On the Park Bench - Author's Forum: Architecture & the City

i wonder what jeffrey tubin is doing right now i think we're live oh we are so we're going to let people uh come in wander in for a few minutes the numbers are climbing and then we're going to begin okay again we're waiting a little bit for more people to arrive are we audible to the audience now or if we are okay so welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation it's brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is intended to be a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing and emerging issues that we're all facing right now let us know if you'd like to hear about something or from someone and we'll try to line it up in a future webinar today's conversation is our inaugural author's forum uh webinar it's it's on the book architecture in the city with author michael dennis and speaker interviewer dan solomon author's forum on urbanism is a monthly series featuring authors in an hour-long interactive discussion of recent publications on urbanism the producer of this series off the camera is urbanist and architect dhiru tadani the author's form and urbanism will be held once a month on tuesdays from 12 to 1 pm eastern time next so you can share your thoughts on on the park bench uh there is the url next and you can register for our next authors forum on urbanism which is going to be held tuesday december 8th at again 12 p.m eastern time and it's going to be on the book space in anti-space the fabric of place city and architecture with authors barbara littenberg and stephen peterson and interviewer philip langdon and you can register that at cnu.org resources on the park bench next so my name is rob studiville i'm senior communications advisor and also editor of the online journal on the public square a cnu journal and with us today is michael dennis who is the author of architecture in the city many years ago michael was at cornell in ithaca new york my home city and now michael is professor emeritus at mit and author of court and garden from the french hotel to the city of modern architecture joining michael dennis is dan solomon an architect based in san francisco who is principal at methuen in architecture and urban design firm dan is also a co-founder of cnu and an author in his most recent book is love versus hope housing in the city recently an entire journal publication was dedicated to dan's book and that included an essay by michael dennis next so architecture in the city is comprised of essays and articles written from 1977 to 2020 and it argues for the re reconnection of architecture and landscape as a function of the city it also makes a strong case for the environmental imperative of urbanism on the cover is an aerial photograph of florence italy so both michael and dan will present and then they will have a back and forth discussion and then we will go to q a so please use the q a function of zoom to ask questions as they occur to you without further ado i'm going to pass this along to michael dennis okay thank you rob and thank you dhiru if you're listening thanks to cnu and especially to den it's a bit of a challenge to talk about a book that no one has seen or read except perhaps dan and i um so i thought i would start let me share the screen here ah going the wrong way sorry start over again there we go ah how do i go back so i thought i would start with a whitman sample box of contemporary architectural chocolates these are these buildings these projects are probably much admired by contemporary architecture students i might have even been enthused about them when i was a student had i seen them but my book is not about this and it's not against these per se it's about architecture as an integrated part of the city uh the book has excuse me the book has very personal underpinnings i grew up in a detached one family house in a small texas town in architecture school i learned to design freestanding modern buildings there was no discussion of urbanism at the time and no courses about urbanism by the time i graduated from architecture school i had lived in sherman texas austin texas fairbanks alaska and eugene oregon not a real city among them afterward with a travel scholarship i went to europe can you imagine arriving in paris france from sherman texas or eugene oregon to discover a real urban city with integrated landscape etc or then arriving in florence to discover urban architecture architecture in integrated into the city a city with almost no freestanding buildings i can assure you that this the uffizi and the palazzo vecchio in the background which is this building right here we had nothing like that in sherman i could tell you and certainly nothing like the pity palace this fantastic uh connection of urban elements the the vasari corridor church and the bridge the ponte vecchio and the uffizi and the palazzo vecchio were astounding to me that architects could in fact adapt their buildings to help form the spaces of the city we didn't have that either in sherman texas so that forms the first uh article in the book about the uffizi in that corridor was remarkable to me also in that there were virtually no freestanding buildings only the baptistry and the duomo or the cathedral were the only truly freestanding buildings today with towns and cities you could probably imagine the reversal of that there are almost no contiguous buildings so in pursuit of urbanism and urban buildings i sort of uh fell into or discovered the french hotel which was interesting because it had a different kind of composition from it was anti-classical and anti-modern at the same time and yet it was a way of doing a flexible planning system that could make urban things and private accommodation at the same time in another way its um english cousin the london townhouse uh was inseparable from urbanism it formed the streets and squares of georgia and london and you can't really imagine these townhouses without their urban connections they're the streets and the spaces that they align on this is in some degree of contrast to the french hotel which you see on the upper right hand side finally then and these are the first three excuse me first three articles following the uffizi uh article is uh about the venetian facade uh to me the venetian palace is to the art of the facade as the french hotel is to the art of the plan the quintessential level of achievement professional achievement so these chapters then in the book are followed by a series of others articles or chapters highly illustrated focusing on various aspects of urbanism and design so dan over to you before um we get into our discussion of the ideas in architecture