RETHINK: WHERE’S THE BIG IDEA?

Best known as co-author of Learning From Las Vegas and the bruising battle to build the National Gallery extension in Trafalgar Square, Denise Scott Brown argues that big ideas have defined architecture of the past century but wonders whether ‘depression modern’ can hold onto those ideas while doing good

‘South Street Philadelphia is derelict and dilapidated but, if these architects have their way, you will see, rising from the ruins . . .’ This was the opening sentence of a 1968 news report describing a plan for a low-income community. The reporter could not imagine that we might design anything other than tower blocks soaring over cleared land, and expected us to fit into her preconception of our vision.

Like many in urban Europe and America, she was swept away by Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Combining social observation, architectural prediction and an ideal, this image of cloud-searching high-rises, wide picture windows, roof terraces overlooking parkland and small aircraft joyriding above had seduced architects recovering from the First World War and tugged again at the imagination of their descendants as they renewed cities in the 1950s and 60s.

Corb’s big idea was high-flown and passionate. Its prognosis for the future was based on a broad world view and a long timeline. Not all architectural visions are big. Some describe a building or neighbourhood, cover closer futures or consider aesthetics rather than need. But most embody the value systems of their designers and project ways of life as well as views of cities.

Even today, the most dramatic derive their tone and ethos from the heady years of the 1910s and 20s, when manifestos circulated in Europe among young poets, philosophers, artists and architects. Their authors depicted the new world they believed would and should grow out of the turmoil of war, expressing zest and rebelliousness in terms intended to épater le bourgeois – blow the minds of the citizens, as their 1960s counterparts would say. Their ideas fuelled successive movements and still do. And they morphed easily into catchy slogans, inherited or invented – ‘form follows function’, ‘when the streets are straight the mind is clear’ (Corb) and ‘ornament is a crime’ (Loos). I admit to a nostalgic sympathy with architecture’s manifestos, even when they are inappropriate or posture self-importantly.

Big ideas expressed in slogans
There is no room here for even a potted history of architectural ideas, but a few key words may convey the feeling of some eras.

Early modern founding ideas included socialism, cubism, neue sachlichkeit, ‘truth to function and structure’ and finding inspiration from a great new industrial era. This statement by MJ Ginzburg in 1928 poignantly conveys the ideology: ‘One special circumstance that will be particularly significant in furthering the work of modern architects in Russia is the emergence of a new group of clients: the working masses, free of prejudices as far as taste is concerned, and not bound by tradition… Because of bare economic necessity the millions of workers have no love for the ornamental junk, the holy pictures and the thousands of useless articles that clutter up middle-class homes. These millions of workers must unquestionably be considered supporters of modern architecture. Their willingness to relinquish certain private desires – which make coherent planning so difficult – should make the transition to constructive building easier and help facilitate the industrialisation of the building process…’  His prophecies did not pan out but modernism began to put its mark on objects from toasters to skyscrapers.

Late modernism In the 1950s architects rejoiced that governmental financing and legislation had given them the control to ensure ‘coherent planning’ in urban renewal. Stripped of its revolutionary rhetoric, the Le Corbusierian ideal became the chosen vision in planning agencies, developers’ offices and schools. But reaction to the social harm it caused began to emerge.

In Europe, the brutalists and Team 10 presented an opposing vision with slogans including socioplastics, pop, streets in the air, twin phenomena, breaking the rules, and building the physical ‘counterform’ to the new society through collaboration with sociologists. This soon came up against architects’ and social scientists’ inability, through custom and training, to walk in each other’s shoes, and some, particularly Alison and Peter Smithson, retreated to earlier ideologies, following the ‘whiff of the powder’, as they called it, of early modernism. 

In the United States, Jane Jacobs offered Little Italy as a countervision and Louis Kahn, briefly an ally of brutalism, produced the Trenton bath house, his street studies, ‘master and servant’ spaces and ‘wanting to be’. Robert Venturi set out iconoclastic ideas on architecture under the rubric ‘complexity and contradiction’ and suggested ways to interpret history yet hold to modernism. This work, which helped to free architects from late modernism, was produced while the civil rights and Vietnam war struggles broadened and began to penetrate schools of architecture.

In the late 1950s social scientists rushed into well-funded planning departments, where they ribbed the architects for their social naivety but offered no vision themselves. Some architects proposed alternatives beyond the sentimental. The English expat Jacqueline Tyrwhitt published Patrick Geddes’ evocative proposals for refurbishing Indian villages and introduced his metaphor, ‘conservative surgery’. And the ideas and verbal images of David A Crane intrigued architects with emerging themes in planning; The Four Faces of Movement, City Symbolic and Painting on a River were a few. Geddes’ and Crane’s writings deserve to be better known. But powerful social forces unleashed in the US in the 1960s overtook this quiet evolution and upped the ante on vision attacks.

