BUILDINGS are looking prettier than ever, thanks to the freedom that contemporary architects have these days to play with form. Meanwhile, many of our cities are falling to pieces, as the infrastructure that once bound them into functioning communities crumbles from years of neglect.
New Orleans exposed a breakdown in infrastructure and social policy that will not be repaired by a conventional formula of tourism, architectural nostalgia and gated communities. And the atomization of cities as diverse as Dubai, Beijing and Beirut, where the construction of glistening new urban centers masks growing social inequities at their edges, have only further exposed the hollowness of some contemporary urban-planning strategies.
So the most promising trend this year is a renewed emphasis in architectural circles on urbanism as a field for creative exploration. Architects like Eyal Weisman (in London), Teddy Cruz (San Diego), Philipp Oswalt (Berlin) and Rem Koolhaas (Rotterdam and just about everywhere else) have been striving to bridge the gap between architectural fantasy and stark political and social realities. Seeking to distance themselves from the current obsession with “star” buildings, they proceed from the assumption that we cannot create valid new architectural forms until we arrive at a deeper understanding of the era we live in.
The 10th Venice Biennale of Architecture, which opens this weekend, is the first to focus on entire cities rather than uncovering the latest architectural trends. Organized by Ricky Burdett, the exposition examines the effect of design in cities as diverse as Cairo, Mumbai, São Paolo, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Caracas.
Among the highlights is Al-Azhar Park in Cairo, conceived as an “urban lung” to provide relief for a city that has only one square meter of green space for each inhabitant, and a series of schools in São Paolo that function as around-the-clock community centers to help reduce violence among youths in the poorest slums. (Simply getting children off the streets is a starting point.) “I think projects like this give a raison d’être to architecture again, which is what the profession is looking for,” Mr. Burdett said.
In “Lago: How It Works,” a book to be published this fall, Mr. Koolhaas turns his penetrating gaze to the Nigerian city, a dense matrix of congested slums and infill markets that in many cases have devised their own court systems and electricity and water utilities.
In the 1970’s Lagos was the nexus of a stirring intellectual renaissance and a wave of sprawling, megalomaniacal urban planning projects. That optimism evaporated with the drop in oil prices at the end of the decade, and the city was left to fend for itself.
Today, the Nigerian government is trying to resurrect some of the old planning projects, clamp down on illegal street trade and rein in urban indiscipline in general. Yet in eight years of research, Mr. Koolhaas realized that what seems like chaos to outsiders is a complex and highly organized social organism. His analysis suggests that a democratic, informal urban planning model could be combined with aggressive planning to lift Lagos out of poverty without destroying the spontaneous freedom of daily urban life.
“In Lagos there is no choice, but there are countless ways to articulate the condition of no choice,” Mr. Koolhaas has said. “In New York, on the other hand, there’s a sense of infinite choice, but a very conventional set of options from which to choose.”
Of course Mr. Koolhaas, now 62, has been known for countering conventional wisdom about how cities really work since the publication of “Delirious New York,’’ a 1978 book casting the “city of congestion” as an antidote to the sterility of Modernist planning conventions. Today, he is joined by a younger generation of architects who are no longer content to consider architecture in isolation from larger urban patterns. Among them is Mr. Oswalt, 42, who has organized a show that arrives in December at the Van Alen Institute in New York and the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Titled “Shrinking Cities,” it examines the shrinking industrial centers on the fringes of the emerging global economy.
The show sheds light on the abysmal failure of planners to avert the gradual disintegration of cities like Leipzig, Germany; Ivanovo, Russia; and Detroit. The phenomenon of decay is often juxtaposed with a different form of assault: the insidious encroachment of suburban values. New Yorkers need only stroll through SoHo to get the point.
The exhibition, which originally opened in Berlin 2004, also resurrects some largely forgotten critiques of urbanization. It touches on the Disurbanist proposals of Soviet Constructivists like Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch, who challenged the thinking behind Western urban traditions in favor of a more rural Russian model, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, in which each family would be allotted an acre of land and the agglomeration would serve as a decentralized metropolis.
But the show’s most penetrating attacks are reserved for more recent urban strategies, particularly the argument that the salvation of cities rests in a so-called “creative class” that leads the way to gentrification.
“Shrinking Cities” is to travel in February to Detroit, where, a bit paradoxically, it will go on view in an abandoned 21,000-square-foot warehouse that will be the temporary home of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Designed by Andrew Zago, the museum is being opened, in part, with the goal of revitalizing the city center.
Finally, Mr. Weisman, an Israeli-born architect who is the recipient this year of the prestigious Stirling Prize for architecture, will open a series of lectures this fall at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. The talks are pegged to the release of “Hollow Land: The Architecture of Israeli Occupation,” a chilling book in which he explores the way the military selects targets in bombing and fortifying cities and how those strategies can re-emerge in civilian planning practices during peacetime.
His analysis is ideally timed. If the Modernist mass-housing programs of a half-century ago reduced a generation of urban poor to mere numbers in a machine, many of those projects are now being wiped away to make room for an equally troubling formula: gated communities, open-air malls and sanitized tourist enclaves that have exacerbated social inequities by making destitute children invisible.
Acknowledging the complexity of these issues is not enough. Thankfully, some architects have assumed the challenge of binding us back into a civilization whose fabric often seems on the verge of unraveling.