in the city thank mike on behalf of all of us uh for the gigantic effort to create this book over a long period of time it's an artifact that i will cherish as i cherish few other things my wife my car maybe a few other people and a few other artifacts it's a real treasure and it's a house of treasures a big part of the content of the book is the beautiful physical artifact of the book itself every page is beautiful every drawing is beautiful the prose is beautiful 280 pages without a single clumsy sentence mike is telling us that one of the joys that great urbanism provides for us is it splendor pure aesthetic pleasure not to embrace that pleasure is to be a philistine to miss out on one of the best parts of being human like never listening to music i think mike's role is like that of a great musicologist who reveals the secrets and the intricacies of bach to those who might otherwise not hear them or appreciate them but it's not only the secrets and the intricacies that michael reveals he reveals the magnificence the sheer sensual beauty without court and garden and now without architecture in the city to reveal the secrets of the french hotel the knowledge that knowledge of the art of the architectural plan at its most virtuosic would simply be lost similarly the splendors of george and london venetian facades and the other subjects of loving chapters so thank you mike thank you for this huge enrichment to our lives and our knowledge i know i'm not the only one who will retrieve it from my shelf from time to time just to savor it mike has bravely attempted the kind of book that many of us attempt but few succeed at he succumbed to the temptation or the neurotic compulsion late in life to create an autobiographical anthology summation of everything he has done and learned and thought over a long lifetime very few of us have a life story that constitutes a coherent narrative mike is an exception if you string together everything he has ever thought everywhere he's ever taught everything he has been moved by over 50 years or more it makes sense it makes a good book it has an ending that grows seamlessly from the beginning and parts that are part of something a life well a life lived a life well lived and lived with purpose to define refined and pass on to others a grand idea to do justice to his endeavor i think it's important and fair not to mix up mike with his great mentor colin rowe i suspect it was colin who discovered the path and pointed mike along it but mike denies this but it was mike who made the journey who fleshed out the map with study and exploration that neither colin nor any of the other brilliant road disciples and acolytes had the patience the persistence and the sheer talent to produce to produce what one can call i think a master work in preparing for this morning i admonished myself not to just gush about his book but i'm afraid i just did gush so my apologies to the audience and i promise to be more critical in a few minutes back to you mike yeah thank you dan uh thank you doubly uh okay this is where we uh have a slight diversion of opinion it's difficult for me at least to disagree with dan's introduction i'm flattered at the description uh to me it's now clear however that uh we're in a very serious unprecedented environmental predicament the sixth extinction there have been five previous extinctions of life before there were humans this one is caused by we humans global warming is not the only environmental issue today by a long shot but it is the elephant in the room and we're already past a tipping point but scientists say that if we exceed an increase of two degrees centigrade global warming will become unstoppable resulting in catastrophic unmitigated disaster you can see where we are right now and if it continues as projected we're going to pass two degrees of centigrade increase over pre-industrial levels by 2050 if not 2030. so we have very little time to act and change this fortunately this is something that architects and urbanists can do something about it is in fact central to what we do because all of these problems are a result of the way we live we need to drive less consume less live smaller and more complex more compactly and this is a major challenge due to the form of our towns and cities this little diagram right here is to me the problem of american towns and cities if you go back to the beginning of the beginning the middle of the 19th century the great landscape architect frederick olmsted proposed that begrudgingly i think that we needed dense uh town centers or downtowns uh for business purposes but that we should live in the forest in the landscape beyond it and he built parkways to get out uh to these uh external uh houses single-family houses it's important to note that two-thirds of americans live in detached single-family houses and you can see in the upper right here photograph of boston with commuters coming in from the south and there's an equal condition like this from the north 66 percent two-thirds of americans live like this and like this this is america coast to coast outside the major centers this is hot springs arkansas by the way this graph clearly illustrates to me at least the proportions of energy and carbon produced by the way we live and you know that it's to say to state to simple facts burning fossil fuels produce carbon which produces global warming which produces all kinds of other uh disastrous things so two-thirds of america lives in households like this uh that use this much carbon uh this much energy and produce this much carbon on the other hand one-third of americans live in urban conditions like these dan and i in san francisco and me and boston live like this with this green urban single-family attached thing and and the use the energy use and production of carbon drops again uh when you go to urban multi multi-family housing it's i think interesting to point out that european towns and cities and villages for that matter are all urban they're they're not composed of freestanding one-family houses with a downtown in the center a comparison of atlanta and barcelona uh illustrates the point they're both have populations of just a little over five million people and uh the urban area in atlanta is 4 280 kilometers square kilometers and in barcelona it's 162. if you look at the emissions it's 7.5 tons and 0.7 tons for barcelona so there's a kind of connection between the data and the way we live and it's going to mean if we're going to solve the problem we have to think of a new way to organize ourselves another comparison is formerly is a bordeaux and hudson yards in new york city on the right-hand side these are both both of the plans