Social and systems planning The offensive was bi-pronged. Pressed by civil unrest, students of the new left turned radical and young social scientists turned activist. Social planning and advocacy planning were their proposals for countering urban renewal’s ‘war on the poor’. Gibes of elitist, do-gooder and masterplanner were hurled at architects, alongside accusations of physical bias, values blindness and ignorance of the basics of cities. Daniel Burnham’s famous ‘make no little plans’ gave way to ‘small is beautiful’ and La Ville Radieuse was denounced as long-ranged. Planners accused architects of designing for the distant 2020, the ‘year of perfect vision’, to avoid the work of making and implementing proposals for the present. How will you tie the ‘is’ of now to the ‘oughts’ of your plan, they asked, and: ‘What will you do about people hurting today?’ This happened as Allard ‘Dump Johnson’ Lowenstein asked student protesters: ‘What did you do after you marched on Washington?’

Although no visions emerged from the social planners, Herbert Gans and Thomas Reiner wrote on the need for thoughtful social ideas for the future, harking back to 18th century ideal communities, visions of the New Deal, and Communitas by Paul and Percival Goodman and Paul Goldberger. Paul Davidoff formed the Suburban Action Institute to help low-income people to live and work where the jobs were. The social planners found hippy communities too sectional to be applicable, but they interested architects.

Systems planning emerged from wartime researchers’ efforts to adapt the prodigiously developing computers to peaceful purposes.  Some chose transportation, where federal gasoline taxes could support large-scale regional studies of population and movement. Their visions took the form of transportation ‘models’, mathematical and ‘spatial’ rather than physical, backed by a new jargon. Their formulas allocated land in hypothetical settlement patterns, related to movement, socioeconomic conditions and other ‘variables’ and in line with assumptions – sometimes ‘simplifying assumptions’ – about urban relationships in the future.

I watched, surprised, as the social planners approved the mega-scope, all-embracing holism, and scary simplifications of the systems planners, without finding their visions more terrifying than those of the architects. Only Crane cried out against their unwarranted assumptions and procedural ineptitudes. And the students were so enamoured that I concluded some sceptics had better learn the rudiments of systems urbanism while its thinking was still simple enough for outsiders to spot its mistakes. So I took courses. I found that their computer-generated maps, complexly beautiful even in the early 1960s, derived from central place, rent, and gravity and potential theory, the ‘city physics’ whose elegant diagrams of how social and economic forces lie on the land were already my muse. Combined with Gans’s ideas, they suggested ways out of the Smithsons’ dilemma in translating social to physical. 

It was all, in a sense, postmodernism. This philosophy originated far from architecture, among social and religious thinkers responding to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.

They began with the Holocaust. How could visions be propounded in good faith after this event? They both documented and called for a ‘loss of innocence’. To artists, this suggested that irony and self-deprecation be themes for the day. As they talked, riots erupted on the streets. Visions of protest, including ‘I have a dream’ and the maligned ‘political correctness’, were myriad, but those that pushed the planners had to do with equity, diversity, multi-culturalism, awareness of multiple values, taste cultures, popular culture, the inability of physical planning to effect social change (Corb’s ‘architecture or revolution’ was wrong) and scepticism about aiming to ‘do good’. This social vision was one of our routes into a valid postmodernism. 

Another was artistic. Artists, tuned to social eruptions and bored with abstraction, now embraced realism and, via their lost innocence, commercial culture, considered ‘American’. The super-real imagery of pop art emerged just as social planners asked architects, ‘Why don’t you study the urban sprawl environment that you hate, to learn what others in the society find in it?’ We were off to Las Vegas and Levittown. Out of those studies emerged ‘ugly and ordinary’, the duck and the decorated shed, ‘symbol in space before form in space’ and our contemporaries’ conviction that our big idea was neon. Indeed, symbolism and the ignored function of communication in architecture (‘communication builds community’) have been important themes for us. Yet other ideas condition our design. For example, a muted anti-vision – ‘the vision thing: why it sucks’, Venturi wrote – and an emphasis on everyday and ‘second glance’ architecture; also interdisciplinary connections, systems, context seen in context, functionalism reassessed for today, generic architecture (‘form accommodates function’ Venturi again) planning for change, mannerism, diversity, awareness of many values, openness to many delights, humour in architecture, the relation between public and private, mapping for design, the street through the building, land use and transportation planning inside buildings, and socioplastics on the ground.

