realize--
and I think Kevin Lynch put it well--
we have a city building process which is complex
and plural, marked by conflict, cross purposes, bargaining,
and whose outcome, while often inequitable or wanted,
seems as uncontrollable as a glacier.
He argues this contentious argument,
a highly-decentralized decision process
in which the immediate uses of a place
make the decisions about its form
is an accepted ideal, both because it reinforces
the user's sense of competence, and because it
is more likely to result in a well-fitted environment.
This is probably true of us from--
this probably true when the scale of the proposition
is small and diminishes in utility
as the proposition gets bigger.
Who would you ask to make a decision,
to influence a decision on whether Route 495 should
be widened?
Do you do a poll?
You can do a poll.
What utility, what would you base your results on?
There are users who are not capable of taking part
in the poll.
There are users who are too young,
and are only going to be of age once the proposition is
completed.
There are handicapped people, and so on, and so on.
The utility of user participation in general,
then, is spatially conditioned.
we have one street in Cambridge which needs repair,
I think it would be a good idea to talk to the people who
live on that street and ask them what needs, what priorities,
what problems do they have?
Are there too many dogs on the street?
Are there too many holes which are not repaired on the street?
It makes an assumption about the unique knowledge
that people have about their own situation, which professionals
don't have, only have to a limited extent.
And so buying into this unique knowledge is an enormous asset.
I mentioned that in the New Towns Committee in London
did a broadcast in 1946 asking people
what a good size for a town would be.
That is the sort of nonsense use of participation.
But active participation on a small scale
has become almost professionally mandated
in the change of an American city.
Some people would argue that it frustrates development.
I think development has built itself into a position
to take account of it.
The fees for user participation in the big-dig project
equal the fees for urban design.
So the shape of the road, which is largely mandated
by engineering concerns, you can't say it
should be painted red, or green, or yellow,
the real crude rules, about which you will understand,
about maintaining the perceptual quality of automobiles
at 50 miles per hour.
But the right to terminate, to exit
the expressway into Watertown-- or, no,
it doesn't go into Watertown-- into Chelsea
requires, probably, a bargaining arrangement
whereby Chelsea is given a new library by the federal funds
that come in to pay for the project
in order to buy the right for the road
to connect at that point.
So public participation, which we'll
see a number of examples of in the slides
I will show you, probably as a summary,
is a fundamental aspect of democracy.
It requires an educated--
not educated, but transparent-- population.
People are educated in different ways.
Formal education doesn't necessarily
mean that you're sensitive to your own environment.
You're probably so overlaid by questions
as to how much your property is worth,
and whether if a Black person buys
a property on the same street, your property is
going to be devalued.
These are important questions.
The major model by which urbanism
is being transacted and taught has
been that the great improvements in cities
have come about when great, powerful figures, super figures
are in control.
Robert Moses is a great American example.
In over 40 years, he built $28 billion
worth of projects, the largest city
builder in America's history.
I handed out to you a couple of things.
The first pages are some notes I made from Ramparts
in March, 1975, when Robert Caro's book on Moses
was just published.
Ramparts was a left-wing, radical journal,
and it asked these six people, those names on the left, what
they thought about, what they thought the problem with Moses
was.
And I tried to list them in my own handwriting, what I think.
One of the interesting ones is the last one.
The second-last man, Temco, says that Moses
didn't understand architecture, therefore
he made bad decisions.
Berman follows up by saying, Moses actually
did understand architecture.
Look at Sigfried Giedion's book Space, Time, and Architecture.
The flyleaf has one of Moses's elevated highway intersections
on its cover.
Gideon talks about the similarities between Baroque
form and highway curvatures.
He talks about the great Borromini building
in Rome, the two churches, which is not [ITALIAN],,
the other one.
It's near the pantheon.
Forgive me, I can't remember.
My memory is gone.
Gideon makes a claim that we should,
you can well understand Moses's reaction to that claim,
that he was actually doing things
which were being appreciated by one of the great philosophers
of modern architecture.
But these are tendentious comments.
Let's look at Moses's record.
The argument is that a good city is
a city of grand design, large public works.
It's important to have a large figure who can superintend over
all the bureaucratic complexities
and barriers of city form.
Moses, the masses are incapable or unwilling to act.
If allowed to intervene, no single product
could ever be delivered.
You cannot have the changes you need in cities without
conflict, hurting some people.
