A SAFER MORE WELCOMING FRONT OF SCHOOL is created with this new classroom building situated to accommodate arrival and exit in a more humane and gracious manner than that to which this community is accustomed. (SMMUSD McKinley Elementary School new classroom building)
In America fifty years ago, safety and security were on everyone’s mind. Crime ran rampant, serial killers stalked, children disappeared. What were architects’ responsibilities in the face of all these societal problems? How would we correct for all the unsafe spaces we had so thoughtlessly and carelessly made in and around the buildings we designed and instead create “defensible space.” Sociologists, behaviorists, criminologists and public health officials advised us on how to design buildings.
THE SEVENTIES BROUGHT US CHAIN LINK FENCES on school campuses across the US in an attempt to make schools safe that in retrospect accomplished mostly self-fulfilling prophecy. Were the fences keeping people in or out? Did making students feel like prisoners and wrecking the neighborhood only render the fences that much more necessary? (SMMUSD McKinley Elementary School existing campus)
THE CONFIGURATION OF A SCHOOL’S BUILDINGS—its architecture—is a traditional way to create a safe environment. It employs buildings to insulate the school environment from surrounding streets and neighborhoods while also enhancing the neighborhood. (SMMUSD McKinley Elementary School campus master plan)
Then came climate change, the subject changed and architects were only too happy to respond. We endure fatuous, self-aggrandizing proposals for floating cities and ski slopes on power plants. But most environmental issues related to building are political problems (international, national and regional land use policy) and engineering problems (global resource utilization and generation) -- that is, problems both created by and now to be solved by politicians and engineers.
CRIME IN AMERICA achieved a kind of ubiquity and horror where not even supposedly benign suburban neighborhoods felt safe. That these neighborhoods harbor endless opportunities in which to hide hardly characterize them as “defensible space” But instead of rethinking the very idea of such a neighborhood we got the “gated community.” (Brian and Katie Maggiore and the neighborhood in which they were slain by the so-called Golden State Killer in 1978 (left); a typical Californian gated community (right)
PUBLIC HOUSING PROJECTS across the country emblemized all that was wrong with modern architecture—dehumanizing, anti-social and crime ridden. As corrosive as this architecture was for the integrity of a city, was it to blame for such social problems? Park La Brea in Los Angeles offers a counter example: the architecture’s the same but the problems are not. It’s considered a lovely place in which to live (Public housing in the Bronx, New York City (above); Park La Brea residential complex in Los Angeles (below)
Now with COVID-19, we hear predictions that commercial office space will disappear (everyone will work at home) or double (social distancing forever). Public spaces will vacate (a traditional idea if ever there was one) and operable windows will ventilate our schools’ classrooms (if sustainability didn’t do it maybe a global pandemic will). We get gratuitous talk that our “perceptions of space” will never be the same. But the global spread of a disease is a public health problem to be solved by our public health systems and (perhaps with the exception of minor modifications in hospital design) only at the margins does architecture have anything to do with it.
DEMAGOGUES LIKE OSCAR NEWMAN AND JANE JACOBS lectured on the tenets of “defensible space” blaming architecture and architects for all of society’s ills and suggesting they knew better how to create “crime free” neighborhoods. (The book “Defensible Space” by Oscar Newman published in 1976)
TENETS OF DEFENSIBLE SPACE offer little more than common sense and obvious measures that are, if anyone cares to look, imbedded in traditional urbanism. (Diagrams by Oscar Newman and Jane Jacobs (left); traditional pre-modern European street (right)
What is it about our profession that prompts so many to so immediately look to us for -- even instruct us on -- solutions to society’s immediate social, political, economic, and public health problems or worse, that we so immediately volunteer them? Indeed, architecture does contribute to the vitality, health and well-being of society and it is understandable that we as architects want agency, to be helpful. It is the immediate part that is delusional. In today’s America, it is not all that exciting to do your job in service to future generations but it is nevertheless still our job. Like any artist, we want the attentive audience, but we play the long game anyway with or without the attention.
MEDIEVAL TOWNS IN ITALY were hardly safe places, and yet they managed through architecture to achieve a degree of security with poise and grace. (Medici Palace, Florence (upper left); Castel Sant’ Angelo, Rome (upper right); Vasari Corridor, Florence (below left); City walls, Lucca, Italy (lower right).
