**THIS RHETORICAL IMAGE** was produced while in design on the Manhattan Beach Library to demonstrate the absurdity of attempting to capture some kind of “seaside theme” in crafting the architecture of the building.

In America, we recoil from political elitism in Washington and state capitols. We resent that our elected and appointed leaders are not “just like us” that they seem to think they know more than us, that they hang out more with each other than with us. In the popular imagination, anyone can be president (or a senator or congressman) and therefore they should act accordingly, they should act like us. We are starting to feel the same about professionals, even doctors and attorneys, financiers, and university professors with tenure. Oddly, we don’t feel the same about actors and musicians and athletes. We readily accept their elitism. It seems the more formal the education the less regard afforded.

**AN ARCHITECTURE OF SELF EXPRESSION** lacking in any kind of personal restraint or social graces is how we might characterize the architecture of Manhattan Beach as distinguished from, say, traditional Pasadena, Santa Barbara, or Palm Springs.

**HOW ARE WE TO CHOOSE** one image over another plucked from the chaos of American architecture so acutely exemplified in the architecture of the city of Manhattan Beach?

**OR IS THERE ANOTHER WAY**, a more natural and fitting way with a more nuanced feeling for the social and environmental context of the people and place for which this building is conceived? (Manhattan Beach Library, Manhattan Beach, CA 2015)

In 2006, nobody had an iPhone nor did anybody want one. In the 15 years since 1.9 billion iPhones have been sold, not only does everyone want one but no one can live without one. Witness Coca-Cola (zero sold in 1886; seven trillion sold in 2021), Levi’s jeans and Nike shoes, movies and television, the single-family house and two-car garage. What’s good business we are told? “Give them what they want, the customer is always right.” But do people really know what they want, or is it that they want what they know (or have been exposed to via advertisement)? It is the paradox of desire and satisfaction that the satisfaction (or “knowledge” as in Genesis) comes first then the desire, not the other way around. Just ask Steve Jobs or John Stith Pemberton.

**POPULIST MOVEMENTS** are oxymoronic and cynical in that they require hierarchies of theorists and leaders while pretending otherwise.

**IDEOLOGICALLY BITTER** and with semantic slight of hand, Bernard Rudofsky capitalized on the 1960s era’s loss of faith in modern architecture and by extension all architecture and architects --and in so doing got himself an exhibit at MOMA along with international fame.

**WAVES OF SENTIMENTALITY** washed over post-war reconsiderations of urban design lead by “light touch” interventionists such as (Gordon Cullen (UK) and boulevardiers such as Kevin Lynch (US) both of whom produced theoretical works so superficial and so lacking in agency as to render them useless to anyone other than latter-day anthropologists interested in the vacuity of mid-20th century city planning and urban design.

**THE TOWNSCAPE IDEOLOGY** that first emerged post-WWII assumed that the modern city was an inevitably dreary place and to make it livable designers should employ such tools as colorful umbrellas, banners, and balloons-- to cover up the architecture instead of reforming it (Gordon Cullen, Townscape imaginings).

**THE ENDURING LEGACY** of the townscape ideology is evident to this day with updated imagery that is more technologically savvy and contemporary in feel but still intended to distract us from the supposedly harsh realities of modern city life.

When in the post-WWII years of the 20th century, the results of modern architecture had revealed the folly of our wholesale commitment to it coupled with our wholesale rejection of everything before it just as the commodification of building (“real estate development”) had secured its hegemonic grip on how things got designed and built in America (Rockefeller Center having been one of the last great urban design projects to escape the clenched fists and wooden noggins of its bankers and developers relatively unscathed, although narrowly—Hudson Yards clearly having not). By the time Jane Jacobs and her fans in city planning departments across the country had so contemptuously thrown architects under the bus, architects responded in a few ways, some defensively and defiantly, others apologetically and opportunistically.