Moses is quoted as saying "you can't make an omelet
without breaking eggs."
But Moses moved over 100,000 people out of their houses
in East Tremont, in the East Tremont.
500,000 people were displaced.
This was a neighborhood of Blacks, Irish, and Jews.
He wished to build the Cross Bronx Expressway.
He used a private company to relocate people.
The company had four offices far away from the neighborhood,
and never had regular hours.
When an available new apartment was to be looked at,
there were four floors of people already on the staircase.
Comparable price was never achieved.
Demolition, even when people didn't wish to move out,
demolition started, and subsequent vandalism
was used to increase the working, the moving
out, the speed by which people moved out.
This is the sordid side of the grand master.
Moses had charisma.
The book starts with him at Yale as a brilliant student, ideal,
wanting to dedicate his life to public service,
to helping the lower classes.
But he was strong.
He was a very good swimmer.
But he was a nasty man.
In the book, he doesn't help his brother who needs help.
All of these things paint a picture
of a flawed master, a kind of a Beethoven
who, if you look too carefully, doesn't ever wash his clothes.
One of the interesting things about Moses
was not only the scope of his work.
He built 600 miles of highway.
He built the Verrazzano Bridge.
He built a number of bridges.
He built a number of centers in Manhattan, the United Nations,
the Colosseum, Lincoln Center, all the products of his reign.
He was, for reasons which I don't quite understand,
convinced that automobile transportation was inexorably
the solution to the American city.
For instance, the Long Island Expressway cost $500 million,
or $500 billion. $500 million, I think, $500 million
at the time.
He could have added 4 feet for mass transit.
This would have cost 20% more.
He didn't.
Or he could have purchased land and kept it in escrow
for further transit for something like $20 million
more, but he didn't.
How did he achieve this power in a democracy,
is perhaps one of the more interesting things.
How do you achieve such power?
AUDIENCE: How do you achieve such power
in a city that portrays itself to be very sophisticated?
JULIAN BEINART: Well, it is sophisticated in many respects.
There's some of the most wonderful restaurants
in the world, and great opera companies, and so on.
Now, I think the interesting thing
that one learns from looking at this case
carefully is that he used the public authority
system to build power.
Moses was never elected to office in the 40 years.
At his peak, he wasn't challenged seriously
by any governor of the New York State.
New York Times in its private memorandum
claims that he could not be criticized in the newspaper
without special documentation.
But he gained his power from taking over and gaining power
in the public authority, which possesses
not only the powers of a large corporation,
but some of the powers of a sovereign state.
It has the power of eminent domain
that permits the seizure of private property,
and the power to establish and reinforce
rules and regulations.
The public authority has two other vital characteristics.
It's controlled by a board of directors,
which can be as small as one member,
and they can issue bonds.
Haussmann understood this.
Haussmann used his understanding of physical economics
in order to transform Paris.
In 1960, he was the sole member of the Henry Hudson Parkway
Authority, one of three members of the Triborough Bridge
and Tunnel Authority, Commissioner of the New York
City Parks Department, City Construction Coordinator,
a member of the City Planning Commission,
Chairman of the Mayor's Slum Clearance Committee,
Head of the City Office of Civil Defense,
a member of the New York City Youth Board,
President of Long Island State--
oh, god, it just goes on--
president of the Jones Beach State Parkway Authority,
the Long Island Parkway Authority,
chairman of the New York State Tunnel Authority.
Having power in so many domains, which
allows you to reticulate decisions
which individual entities can't assume.
If I'm on one board, and I want a highway to move
through a park, I can use the connected power system,
or the contiguous power system.
He also used, he also had a great--
with power comes the capacity in this country,
and probably anywhere in the world, to assume wealth.
He got big gifts from the Rockefellers
for the building of the United Nations property,
and so on, and so on.
The question is, what kind of city did he leave New York in,
and would we have been worse off, had there
been no figure like Moses?
In our field, we should be able to answer these questions.
But there's so many variables.
Nobody probably will ever be able to assume
the power through the public corporation system
as Moses did.
We have a completely different set of environmental issues.
We have all kinds of different public groups, issues of youth,
issues of gender, issues of race,
all trends in the importance of a super figure right now.
Look at what Mayor Bloomberg is spending his time doing.
There's no Federal Highway construction program.