are at the same scale one of them architecture has hegemony over the city and the other one the city has hegemony over the architecture and i would argue that architecture and education need to be reformed if we're ever going to be able to deal with the problem and i think that's what the book is about and i see this chapter which dan is probably going to dispute being integral to the first parts and it's up to us to make not only solve the problem but to make it beautiful and joyful and livable at the same time so dan back to you okay for those of us who know him or those of us many of us who hold dear their old dog-eared copies of court and garden michael dennis the urban esthete is no surprise and the first 221 pages of architecture in the city are what he's always been good old mike a passionate advocate for the intelligence that creates a fragile subtle hard-won equilibrium between the private needs and desires of people in the public realm of the city physical manifestation of our shared humanity what is something of a surprise at least it was to me is the michael dennis of the 12th chapter pages 222 to 260. new mike a passionate and well-informed environmentalist reacting with eloquent panic the maltusian apocalypse that is nearly upon us or is upon us i would venture to say that mike's purpose in writing the book is to argue that old mike and new mike are really the same person and that new mike's concerned necessarily embrace those of old mike what one might call the dialectics of old mike and new mike or at the heart of the book the attempt is to make the case that a lifetime of love and study of the splendors of world urbanism is crucially relevant to address the environmental calamity i say that the weakness of the book that has no other weakness is that this claim of acute relevance remains a mere assertion without rising to the level of an argument all the data in the handsome but largely incomprehensible graphs and charts of chapter 12 make a convincing case that he just has that dense cities are the only choice for human survival but there is no convincing argument that the brilliant and beautiful resolution of the conflicts between private and public the subtle resolutions of this conflict that old mike has so lovingly cherished and documented are really a necessary part of the survival imperative the new mic of chapter 12 is like a five-star chef arguing that an exquisitely refined cuisine arguing for an exquisitely refined cuisine on nutritional grounds not that it is intrinsically good but that it's good for you that's a fine thing to assert but it's a tough case to argue for many of us the assertion is good enough to love your book michael but we are left with the disquieting thought that the concluding chapter is missing that chapter q for the slides margaret if you want to start the slideshow wrong slideshow there we go that chapter could be called environmental urbanism and it would have formal analysis and aesthetic pleasure like the french hotel chapter but directed at the morphological impacts of transit sea level rise of storm water management waste collection of energy energy generation and the like unfortunately there are only a few candidates in the world for inclusion in this chapter perhaps none more complete than the hammer b district of stockholm as more hammer bees are built in the world maybe mike owes us and maybe michael is himself yet another beautiful book perfectly timed to end at the right moment okay thanks dan um i dan this is a surprise for you uh i don't agree with you about hammerbee uh i think it's not really urban i think the streets are too wide the buildings are isolated modernist buildings it doesn't make blocks and all of the other arguments about this is an aerial photograph of part of stone across the water from hammersmith it has streets and blocks and squares and parks and almost no through ways cutting through it on the other hand this part down here is hammersby it has too much open space the streets are too wide uh there's not a kind of integral relationship i would argue between landscape and and the urbanism and uh it looks like right here for example uh the xylem bounds of early 20th century uh germanic housing and it has buildings that look like these too hardly an argument for an integration of architecture in the city so um i think the last chapter is to be written by architects not by me and by by younger people coming along uh dealing with the issues uh that are contemporary issues but not forgetting about the traditional city and traditional principles of architecture and urbanism i'm i'm old enough that i can argue this because i am old uh so with that uh i'm going to turn off the screen share and we can have it have an argument how's that i think the la the last chapter might begin with a critique of hammerbee and the critique hammerbee is more than one thing in a transitional project from modernism to what comes after modernism and environmental urbanism and it's not all the way there and not every part of it is beautiful but some parts of it are beautiful and one of the things most beautiful about it is the way that it takes stockholm's traditional waterfront building typology of u-shaped courtyards that bring the presence of the water deep into the blocks and they've adapted that and they've adapted it quite beautifully to modern architecture and there is a a theme running through it which is the part of the landscape is directed to storm water management part of it is formal landscape and part of it is naturalistic landscape and they're put together quite artfully and beautifully and make some beautiful public spaces beautiful places to be in and live especially for children for children so b is not the last word and it shouldn't be the last word but it's important transition and it's a transition that can and should embrace traditional urbanism and i think that's the argument that is yet to be made convincingly well i would agree that it's better and more sustainable than a suburbia of uh detached uh single-family housing i probably would agree that it's a kind of transitional piece as well it's not that we need to go back and excuse me go back and build things today that are exactly like traditional cities there's a lot a lot of room for uh interpretation and expansion i do think in hammersby most of the architecture much of it is not good some of it is not good let's say to be fair uh most of it is overactive and uh it tends to supersede the urbanism the nice thing about traditional cities is that let's say a city like barcelona there are lots of um modern buildings in barcelona in their serda fabric of barcelona but they are absorbed