Week 9: Morphology, History, (New)Urbanism

Key readings:

Calthorpe: The Next American Metropolis

Rossi: The Structure of Urban Artifacts

Rowe & Koetter: Crisis of the Object: Predicament of Texture

As I read through Calthorpe’s vision of the Next American Metropolis, I found myself becoming increasingly critical. He uses data to back up his argument, but I can’t help feeling that this often has his own spin on it. He claims that ‘the car wants to travel more’ (p. 27), quoting an 82% rise in vehicle miles against a 21% population growth between 1969 and 1990, but this is surely also bound up in the increasing affordability of the car and petrol, and increased car ownership, in part a lifestyle choice? His portrayal of a hierarchy of public and private buildings seemed too black and white to me, ignoring the increasingly complex nature of public/private space. And whilst I agree that commuting by train is preferable to each person driving to work, he seems to have a very romanticised idea about how comfortable this would be…

Calthorpe's preferred choice of reading location?

One interesting point of contention between the American Metropolis and Collage City concerned the nature of outdoor space. I am inclined to agree with Rowe and Koetter that an increased complexity of outdoor space is fundamentally more interesting than a barrier free expanse of public land. Calthorpe by contrast called for all exterior space (at least all that meets the street, given his strongly defined public and private spaces) to be in the public domain. He equates closed off spaces with the negative image of gated communities, which I do not think that Rowe and Koetter are advocating when they call for a complexity of outdoor space.

The main argument of the Crisis of the Object is that objects (which have valuable qualities despite their tendency to attempt neutrality to their urban context) should become part of the urban texture so that both figure and ground are enriched. Having seen today some images of Zaha Hadid’s proposal for Zürich Airport (and also thinking about her CMA-CGM tower in Marseille), it is evident that this idea is not universally held; the ego of the architect allows itself to be bigger than that of the city.

Zaha's object is obviously attempting to dissolve into the urban fabric of Marseille...

Throughout the Architecture of the City, there were constant implicit references to ideas from Umberto Eco (which it predates): the changing meanings of buildings over time, a split between function and type (semiotic implications of a church that is used as a cinema, for example). In some ways Rossi also shares common ideas with Latour, in that social relations are embedded in the architecture of the city. A lot about a city’s social and economic structures can be understood by looking at the patterns of land ownership across the city.

As Stephen pointed out with reference to Koolhaas in the lecture, figure ground plans are limited in that they only work on one level. My site in Marseille is a good example of this limitation, despite being in a historic city centre. Although demonstrating the density of the block at ground level, a figure ground plan would oversimplify the complexity of different private and semi-public spaces at higher levels.