So he's not building any highways,
at lease none that I'm--
Manhattan, it's impossible to move through Manhattan,
because they're building subway--
renewing the gas system and building the Second Avenue
Subway.
So when, in the history of a town,
do you need somebody who can assume total power?
Who'd be able to answer this question?
In a democracy, you do so when the society
is threatened absolutely.
Remember Foucault's rules for what happened
when the plague occurred?
One of the problems of the project of environmentalism
is that the actual symbols of environmental degradation
are not impacting people sufficiently,
not in this country, not in New York.
And in a democracy, people will tend
to be lazy about a great deal of things which
they will suspend until some--
Hurricane Sandy hasn't probably caused much of a change
in maintaining flood control land,
and probably will never result in
major infrastructural changes.
It means that the only way that you're
going to be able to get all of this done
is probably through waiting for an emergency situation, when
the cost of repairing the conditions
are 5,000 times higher.
It's a bleak prospect.
It's easy enough to criticize Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,
as legions of liberals have done,
but it's worth speculating about the state
of our business in a democracy.
What do you think?
Have you thought about Robert Moses ever?
Well, what did you think of him?
You must have some thoughts.
You must know something about the man.
You have the greatest urban builder
in this country's history, not a trivial figure.
Are we likely to have people like that again?
AUDIENCE: Even if we put more mechanisms and checks
and balances, the reality is that there
are people have the capability of achieving
a lot of power and influence and just drive context.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: And in fact, oftentimes,
the population in different places and different cultures
do like that, whether if it's proper or not.
So there is a part of the population
that actually is pleased with the notion of somebody
taking charge.
JULIAN BEINART: Sure.
We are all lazy.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
We're all lazy.
JULIAN BEINART: And to the extent
that I can trade off my concerns about my health
to my doctor, who, if he's kind, he behaves like a psychoanalyst
and relieves me of worry, I will do nothing
about eating my pills at the right time, because he--
I've found that going to see a doctor
and saying that I train at a health club twice a week
immediately makes me feel--
makes them feel good about me.
Anyway, that's a bit of an aside.
The interesting thing is not to, I think,
focus on these extremes, to imagine cities
as building themselves over a long period of time
and being much more engaged in the proper process
by which things happen.
You know, Moses's work is monumental.
So is Napoleon's for the Champs-Élysées and Haussmann
for the Boulevard de l'Opéra in Paris.
Over a period of time, another generation has grown up.
Monuments, when we deal with memory in monuments, one of--
I forget his name--
Robert Musil, the French critic, says
monuments are amongst the most forgettable
of items we produce.
You drive through France, and you stop for coffee
in the afternoon in a small town,
and you're sitting in the square,
and you look at the monument of a man on a bronze horse.
He fought in the Battle of Algiers
in god alone knows when.
No small child in the town pays any notion to him
except that there's a monument there.
So it is often with cities.
We ingest the new very quickly.
We assign it to a category of the past.
Certain aspects of the past can create value
by being so much of the past.
AUDIENCE: How much political process is there?
How much are they momentarily lost in social memory?
And people forget about the guy whose monument
was dedicated to, but how much, in the end,
those monuments become fixtures in the city and remain in time?
JULIAN BEINART: Yes.
The one in the central square in this little French city
that I'm talking about will never again much
leverage in that town or anywhere.
It's just a gift because this man was born there,
and so on, and so on.
Let's delay talking about memory seriously when
we, in a few weeks' time, deal with Maurice Halbwachs'
book The Collective Memory and the whole idea of monuments,
and temporary monuments, and permanence, and temporariness,
and so on.
Let's just talk briefly about the World Trade Center.
There are a number of actors which started the game.
There's the governor, Mr. Pataki,
who controls the lease, the sea port authority they gave
to Mr. Silverstein, the developer, whose towers were
destroyed by some nasty airplanes.
There's the mayor of the city.
There are the victims' families.
See, if we put them on a diagram together,
they all wish to interact in the creation of something which,
both as utility, as real estate, but has nourishment for loss.
It's a tough combination.
The mayor and the governor get together
and form a Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation which has-- and it's another public corporation.
It seems to me that in New York particularly, things
are so divided that public corporations for almost
every single item can be created,
and Moses took a lot of advantage of that.
The first thing this the LMDC does
is it hires a firm of planners and architects
to make six different models of the site
as what they call placeholders.
This is just to describe to the world
what you can build on the site.
The response to this is very negative.
People say, this is completely classless.