**ONLY TOO HAPPY** to oblige the populist townscape ideology, developers across the country went all in on cosmetic urbanism and nostalgic decor to capture otherwise mostly bored and alienated populations content to live lives as consumers and customers. (Faneuil Hall, Boston, MA left; The Grove, Los Angeles, CA, right)

**HIPSTER TOWNSCAPE**--let’s be real-- is the only way to understand the cop-out that is the New York High Line.

By 1970, the guilt over what had in less than a half-century gone so terribly wrong combined with the disempowerment of the profession gave way in some quarters to a kind of throwing up of the hands or throwing in of the towel: “we have nothing to say and anyway no say, so let’s just give them what they want.” This translated into a kind of urban design more akin to carnival or festival design or no- or anti-design than anything resembling intentional urban design.

**IN THE ERA OF WARHOL**, it was only a matter of time before theorists in architecture picked up on that we were supposed to appreciate about populist architecture—although the impact of a soup can painting on the wall of one’s home is of a different order than that of a fast-food outlet on the street of a city. (Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas, 1972)

**SELF FLAGGELATION AND SUPREME CYNICISM** is the only way to characterize these ruminations of an architectural theorist who clearly also wanted to be a famous architect. (Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, 1972)

**SEMI SERIOUS ATTEMPTS** to create an architecture with popular appeal were ultimately undermined by their (entirely high modern) avant-garde ambitions. (Piazza d”Italia, Charles Moore, 1978, New Orleans, LA above; Disney Studios, Michael Graves, 1990, Burbank CA below left; Children’s Museum of Houston, Robert Venturi, Houston TX, 1992 below right)

I experienced this first-hand as I entered architecture school in the late 1970’s. For the pleasure of four years of busting my ass to become an architect, I realized that just prior and around then ideologically demeaning books masquerading as humanistic archaeology such as “Architecture without Architects” (Rudolfsky) and algorithmic humanism “A Pattern Language“ (Alexander) had come out while pandering, sentimentally superficial places like Faneuil Hall Marketplace (in Boston) and a thousand “themed” shopping malls had proliferated across the country. And while, yes, there is cooking without chefs, and sewing without couture, these treatises and their projects carried (and still do carry) a more insidious, threatening motive: elitist high modern (and by association architects’) blood in the water, populist sharks circling.

**JOKES AND TOYS** are fun at parties and boring as buildings.

**GEHRY’S POP ART** is more complex and accomplished than Oldenberg’s because Gehry’s is occupiable. (Fish Sculpture, Barcelona, Spain 1992, above left; Chiat Day Headquarters, Venice, CA, 1991, below left; Claus Oldenberg sculptures, right)

We live with this legacy today and we are worse off for it. We’ve gotten what people want filtered through what real estate developers and city planners think they want without any idea that people may not know what they want, without ever knowing that there’s so much more we could have if we were exposed to experiences other than the limited ones we have had. Or worse, there are architects who don’t believe we have anything to learn and have, therefore, learned little with now little to offer—the practice having been reduced to following the codes and the regulations, the protocols of the computer, shopping for ready-made, manufactured solutions and some vague notions of what “our clients” think they want reflexively recorded in dutiful meeting notes.

**CARTOONS FOR ADULTS** or fairytales or nostalgia need not patronize nor cloy even as they might aim to charm. (Beverly Hills Children’s Library, Beverly Hills, CA, 2013)

**NO ONE ASKED FOR THESE ROOMS** but now no one can live without them. (Council Chamber above; Children’s Storytime Room, below; West Hollywood Library, West Hollywood, CA 2011)

We witness little reflection or even acknowledgment that design is by definition intentional, that it can be affirmative, that there is something to be learned, and then (hopefully) skillfully applied, and that for those of us who make the effort to experience new and old things and learn from them we actually can design buildings and cities while those who haven’t cannot and therefore should not so cavalierly tell us what to do or how to do it.

Populism and the Poverty of Our Thinking in the Theory and Practice of Architecture and Urban Design /August 20, 2021 by Johnson Favaro

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