THE AMERICAN BANK of the pre-modern era employed a kind of architecture that was meant to convey stability and security. The buildings were not only safe but looked safe. (NY Stock Exchange (left); traditional bank buildings in Portland OR (right)
In the 1970s, in response to the incriminations of the sociologists and the behaviorists, there emerged the concept of “autonomous” architecture. It was an unfortunate term but it meant this: “we have been building buildings for a while now, there is a reservoir of experience from within the discipline from which we can draw to make wise decisions, we got this.” This is sometimes referred to as “tradition”, but referring to tradition would not have had the avant-garde punch that was prerequisite in the 1970s (and still is). In the wake of the overreach and the consequences of the (often misapplied) tenets of early modernism, “autonomous” was instead interpreted as “we only care about the buildings not the people in them.”
ATTENTION GRABBING stunts offering dramatic responses to climate change mostly achieve attention, only marginally addressing the real challenges at hand. (Oceanix City on water, visualizations by BIG Architects, left; Power plant with ski slope, Copenhagen, DK by BIG Architects, right)
THE ORIGINAL CITY ON WATER Venice in Italy is founded on earth, however precariously. It was founded as a defensible city by people from the mainland escaping repeated foreign invasions. Its future depends not on architecture but a gigantic infrastructure project intended to keeping rising sea levels at bay and which will probably also damage marine life. (Venice (left) The MOSES project in the lagoon just outside of Venice (right)
SUSTAINBLE ENERGY SUPPLIES will come in the form of giant renewable energy infrastructure projects such as these solar and wind farms in southern California. The systems will impose their own impacts on the environment with which we will have to reckon.
Things do change. Societal relationships and hierarchies, cultural frames of reference and tastes, circumstances, materials and technologies are in a constant state of flux. We are not passive receptacles of these changes, we absorb them and respond and contribute to them in ways that are evolutionary, rarely revolutionary, mostly at the level of analysis of the situation at hand, more local than global, engaged not autonomous, informed by experience always with the long term in mind, and met with by the repertoire of tools at our disposal (drawings and models).
EXPANDING CLASSROOMS intended originally to accommodate flexibility in learning formats are now in the era of COVID 19 seen as highly advantageous. A happy accident that no one could have foreseen. (Classroom prototype, Foothill Country Day School, Claremont, CA)
OUTDOOR CLASSROOMS intended originally to offer learning opportunities outside of the formal classroom are now in the era of COVID 19 seen as highly advantageous. A happy accident that no one could have foreseen. (Outdoor classroom prototype, Will Rogers Elementary School, Santa Monica, CA)
THE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH rates in regard far behind the business, law or medicine schools, football or basketball programs at this university. How’s that working out? (UCLA Fielding School of Public Health redevelopment master plan)
NO ONE BUT AN ARCHITECT could demonstrate to this medical research institution, that instead of wasting money on long term commercial real estate lease agreements outside of campus it could accommodate as much as 2 million SF of additional floor area on campus financed through debt in place of such leases. (UCLA Center for Health Sciences proposal showing existing campus, upper left; demolition of low floor area capacity buildings, upper right; new high capacity buildings, lower left; campus at completion, lower right)
But that we continue to make bogus claims in a misplaced effort to claim currency distracts us from what we do best. We ask too much of architecture to think that it can solve society’s problems and too little of it by not demanding and investing in the level of excellence that can only be achieved with exacting work informed by experience and focused on the future. When faced with any new situation, we need not ask so quickly what we will do (the answer will always be what we have always done—we got this) but rather how we will do it.
SMART CITY PLANNING understands that land is our one truly unrenewable resource and that every move we make matters in conserving it. In placing this new public library on a site larger than what was required, we as the architect were obligated to conserve as much of the site for other uses. (Riverside Main Library, downtown Riverside, selected option, above; other options considered, below)
TENETS OF TRADITIONAL CITY PLANNING exemplified by the American City Beautiful movement of the turn of the last century (that Jane Jacobs so opulently disdained) were precisely those that drove the planning of the majority of the site outside of the library’s footprint Humane density, no floating cities necessary. (Mixed-used development proposal for the site adjacent to the new Riverside Main Library, Riverside, CA)