easily because the urban plan has hegemony over architecture in other words the the urban realm only begins to disintegrate as you move out and architecture gets more active and takes over to be center stage instead of urbanism and i think you can find you can make sexy buildings within the fabric of traditional cities well i think you know the i'm writing your last chapter that you need to write and stockholm is a very interesting case study which is a largely i guess 18th century city 18th century and earlier city that was after world war ii badly damaged by modern architecture and modern planning um and the after a period in the 20th century of building beautiful urbanism uh under the influence of the arts and crafts movement garden cities movement and the probably the most fully realized vision of camilo city's name of the book the city planning according to templates according to artistic principles yeah town building according to artistic principles instead of um so stockholm is an amazing record of different kinds of urbanism not all of it not all of it ancient some of it ancient some of it fairly modern some of it extremely damaging to the earlier parts and some of it not extremely damaging uh quite beautiful in its own right um and it i think it points the way i think you you and it both point in the same direction possibly you're you're very lucky you know not only to have grown up in a city like san francisco but to have an urban fabric within which you work i said the other day i think you're the most urban of the new urbanist if you consider yourself to be a new urbanist you were at least a founder of it and all of your buildings are in fact integrated into the city fabric of san francisco or san jose or wherever they are and and that's you're quite lucky in that regard the city is better off for it um how things transform from here on i don't know whether we will be able to overcome the the problems of global warming and and the environment i don't know it's very hard to be optimistic when you think back to that first slide what students are taught to do and what architects do do today uh i will back up a little bit and say hammer beat is like in one sense a breath of fresh air relative if you think about that first slide uh with all those sort of goofy buildings i don't know what's going to happen maybe we should uh it's been 35 33 minutes maybe we should uh open it up or do you have questions or no i think let's open it up too more intelligent questions okay well i wanted to remind everybody to please put some questions in in the q a and uh we can um uh get to them as as we as we can and really start a good conversation um i i just wanted to i thought it was a fascinating point that that dan solomon had made that [Music] to not be interested in urbanism is like not being interested in music i wanted to ask how is it that many people seem to have lost the appreciation for urbanism and if that is true how do we get it back by reading michael dennis well let's say a word about that huh um i i think historically something happened in the kind of transformation happened in the middle of the 18th century which conspired with the transformation that happened in the middle of the 19th century to produce the kind of modern condition that makes it difficult to produce high level urban designs urban conditions in the 18th century the transition to freestanding iconic buildings in the beginning it was buildings like in florence had always been contiguous buildings party wall buildings and gradually the the sensibilities transformed as society changed and there was more emphasis on the individual in society rather than royalty buildings accommodated that and gradually became uh freestanding buildings like the petite tree known in paris in 1862 i guess it was and that made buildings like us that they they were we we began to have a kind of uh anthropocentric relationship to buildings because they were figurative like like we are and they had a kind of they expressed a kind of character they became mute of course in the 20th century but in the 19th century the middle of the 19th century most people were born and lived their whole lives within a four block radius of their uh their birth place there was not the movement in cities that we come to associate today but around the time of hauntzmann people began to move back and forth in the city working in a different place from where they lived and cities loosened they loosened to accommodate traffic uh and as a matter of fact in the late 19th century most of the urban theories like steuben and and others and houseman for that matter urban design centered around the design of streets in a practical sense it's when we get the boulevards in the middle and then later on the extension of cities based on streets and they were wide streets and they became and they were articulate streets in the 20th century the street went away and we were left with highways and detached buildings and so on if you pick up any history of modern architecture i assure you you will not find almost a single urban building because the focus of design interest changed and if you when i was in school it was the courtesy uh especially late corp and today if you again i'm sure that every architecture student in the u.s has a what we used to call a cheater book inside their drawer under their table with pictures of those buildings in the first slide thanks to norman crow by the way and you can't make cities out of those things so architecture and education i think have to change considerably because this stuff is so embedded in our dna at this point that we almost can't see any other way of working thoughts on that tan or going to the next question i i share that i i think that that architecture education is crying for a major reform where from the first minute in architecture school people are taught that they're making artifacts that are part of something larger than itself and there's no way of looking at a building other than it's in its setting and it's setting as a it's setting in time as well as its settings in place um with the time i have left on earth i would i hope to be uh engaged in some kinds of curricular reform and teaching reform about the beginning of architecture school what's the beginning and the end we i have a friend who uh at the university of texas who refers to it as architect educating architectural toy makers architecture what toy makers toy makers architectural toy making and if we don't i know when i when i first started teaching at the gsd in 1981 there was a great admonition to not have anything to do with the landscape section or the planning section or the urban design