It's unemotional.
It's got no guts.
It doesn't mean anything.
It's just a banal disposition of space.
The LMDC, the New York Times attacks this procedure
and publishes, you can see in the piece I gave you,
a little extract from its publication, "Don't Rebuild,
Reimagine."
It proposes a new high road on the West side which
links down to Battery Park.
It gets Zaha Hadid and Peter Eisenman
to design funny-shaped housing on the road.
It has Rafael Vinoly doing the new subway station.
The LMDC have got to do something,
so they decide to do something called an innovative design
study.
This is not a design competition.
They're going to pay selected architects
flat fee of $40,000 each.
The seven teams that take place each paid about $500,000
out of their own pockets, just to take part.
There were very few limitations or rules
set up for the computation.
On December the 18th, 2002, the seven teams
were asked to make a public presentation broadcast live
on television, as well as set up an exhibition at the World
Financial Center Winter Garden.
The exhibit was up for a month and drew 100,000 spectators.
CNN, the New York Post did polls showing a strong preference
for Lord Foster, Libeskind, and the Think Team's projects.
So much for public participation.
I haven't got time to go into the three projects.
Foster proposed two enormously tall towers linked together.
They were called the Kissing Towers project, really quite
a silly project, because when you build so much square feet,
you need to build separately.
If you build two towers with this massive square footage,
the chances of you selling enough square footage
at a fast enough rate to fill the whole building
would be very difficult. So buildings are generally
targeted in size, and this is 776 feet high.
Anyway, the Think Team's group proposed a megastructure.
Their scheme was called not the kissing towers,
but the cultural center.
It would be the tallest building in the world, of course.
There would be a great hall 30 stories
above the ground level covering 13 acres of open space.
A stainless steel system would hold these towers up in place.
There was a certain transparency.
They claimed that the scheme resembled
the Eiffel Tower, which is very difficult to understand.
Then there was Daniel Libeskind, a Polish born Jew whose parents
died in the Holocaust.
He made his presentation at the Winter Garden
by relating his vision of the Statue of Liberty
when he immigrated to New York.
Norman Foster used a video of a little girl in a red dress
as an important part of his presentation.
All of this has been written about.
There are books about this story,
all about the kind of commodification of the six
weeks after the Winter Garden.
Two were chosen, Libeskind and Think.
The final committee preferred the Think scheme.
The New York Times preferred the Think scheme.
And Rafael Vinoly, the head of the team,
went to bed on the Thursday night
assuming that him project had won.
He got a phone call at breakfast the next morning
to say that the governor had preferred Libeskind's scheme,
and the governor had greater power than the mayor,
and so Libeskind was chosen.
Before the catastrophe, Silverstein, the real estate
developer, had already hired SOM to build
a new building for him.
SOM coyly didn't take part in the competition.
He emerged politically as the great force,
David Childs of the SOM produced what
he called the Freedom Tower.
They asked that Libeskind was given 49% of the commission,
they pushed him out.
And we now have the 1,776-foot high Freedom Tower as a result
of this complex interrelationship between
the media.
The mourning relatives got the result
of a competition of a memorial space.
Calatrava was chosen to do the train station,
and that's where it stands at the moment.
What's it going to matter in 25 years time?
Nobody will know this story.
We are only rehearsing this story
to put you in a position of being
critical of ways in which it could be done better.
This is a completely bungled, amateurish kind
of claptrap operation, the problem
of choosing major monuments.
The Eiffel Tower occurred through the genius
of an undistinguished French structural engineer.
The Ferris wheel came from an undistinguished betting
computation.
No, the Eiffel Tower wasn't a competition, sorry.
The Ferris wheel for Chicago.
The Statue of Liberty was a donation
by the French government to America, not even
an American product.
And every baseball game starts with the singing
of the National Anthem, god alone knows why.
And the foreign-born Statue of Liberty
is still the single evidence of American democracy
in physical form.
Where does it leave us theorists?
You work on the stochastic opportunity
that competitions have, that a young Asian immigrant
to the United States will come up
with a brilliant solution to the Vietnam War competition,
putting the names of all the people who died on the facade
so that generations of children will be able to recognize
their family name against the simple embodiment
of a single monument.
Maybe that's what the human species is all about,
all we can do.
I don't know.
I'm not empowered by the story that I've just told you.
It seems to me to have all kinds of--
I don't know if Robert Moses would have done
better, had he been in power.
