If you love the way this looks you can stop reading now.
Every town seems to have a place like this. Funny that you never see it on the cover of the tourist guide books.
If, like me, you’re in awe of our propensity to build environments that people dread being in and wonder why we do it, read on. This isn’t a comprehensive list. Everything in our culture affects how we build, but I think these five trends have made significant contributions to the ugly, soul crushing architecture plaguing America for the last 50 years.
1. Fossil Fuels
Cheap energy freed Architects from the constraints that traditionally governed the size and shape of buildings. Electric lights, central heat and air conditioning replaced the use natural daylight, cross ventilation, and the careful placement of mass and shading to control the indoor environment. Without those constraints, architecture turned into a form of modern art with buildings as abstract sculptures.
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
Architects became more interested in pushing boundaries and impressing each other than making places people like to use.
2. Industrialization
Like almost everything else, buildings changed from being hand built to machine built during the industrial revolution. Surfaces became smoother, edges straighter, and materials modular.
It’s hard to screw up an arcade, but almost every strip mall has one that’s mechanical and dead.
Straight lines are rare in nature. Modern buildings appear more machine-like than natural. While Architects were playing with the shapes of buildings, the construction process became more like an assembly line and the small creative details were lost in the interest of efficiency.
3. Automobiles
The increasing number of progressively larger and faster cars required more and more space until they became a prevalent factor in the design of buildings and the spaces between buildings. At the neighborhood scale, parking became a dominant driver of design. At larger scales, efficiency of traffic flowing through a place overshadowed the needs of it’s residents.
Cars are very happy in this environment. People - not so much.
Cars diminish the physical health of people through accidents, pollution and lack of exercise. They also diminish the mental health of people who live in relative isolation. We have given cars too high a priority in design for 50 years. We need to be clear about the costs, and find the right balance. We should be designing to make driving less convenient and walking, biking, and using trains for long trips more convenient.
4. Specialization
A century ago buildings were smaller and there was much less infrastructure in them. One Architect (or Master Builder) designed the entire building and oversaw the construction. Over the past century, while the detailing become simpler, the stuff inside them became more complex. Electrical wiring, indoor plumbing, heating and cooling were added. Telephone and data infrastructure became necessary. Kitchens moved inside. Security and fire protection systems were invented, and so on.
A school corridor with the ceiling removed.
At least half of a modern building’s construction budget is spent on systems that did not exist 100 years ago. One person can no longer have expertise in all of those areas. The traditional Architect’s role has been fragmented into a team of people. On a large building hundreds of people participate in that role. With so many people involved, and so many more factors vying for attention, developing a place with soul has become more difficult.
5. Top Down Control
Finally, and I think the most problematic and unrecognized, has been an attempt at controlling our environment without a thorough understanding of how it works. We’ve zoned each specialized building to distinct areas. Houses, apartments, offices, retail, and manufacturing buildings are clustered in groups of like buildings making automobiles necessary to cover the distances between functions. This is top-down centralized control which is usually overly simple never seems to work as well as organic bottom up growth.
Aerial view of suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. Building uses are segregated.
Natural ecosystems consist of a complex tapestry of interdependent species. We plant crops and keep animals in large groups because it’s more efficient. As agriculture has become more and more mechanized those groups became larger. The assembly line approach to farming has made us more productive in the short run.
However, we’ve now learned (at least some of us have) that monolithic row crops and large herds are vulnerable to disease and topsoil destruction. Industrial agriculture uses toxic chemicals to treat the symptoms rather than using nature’s more elegant organic solution of evolving an interlocking system of checks and balances.
Orange Trees Near Fresno, California. Looks a lot like Phoenix from the air.
When the same simplistic, monolithic thinking is applied to the built environment similar pathologies result. Like ecosystems, the built environment was healthier before we tried to exert control over a system we didn’t fully understand. Before codes and zoning, development was allowed to self organize from the bottom up. It was messy and complicated, but buildings naturally intermixed and places full of life sprouted up between them. Our overly simple rules killed that.
So, what now?
I see the last 50 years as an explosion of architectural experimentation enabled by new technologies. Because technological development is increasing at an exponential rate, I expect the experimentation to continue. That’s fine, but let’s learn from some of our failures and move on.
Hilversum, Netherlands. What’s so hard about this?
I’m a fan of Christopher Alexander’s books and the New Urbanist movement (if you haven’t seen it yet, watch this presentation by Andrés Duany). Both are bottom up approaches that try to identify things we’ve done right in our past designs. That, I think, is the right idea.