section uh and there may have been a reason for that i don't know but more than ever we need to know our craft that is to say our own discipline but we also need to to know how to relate and use other disciplines specifically landscape and urbanism and environmental issues etc you don't have to make bland background buildings and here's another topic dan that we could talk about but but you do need to see architecture as socially formally urbanistically embedded that it's urbanistically biodegradable as fred used to call it uh and and i think education needs to be that the school said i know very few schools today that do teach this way let me ask the first question i like a question from the q a doug kelba first says good job to you guys and uh um i agree that hamaby is urbanistically flawed what about b b001 in malmo sweden or vauban in freeburg germany familiar with those i've not been to eitherism i you know i think there is a whole bibliography of environmental urbanism that um doug and doug and harrison fraker and i guess no others that i can think of have been in peter assembling go ahead mike and peter councillor and peter yeah peter wrote an amazingly good book called urbanism in the age of climate change uh i i don't know whether it's had an impact uh beyond me but it certainly had an impact on me and i don't know those uh projects um i don't know much beyond italy and france sorry about that if somebody's asking a question from washington dc and is saying that new developments are often opposed by residents who here on the grounds that they aesthetically clash with the surrounding buildings how can we design modern multi-family structures they can fit in with existing architecture should we try and recreate older architectural styles or should we accept the modernist architecture that modernist architecture is here to stay modernist architecture is here to stay modernist architecture is capable of being uh inflected in subtle ways to make it compatible and a good neighbor to almost anything it's not taught that way that's right dan is an example par excellence of somebody who does that in san francisco and uh and there are others in the bay area i've always been envious of this i don't know i i once asked john ellis dan's partner urban design partner how the why this is because in boston we get the worst the absolute worst uh architecture worst apartment buildings horrible things nobody knows how to make facades they don't generally make them urban buildings they're more like uh i don't know towers in the park so i don't know how it happens in san francisco but i certainly agree that modernism modern architecture is fully capable of making urban buildings and buildings that can relate to whatever historic buildings and i mean it's not only classicism there are multiple styles historically as long as they align on the streets and and relate to other buildings then you can do all kinds of things again barcelona's exam is an example of that i have a friend who's a he's a former berkeley student who's a very successful and really brilliant urban designer in tianjin in china and i've worked with him and collaborated with him he's a it's a extraordinary practice where he's the 500 person office that is doing enormous projects and beautiful projects um in in many chinese cities i took him to ceo i just comp we just completed a little building well that's a little it's 50 50 units and a clinic uh in the south of market uh in a rough district in san francisco we're standing across the street from this little building and he said i'm jealous of you i'm jealous of your practice i said why on earth are you jealous of my practice because you've got you know you've got this dream practice building heal chunks of cities and he says you're living in a city that has a living architectural heritage and we destroyed ours and i thought it was a very poignant remark about uh you know modern building that was a career across the street our building was some sort of stops to environmentalism with a bristly facade of sunshades um but it had bay windows and it had a kind of scaling of a large of a series of aggregated lots that left the record of the old flatting of the city uh on this new building so i i thought that was an interesting comment that i'm blessed to be in a city that has a living history you are here's a question to michael as as an academic why have your colleagues been so disinterested in studying the elements of successful cities will they change and if so what will be the catalyst oh my gosh that's a tough one um you know planning as we were talking about this yesterday planning as a discipline late uh as a as a profession let's say early 20th century i believe urban design really only became a topic or a discipline around the 1950s or thereabouts jose established the urban design program at harvard in i think 1956. colin rowe established the urban design program at cornell in 1962 or i believe planning had used to be what we refer to as town planning historically was in fact the design of cities and pieces of cities and they didn't draw architecture gradually planning came to be policy planning and statistical planning it was program oriented more than design oriented and that was reflected in most of the planning schools cornell harvard etc and there's a certain point hopefully the briefly the physical planners and the statistical planners got a divorce and the physical planners went to another unit and then when the economic crush came they had to get remarried again urban design i believe urban design programs and more or less disappeared there aren't very many of them anymore and i i used to teach at mit until 2016 i taught a course about urban design theory it's basically the chapter on temples and towns uh the evolution of the design of planned cities grew out of that course and i used to tell the students that this was a course that i wish i had had when i was in school focusing on the city and its relationship to landscape and architecture etc but i didn't it would have saved me a lot of anguish and a lot of soul searching and a lot of romping around the world trying to figure things out i don't think it's very much taught these days how you turn that around i really don't know people seem to be interested in uh naval gazing and narcissistic architecture these days more than uh certainly of relatively few people in cnu and others but so i really don't know then i think it's a very the cultural architecture is very deeply ingrained and the mechanisms of promotion and success and rewarding of tenure uh what counts as valued in that system is self-perpetuating and the uh it's not only self-perpetuating to