In the 1970s and 80s, Nixonism, Reaganism, and Thatcherism hit. The new left became the Me Generation and some architects were persuaded that because the social planners said architecture couldn’t help, they shouldn’t try. The way was open for Philip Johnson’s PoMo and his slogan, ‘I am a whore’. Seeing our beliefs jettisoned, we disclaimed the progeny we had helped to create. Then flurries and eddies of ideas followed without doing much harm, until neo-modernism. This was modernism without the rhetoric and on steroids. It scorned the notion of function and, although ‘no allusion’ is its slogan, NeoMo is PoMo to me, using early modern rather than classical sources. Today, new urbanism brings postmodernism to suburbia and crowds out all other ideas in urban design. And sustainability is an awakening giant.

Last year Gans essayed his own utopia in Imagining America in 2033. It presents ‘a fictional but achievable… vision of progress with fairness’. His manifesto, warm-hearted, modest yet incisive, sketches broad ideas, mostly social and some physical. But it omits a social vision for the infrastructures of a mass society. Can we discuss job formation while ignoring the banking system, for example? How will the economic upheaval since Gans wrote affect his prognosis? Will ‘Yes we can!’ make his ‘achievable vision’ likelier?

Ideas in buildings
Ideas may be expressed by buildings themselves. Some symbolise their dignity through adopting the ornament of classicism. Others scrape this off and proclaim a new world. Some project images through neon and LED. The Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens says to me, ‘the lives of people in multistorey housing are as complex as those on the ground. Their privacy should be protected and their buildings offer elements of a village. They should be recessive on the site, with the major identity of the project purveyed by landscape.’

Concepts may be broad or narrow. To meet the requirements of clients, architects must investigate fields beyond their own. Some approach with a narrow palette, others with a wide one. If too narrow, the design won’t meet the requirements; if too wide, it faces questions of relevance. A limited knowledge base, derived from navel gazing within the architect or the profession, bedevils most of architecture’s big ideas. And how do you go from an idea to a physical reality? This starts a long process. The step after conceptual design – design development – introduces more preconceptions in the formal grammars that architects use despite their theory that form follows function. Then it is on through processes of development and approval that become successively more public, where architects meet Crane’s ‘thousand designers’, each wanting to have sway. Here ego, all around, makes form. At the end of a project, what is left of the big idea? It depends. Architects hope that ‘rationality’ (theirs) will prevail, but where an idea is maintained, it is more likely to be through the power of the client than the power of the idea. Architects can help by satisfying the client and paying respect to all those who announce themselves as concerned – difficult for a person with a big idea to do, and sometimes useless in any case. 

A hundred years later, what ideas are left? New uses and new ways make the old inscriptions seem dated, but the forms may serve beyond the life of their generating concepts. Princeton’s early dormitories were built to follow the educational principles, now long-abandoned, of the university president, Woodrow Wilson. They have elegantly survived numerous policy changes and conversion to the college system. They have defined Princeton’s character for ever.

Do big ideas make better urbanism?
They can be so wrong. Good art can emerge from incorrect ideas but the harm caused by 1930s urban thinking suggests the opposite for architecture – indeed, some would say that every architectural big idea since 1900 has been a catastrophe. This is too simple. La Ville Radieuse was remarkably prescient and still has influence worldwide, but the idea needed to be used appropriately. The same holds for ‘streets in the air’ that had to be removed for security. They have been successful in places and for activities where enough movement can be generated to make them safe and useful. These were brave ideas; wrong, perhaps, when built, but pertinent eventually. Perhaps they were ‘right to be wrong’.

Then there are bad concepts, posturing, authoritarian, embodying the notion that architects should face only ideas that interest them. A recent example is: ‘Mantownhuman… An architecture that imposes its will on the planet…’ A supporter adds: ‘No more limp-wristed architecture but buildings with a hairy chest and a firm fist.’ Why does putting ‘man’ into manifesto equate with planet domination?  I say, stop it before it builds.

The early moderns believed that difficult problems challenged their creativity.  Can today’s hard times demand our best imagination? Will we find a lyrical new depression modern?  We architects have much to offer. Our training gives us the ability to co-ordinate many ideas and reach a longed-for reality. But we must learn to apply these skills to a broader knowledge base – and with enough training to ask the right questions. Holding to the passion of the ‘manifesteers’ yet shunning unworthy causes, we must turn large, but no longer innocent, hearts, hands, minds and eyes to thinking well, doing good, serving need, and making beauty.

Denise Scott Brown is an architect, planner and urban designer, and a theorist, writer and educator as well as principal of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates.

Photos: Venturi Scott Brown and Associates Inc/Frank Hanswijk