After all, perhaps the form doesn't matter that much.
I keep on remembering what Khrushchev said,
looking back on Stalin's attempt to build the Lomonosov well,
not attempt-- he's building the Lomonosov University decorated
to hell and looking like a large cathedral
set of buildings, and so on, filled with decorative systems.
Khrushchev said, if we'd have built simple buildings,
we could have employed, we could have housed 300,000 more
students.
Let's forget about all of this monumental nonsense.
I'm asking questions which are very difficult to answer.
I'm sorry.
That's not what I'm here for.
I'm supposed to tell you what to do.
All I can point out is that society doesn't
know what it wants to do.
And maybe in a democracy, that's all that matters,
that you're always alive to opportunities,
and you do the best you can.
And if you believe in perfection,
stop being a member of society.
Become a hermit.
But the failures of democracy are only tolerable if they
are temporary, I suppose.
The arguments about gun control in this country are insane.
The evidence is violently against it.
90% of the population wants some background checks on guns.
At the same time, we're going to probably move
towards national legislation in favor
of same-sex marriages, which 25 years ago in this democracy
would have sounded insane.
So I'm arguing that there may be some relief for us
in assuming that we are only elements
in the democratic system.
And provided we maintain the democratic system,
we can use our imagination as best
we can to fulfill our obligations of giving form
to societal needs.
I'm just going to mention very briefly, because we've
got to look at pictures, another way
of dealing in a Democratic society
is redressing social imbalances.
That's what's commonly known as--
what's the term now?
Anyway, it argues that in a democratic society,
groups have equal access, don't have equal access
to support systems.
So the case where this form of planning really originally
starts in [? Lupo's ?] book, very good book,
the story is very well-explained.
The highway system 495, 128, a proposition
exists for building an inner-belt highway
through Cambridge to make linkages
of all kinds towards the main roads,
expressways towards the west and the south, and the north,
of course.
The question of where this inner belt should run is at issue.
One of the candidates is the rail line just running next
to MIT.
MIT objects.
It makes a foolish decision to hire an Irish lawyer,
who in court, in the hearing says that MIT cannot stand
having automobiles so close, because it's got its sensitive
laboratories, the magnet laboratory which is helping
our troops in Vietnam, when MIT has claimed that it has nothing
to do with the Vietnam War at all.
So MIT is embarrassed publicly and loses.
One of our colleagues here, Bob Goodman, on the faculty,
goes out and forms a group, takes
a bunch of professionals with him, and they form a group--
advocacy planning is the term I was looking for--
advocating the rights of the people
in Cambridge Port who don't want the highway at all.
Finally, they win, and there's no highway built,
and Cambridge is a different city altogether
than what would have been with a tunnel--
not a tunnel-- cutting the Earth,
running through either next to MIT or--
so what has taken place?
A professional has given support to a group who don't normally
have professional support in a situation of public contention.
The other group deals with the education of people.
There's a whole variety of types.
There's political education, the project of Giancarlo de Carlo
for steelworkers in Terni in Southern-- not Southern Italy,
Middle Italy--
where he's asked to design workers' housing.
He has these public meetings and designs
certain types of housing.
When the people complain that he's
giving them too much space, he says, you're stupid.
You should argue for more space.
If you're wealthy, all of you don't
have to get up at the same time to use the bathroom.
You need two bathrooms per family if you're poor.
He goes on and on, and the people take this up.
He designs this situation and gets away with it.
There's information giving, telling people about the city.
A good city is one in which people are well-informed.
Patrick Geddes' Outlook Tower, the IBA in Berlin, Media City,
city of benign consumerism, Signs and Lights project,
Yellow Pages, opening up the city's resources.
The visible city is the idea the city is a schoolroom.
Let's look at some of these.
This is a project in Terni.
I'm just going to run through these early ones.
The project in Terni, the housing which was built.
You can argue against the use of concrete in this form, fixed,
when an environment of greater flexibility.
These are some other examples of small town.
This is in York, Pennsylvania, the redevelopment of,
the renewal of a rundown town square,
people being shown drawings and asked to learn about the place
and give their opinion next.
Bologna, Red Bologna, suburban housing
and the redevelopment of parts of the center of the city.
Next.
The redevelopment proposals forced by people
argue for maintaining the facade, existing facade
of the buildings, the housing, but putting it
into a new typology of larger space behind.