survive in that world and flourish get a nice cushy tenured teaching job you almost you know not almost but you were forbidden really to engage uh engaged with architecture other than as this sort of autonomous conceptualism um and they they breed you know these these these creatures they multiply and they they like their own kind um and it's just really deeply ingrained in most schools not all schools i'd say that you know the two that i have some occasional relationship to miami and maryland are not that at all and are where the the legacy of court the cornell urban design program is still alive so we're getting a lot of academic and intellectual oriented questions one is uh to please tell uh uh tell the audience more about the book or relate the topic to the late jack robertson and his ideas of american architecture and urbanism or his conversations uh with eisenman the charlottesville tapes are you familiar with those yes that's like uh that's more than one question right well it's three options right uh well why don't i say a word about the book uh because it's easier for me than the other things i i don't eisenmann and robertson's arguments are not of any interest to me let me say that uh about a little over a year ago in august a year ago i was looking for uh the article about the uffizi uh this is all in the i think the preface of the book but uh it had been published in perspective in 1980 and after 40 years of practice uh you know cutting out publication things to photocopy for pr and for uh submissions for architectural projects uh things get mixed up i couldn't find it i finally found the magazine and the pages had been cut out obviously by me to reproduce so i thought i need to spend two or three days and gather all this stuff together so i can get my hands on it i didn't start out to write a book in other words there was not that intention about architecture in the city so i spent two days or three days and did this and then i started looking at this stuff and i thought um you know there's kind of an idea here there's a lot of repetition uh but there's an idea here and i never had too many ideas actually the idea of the relationship of architecture to the city has been the one that has been primary so i thought i should put these together in a book and i said about doing it and then the problems start because you have to reformat everything right you have to find the illustrations and then you have to decide well am i going to change these few embarrassing sentences or terminologies etc and so i did and then you have to arrange them and they did they they happened serendipitously they were not done in effect on request or on commission uh the various studies they were done according to things that interested me at a given time so i had to rearrange them and put them into a sequence and then i discovered that there were things like for example the venetian facade that had been well rehearsed in lectures and classes and so on but had never been written down so i had to write those and then i found a whole that needed to be written fresh uh new and and put in so the the beyond the introduction there's the piece about florence and the um the ufc article and then there are three about specific architectural elements the french hotel the london townhouse and squares and the venetian facade and then it begins a series of themes about the american campus for example about the american town not the american city but the american town which is elm street basically urbanism and the city which seems like a strange thing but most cities today are not urban too many cities are not urban i should say they're defined by population statistics especially in china urban to be urban hero tadani taught me about this actually to be urban is something else it's a kind of composite of urban space and functions and social issues and so on uh in other words uh that neighborhoods are multifunctional etc etc then there is uh an article that i wrote with um aleister mcintosh about landscape in the city which makes the argument that the relationship between landscape and the city has evolved in stages it you know in a way it began as landscape and the city and then in the 19th century it became landscape in the city and then it became the city as landscape and finally with so-called landscape urbanism they they sought to replace the city which of course is impossible you can't make a city out of landscape and then there's a chapter about another book which i have finished a while back called temples and towns a study of the form elements and principles of planned towns that's a 500 page book uh formatted exactly like court and garden uh it's not yet published i hope it will be uh at some sometime soon but the chapter on temples and towns is the introduction to that to that book and then finally the [Music] the chapter on environmental issues i suppose in a way i would i'm going on too long about this but i suppose in a way i i could even imagine starting with that doing things in reverse because what dan is talking about uh with the argument for the uh the aesthetics of architecture and urbanism uh you could begin with the environment and go to urbanism and then go to architecture you could do the whole thing in reverse i don't see them as independent i see it as a kind of seamless thing and then there's a little piece about south bend which is a typical rust belt city that was uh it looks like the bombs went off in south bend not uh in europe and you could increase the population and and make it uh much more livable and habitable by infilling with uh and and providing housing in the center of the city even by infilling the streets the streets in south bend are way too wide they can easily accommodate housing buildings in in the middles of the street making two streets on either side and then finally there's a memoriam thing about my relationship with fred coder which was a very personal relationship so that's about the book that's actually a good segue you mentioned landscape urbanism we had a question from stephanie bothwell please tell us more about integrating traditional place place making with with sustainable elements and perhaps even the best elements of landscape urbanism such as its focus on revealing natural processes well the landscape urbanists are advocates for natural processes and the way that traffic engineers are advocates for the movement of uh vehicles and storm water is very much like it's a fluid mechanics very much like traffic engineering and it is as incompatible with the brittle fragile intimate structure of urban space as as highways sloshing through town are so i think that there's a fundamental flaw in