THE BASIC BUILDING BLOCK of a city is its blocks made up of buildings that merge into blocks. This development seeks to model that principle with the hope that its neighbors (now vacant lots) will follow suit (5915 Blackwelder Residential Development, Johnson Favaro, Culver City, CA).
Do we think of the city we live in as our home? Rooms and hallways constitute what most of us think as a home and were we to think of a city as our home the corollary might be squares and streets. But how many of us do? It is more likely that we think of a city as a home base, a marketplace of relationships and acquisitions, an environment in which we go about our business of work and play. Our perpetual transience, mechanized mobility and the geographic extent of the environments in which we daily circulate hardly encourages the kind of intimacy we attach to our home.
THE TERM ARCHITECTURE is used metaphorically to describe the shaping of an environment in Reyner Banham’s 1971 appreciation of Los Angeles (in the way that software engineers deploy the word to describe algorithmic frameworks) and literally to describe the shaping of a city in Michael Dennis’ appreciation of Florence (Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham, 1971, left; Architecture and the City, Michael Dennis, 2020, right).
Reyner Banham, an Englishman, landed in Los Angeles in the 1960s and in 1971 published his appreciation of a city he considered our “post urban” future. Banham is of a particular kind of transplanted European or East Coast ex-pat who projects onto California the fantasy of a clean slate, the promise of release from traditional western culture and its moribund cities. “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” described environments—the beach, flats, freeways, and hills. Banham celebrates the wide-open geography, the physical and (supposed) cultural freedom of Los Angeles which while it had buildings was not defined physically or otherwise by them.
ONCE AN IDEAL the mobile city of the mid-century, no longer so mobile, has lost most of its allure for most Los Angelenos—the freeway now more a necessary evil and less a ticket to freedom. Across the country we pay the price in anonymous environments with damaging impacts on our environment (Banham above; Dennis below).
BUILDINGS SHAPED from the inside out emphasize the personal experience of an environment while buildings shaped from the outside in emphasize the social experience of a city (Mid-century Los Angeles architecture as described by Banham above; the Uffizi in Florence as described by Dennis, below).
CORRECTIVE MEASURES toward the repair of urban centers are illustrated through examples in Dennis’ book (Boston City Hall plaza above; downtown South Bend, Indiana, below).
Michael Dennis, a native Texan and Professor Emeritus at the MIT School of Architecture and Urban Design began thinking about cities in Europe around the same time that Banham arrived in Los Angeles. He lived in Italy and Greece for five years beginning in 1962 and arrived at Cornell University in 1968 where Colin Rowe, an Englishman, had in 1963 established its program in urban design. In the moment that Steve and I were in architecture school in the early 1980s, Michael and a few of his colleagues from Cornell were there. That moment turned out to be an inflection point in our trajectory as students and practitioners.
100 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE and the evidence show that compact cities—whatever shape they take—consume fewer natural resources, most importantly land our one truly unrenewable resource (“Environment and the City”, Michael Dennis, 2020).
In Michael’s most recent book “Architecture and the City” he makes a simple argument, one that took decades to distill with clarity and confidence: a city is more than an environment. The architecture of a city is its architecture. It is made up of buildings of a height mostly scalable on foot and so compactly arranged that they merge into one another. Only special buildings stand apart and there are few. The spaces between accreted buildings (blocks) and the streets that connect them are like rooms and hallways—a home—navigable on foot. Anything less is not a city.
LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI the 15th century Florentine theorist first coined the metaphor of the “city as a home” as the foundation upon which he and others then established principles of town planning (probably channeling ancient Roman theorist Vitrivius). The term “ideal” had nothing to do with “utopia” and only to do with what works (Alberti, above introduced 15th Century principles of town planning, below).
SABBIONETA in Emilia Romagna is a surviving example of a town deliberately laid out in application of the principles introduced by Alberti (Sabbioneta, Italy).
Wait, what? LA is a city. New York is a city. What about Salt Lake, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta? These are places where people feel at home, they do not look anything like what Michael describes, we call them cities and here chronology (less so geography) is key. These places would be unrecognizable to anyone alive in the first half of this nation’s existence, the pre-mechanized era, and only to those of the latter half, the industrial and post- industrial eras.