So you get this idea of almost the exact counterpart
of this original street, but in depth increased.
Next.
Pittsburgh, an attempt to build a model of the neighborhood
that's going to be renewed in an attempt
to actually have people participate
spatially and physically in the space.
Next.
This is an Italian hill town in the Abruzzo.
This is an architect, Belgian architect by the name of Kroll,
building for Leuven University, in which he imitates
the individual anarchy of each builder of the house
in the left in an attempt to choose
a system of formal randomness to give
his facade a particular quality.
This is a student dormitory like any student dormitory
in the world.
That's a town that's built up by a process of adjustment
and change over time.
Next.
Robert Moses and three presidents.
Major figures are always large, and they're always photographed
to make them seem larger.
I wonder who's a small dictator.
Next.
These are from Caro's book.
This is a proposition showing a dotted line for the Long Island
Expressway.
And the actual route that's chosen
is contoured by it missing all of the property, almost all
of the property in large holdings by wealthy people.
Next.
I haven't got time to go into detail.
That's Moses's proposal to build a bridge,
and his depiction of the bridge in public in the upper two
diagrams, where the lower diagram, in fact,
shows its impact on the city more dramatically.
Next.
This is an MIT--
we're talking about education now--
this isn't an MIT project called Signs and Lights which
says one of the things we can do is
create much more intelligence in the built formal environment.
The project on the right argues for the coloring of the road
surface to provide, to indicate that you
can travel at different speeds.
Next.
A project in Genoa, in Italy, in which a neighborhood is
cleared, and only the fossils, the essential elements
of the neighborhood are maintained,
giving the people an understanding of what
they've got to work with.
On the basis of their understanding,
they precipitate reactions, create changes,
produce changes, which are on the right.
Next.
Cedric Price's work in England, the idea of building places
where people can--
this is prior to social media.
This is actually making places in the city--
the one on the right is called the Fun Palace,
and the one on the left is called the Interaction Center--
where people randomly could meet each other
and partake of joyous activity.
Next.
This is a Bedford Stuyvesant New York project, a Ford Foundation
study, which is interesting.
The project is to insert a new community college
in a very poor area, and instead of building a new campus
with glass buildings, the form of the building,
the inserted buildings, are within the existing framework
of the town.
All the facilities that are built for the community college
are shared by the community.
In fact, the curriculum for the community college
is set by the needs of the community.
The sports facilities up on the top on the left
are all partly for the community,
partly for the students.
Next.
The park in Philadelphia on the left.
The city, the school without walls.
The city has got enough input, education input in it
to serve as a school.
Next.
Metro Education Project in Montreal,
which argues that you can stop building schools
and utilize meetings and connections with people
in the city itself.
For instance, up there is a meeting
with a professor who is a big businessman.
And so the subway system becomes a method
of utilizing all of the available space which
can serve dual mode uses.
Next.
Oh, well, you can leave MIT.
The extraordinary thing is that this
was 20 years ago, probably.
I'm trying to read what it says at the top.
To leave the white walls gray or paint them white is vandalism.
Your environment is changing.
Get yourself, get together with it.
No one knows better how to create your environment
than you do.
Does your environment respond to your needs?
What a statement of anarchy invitation.
This is one of the posters which I photographed at the time.
Next.
"Up against the Wall Street Journal," an urban imperialist.
This is a time when the form of the city
was politically significant to the students in the two
universities.
Next.
Herrey was MIT's real estate boss.
Next.
The university's response, the University and the City,
Harvard's University and the City.
These are all University reports saying how great things are.
Next.
There's a thesis done by Monika Unger called
"The Politics of Urbanity" on the history of the attempts
in Brussels, after the Manhattan plan,
to respond vigorously to the plan.
The plan was to internationalize Brussels, with tall buildings,
as the center of the European market.
And here are posters emanating from the society
itself saying no to Carrere, no to Venturi, no to Chernikhov,
no to Kroll.
Next.
Posters which set out the way in which local neighborhoods
should be fixed.
A whole set of items like this monthly magazine
for the urban struggles, information
about the development projects at Brussels,
the work of inhabitants' committees,
theaters, schools of architecture,
cinema, arts museums, all being formed together
to form a protest environment with educational material
in the form of daily posters on the left.
Next.
So all of this stuff is an attempt
to influence the form of the city,
often stopping negative things from happening.