landscape organism which is uh set out as a polemic to usurp and replace new urbanism with something hot and new and relevant to those who are the practitioners of it actually one of the better newerness books is the one put together by andrew stewani and emily talon landscape urbanism and its discontents which is a series of very intelligent critiques of the landscape-ribbonist limit yeah i would agree with what dan just said i i i can't stand these cuts like uh mit has a couple of these things these little ravines with bowlers infested by mosquitoes and so on that's supposed to reveal some kind of natural process it's like landscape urbanism is a is a non-sequitur i mean it's uh what are you going to say but not all not all the works that call themselves landscape urbanists are are are bad things i mean there's some beautiful projects including field in san francisco and george howard graves and mary margaret jones is a beautiful piece of city which is very much in the landscape urbanist canon if they have such a thing um we had a question from um kelly wilson uh fred ketter once mentioned that prague didn't seem to have suffered from the usual ills of modern architecture that the modern architecture done in prague has a way of accommodating the city do you know anything about this uh mike or dan or have any thoughts i've never been there i've i've been to prague i thought it was terrific i i um i i really was blown away by by jose pletchnick's work in frog castle it's as an early um proto-modernist he was fabulous i have to confess i saw frog castle i saw the old part of town i saw the 19th century part of town i didn't see in modern buildings so i can't answer the question maybe that's why it's accommodated so well yeah brian looney says to michael obviously he's worked on many academic campus plans and academic buildings what freedoms and crafting the public realm do you find that you have building buildings inside a campus environment that you otherwise wouldn't have framing a city or civic landscape what limitations are there in the campus work and that could also go to dan well wait wait i missed the first part obviously he said what freedoms and crafting the public realm do you find that you have building buildings inside a campus environment academic campus environment that you otherwise wouldn't have framing a city or civic streetscape and what limitations are there in campus work well i think that my experience with campus building is that it is as bureaucratic as difficult as impacted by uh the primacy of program and budget as anything built campus buildings are really tough in campus environments and campus bureaucracies are really tough mike's mike's uh chapter on on the history of campus planning i think is terrific and it documents or it describes as a narrative the disappearance of the campus plan as the morphological structure of campuses and the the hegemony of the autonomous building exacerbated by donor programs where donors donor-sponsored buildings demand autonomy and demand not only uh the celebration of the architect but the celebration of the donor which is a pretty anti-urban impulse right before you talk about that uh mike if if you do i will mention that we're a little at past the hour point and we can keep on going we can keep on talking for a little while longer okay well i i would say there are for me there are two distinct periods and i in my office were blessed by having a lot of work during what i would call the the good period which was up to uh 2008 and then after 2008 things changed before that we we had we did we had the benefit of great commissions good uh campus planning work and campus buildings people were it was a period in campus development when most campuses had sprawled after the second world war and built a bunch of bad buildings further and further out into the landscape and we made the argument that you can the campus is like rehearsal for the city and that you can infill like urban dental work you know you can infill the blank spaces and create the spaces and the paths and the walkways and make the canvas better and make it socially and academically better that there's a fit between intellectual pursuit and the physical uh environment we also were lucky in that we were eight we had a kind of niche another niche which was we we did several performing arts buildings that were high budget uh relatively high budget buildings in sensitive locations and the campus authorities i found to be reasonably intelligent and uh supportive and wanted buildings that were of a certain quality and that reinforced the the community uh uh the physical community the urban design community let's say after 2008 and the economic crash university architects became more interested in self-preservation and and cheap buildings and cheap plans than anything else they were less interested in providing what i would call an urban fabric a kind of campus fabric and donors also wanted more uh what we would call goofy buildings they wanted signature buildings out on the edge of campus you know that scream with the owner's name uh on it and you can imagine all of the things that went on the names attached to those to those buildings so we found ourselves losing out our hit record and interviews went considerably down and to firms that we had never competed with before like canon or som for campus plans and things our percentage of success wrapped precipitously and now uh i'm not optimistic you you you look at the magazines and you see the things that are getting built on campuses and they're they're like the first slide that i showed more or less um so um michael leodakis uh um no locutis i'm sorry uh the world has embraced a culture of consumption and waste by making buildings that will not last and are not adaptable even so-called green buildings are often made of impermanent materials what role do michael and dan think durability the use of local materials and principles of construction should play in making cities in their buildings um and would you consider your positions traditional or modern michael could us damn you [Laughter] this is question yes yeah well i think durability and materiality are immensely important and one of the principal measures of sustainability should be longevity uh there's nothing less green than putting a year old building in landfill um but that's an uphill battle and i think that you know the the relates to the campus planning question is that there's a tension uh an unresolvable and unresolved tension between the hegemony of the facilities manager and value engineering which is like ripping the hearts from maidens as a ritual on the one hand and the the legacy of