BIG, SMALL, MEDIUM are three examples of different kinds of places we call cities (Hong Kong, China and Castellina Chianti, Italy above and below left; Bordeaux France, right).
WE ALL LIVE IN A METROPOLIS most of us anyway. It is how we configure the metropolis that matters. The population of Italy is 50% greater than California (60.5 M vs 39.7 M and its land area 50% smaller (116.5 M sq. mi. vs 163.5 M sq. mi.)) (Florence Italy and environs, left; Los Angeles CA and environs, right).
IT’S NOT ONLY ABOUT DENSITY as Michael Dennis points out—it is how we distribute the density (The environment of towers above has the same density as the city of blocks below).
I grew up in the 1960s in a small town that became a suburb of San Francisco by the time I left. I, like 99.9% of Americans, had never experienced a piazza (town square) or vicolo (narrow pedestrian street) until I landed in Florence while in college in 1976 and then studied it and other “traditional” cities in architecture school shortly thereafter. I used to joke it took me about an afternoon to realize that a piazza is a good thing.
THE FAÇADE is the membrane of a building that gives definition to spaces on both sides of it (5898 Blackwelder Residential Development, Johnson Favaro, Culver City, CA).
5915 BLACKWELDER resides in a part of the LA metropolitan area that is particularly blown out—all vehicular arterials and parking lots (Map of LA with detail plan of La Cienega Boulevard at Fairfax Avenue and the Santa Monica Freeway).
PAVED ENVIRONMENTS can orient to people in cars or to people on their feet, ideally both—we have the means, our choice (La Cienega Boulevard at Fairfax Avenue and the Santa Monica Freeway, above; Siena, Italy below).
As Californians, Steve and I are thankfully free of the understandably distressing associations harbored by many of those from those European cities with their history of wars, plagues, stultifying traditions, suffocating tourism and bad plumbing. And therefore, as unlikely as it is in California in our lifetime that the model of the city that Michael Dennis describes will materialize, we readily, dispassionately accept that it is on balance still a better way—physiologically, psychologically, sociologically and environmentally -- than any other in which to arrange how we live.
AUTOMATED PARKING in combination with less parking could somewhat neutralize the hegemony of the vehicle in planning for building increments (5915 Blackwelder Residential Development, Johnson Favaro, Culver City, CA).
COURTYARDS AND LIGHT WELLS at the interior of the building are a time- tested technique with which to maintain daylight deep into the heart of buildings even as they accrete into blocks (5915 Blackwelder Residential Development, Johnson Favaro, Culver City, CA).
If even only book-learned and sporadically experienced (and mostly while in school or on vacation), it is nevertheless self-evident to us that cities that were built in the 4,900 years prior to the last 100 are neither irrelevant nor quaint and our regard for them neither nostalgic nor romantic. It is possible, especially as Californians, to disassociate the cultural baggage from what are objectively sound principles earned over millennia of experience and it is for this reason that we prefer the word “experience” over “tradition.”
CARS AND PEOPLE are not mutually exclusive—only that we should become smarter in how we accommodate both (Shoppers Lane Residential and Neighborhood Parking Proposal, Pasadena, Ca, Johnson Favaro, 1998).
COMPACT NEIGHBORHOODS WITHIN ARTERIALS may be one way to approach the model that Leon Battista Alberti first articulated in the 15th Century and that Michael Dennis has reaffirmed in the 21st (Shoppers Lane Residential and Neighborhood Parking Proposal, Pasadena, CA, Johnson Favaro, 1998).
The Los Angeles of the 1960s is unrecognizable today. It bears witness to Banham’s romanticism and the unsustainability of the vision he promoted. We will someday mature in our relationship with our machines and our technology and we look forward to the day when we apply them to improve and innovate time-honored and hard- won practices of city planning and urban design toward the creation of cities that look and work like home. Meanwhile, as practicing architects, we will not wait for just the right circumstances nor will we surrender to our circumstances or dwell on semantics. We will instead, in the place we call home, put into practice those principles however illusive or illusory the results.
INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION of a building is by no means prohibited by the concept of a building as a single module of several modules within a city block (Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA, Johnson Favaro, 2001).
TRY AS WE MIGHT to model the principle of a building as a building block of a city block not a single neighbor in the 20 years since this building’s completion followed suit (Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA, Johnson Favaro, 2001).