of um american urbanism good american urbanism through the 1930s um and the good legacy of campus planning where the buildings of the 1920s and 1930s are built out of enduring materials and a very high level of skill in their assembly so we're we're in a mixed culture with tensions uh pulling us in unresolvable directions uh and you know the i always i you know have commented on the similarity between the great days of wpa in uh as the best building of public public infrastructure in the history of the united states and public works of fascist italy both of which turned to traditional building crafts as a way of generating employment part of the wpa was not to use advanced building technology in order to do things with with inefficient hand labor and employment part of the inefficient hand labor was masonry and metal work brickwork aisle the traditional crafts that made the american public buildings of the 1930s and the most enduring ones so we're now in a situation where party plank is considered a luxury material because it costs five dollars a square foot more than than the cheapest non-range screen stucco so we're you know particularly on campus buildings but also for almost all of our low income housing we're pushed to the lowest of the low common denominator of building craft and materials in order to rage against it but but somewhat evidently well yeah you know um in boston i was talking to dhiru yesterday about this in boston the standard way of making uh housing these days apartment buildings or condo buildings is a one or two floors of steel or concrete sometimes with shops and and or parking in it and then four or five stories of wood framed uh housing units that's not boston that's united states i suppose but it's worse here i can assure you uh and they are colossally ugly uh they part of this is brought about by the city and some of the planning agencies oh you need to break up this facade you need to change materials every 20 feet you know so you get these patchwork things hideous hideous things and those are private developer buildings the same thing in a way exists with public buildings like post offices for example one of the best buildings in my hometown was a was a bozar post office building made of limestone with bronze fittings etc and today well even a number of years ago they built a new post office and part of the idea is that even if it costs a certain amount of money cheap because we don't want citizens don't want to think that the government is wasting money on uh limestone building right so the idea is it has to look to you too i don't know what you do i don't know how you overcome these things actually i'm going to ask one last question and this this brings us back to both environmentalism and the united states and it seems that in the u.s economic political and cultural systems run contrary to fostering well-planned cities especially while fossil fuels are cheap is there any hope for change on the scale that is needed well i'd like to hope that environmental issues will change that but let's go back to the idea of the american constitution and if you imagine thomas jefferson's plan for the university of virginia the lawn surrounded by these individual pavilions it's like a a literal drawing a little literal physical representation of the constitution of balance and this is fundamental to american culture historically that there was a balance of civic responsibility on the one hand and private prerogative on the other in other words you don't have we have a lot of freedom but you don't have the freedom to go around killing people let's say you have you have a responsibility to stay within certain bounds of private freedom not to hurt or affect other people gradually that transition from a balance somewhere between louis xiv on the one hand with this kind of total societal control the balance of the u.s constitution and then a an extreme emphasis on the private realm in our time you see it all around you today that we have the right to do anything that we want we have the freedom to do anything that we want and that's reflected in our physical environment if something doesn't happen to precipitate a change it's not going to come internally i know that it hasn't happened yet so it's not likely to happen voluntarily i'm hoping that if we manage things properly environmentally and socially and politically then we may be able to get back to a kind of balance between private freedoms and and public or civic responsibility but there's no guarantee of it we may be toast well let me uh try to make an answer michael makes the point in the book that to be a pessimistic architect is an oxymoron and that that you're obligated to have a kind of optimism or nobody will ask you to do anything because why head there but the conditions against which optimism is put includes what is it 65 million homeless the fact that it costs hundred to nine hundred thousand dollars per unit to to build supportive housing and the uh simple investment in the public good of the universal wearing of the two dollar face mask has ripped the country apart so if um how we get to the point of the generation of building that is as grand and as enduring as the buildings of the wpa uh seems like a very very tough sl sledding uh we still keep doing it i mean we're still at it uh the frustrations are no less they're more but the sense of optimism that one must try and rail against the um our fates uh is part of what we do well with that i think i'm going to um i'm going to thank our panelists today um michael dennis and dan solomon this was a really wonderful discussion um i think we set a high bar for the author's form going forward you know we're going to have i guess 12 of these over the next 12 months um i wanted to thank everybody who joined us today and we had a pretty good group of people out there listening to this and asking really good great questions um if you like this uh please sign up for the next um authors forum in in on the park bench which is uh december 8th and go to our website and uh and look up the uh on the park bench page and you will find uh the uh um the place to click to sign up and once again i would just try to interject a plug for steve peterson and barbara luttenberg's equally beautiful book to michael's book and it's a companion piece and it's really superb space and anti-space right yes um well thank you thank you if you have anything more to add you can add it but otherwise we'll sign off is lunch going to be served afterwards [Music] absolutely stay on and i'll pass it to you okay rob thank you and thank garu for organizing yes okay great thing take care both of you it's great bye thanks everybody