Why do cities have to look so much crappier than they used to?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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I know I have ranted about this before, but I just took “New York 1880” out of the library (Jiminy Cricket, it weighs three tons!). Anyway, it is chock-a-block with breathtaking photos of 19th-century masterpieces by McKim, Mead & White, C.C. Haight, Richard Morris Hunt and other architects who were as brilliant geniuses as Giotto and Palladio. Of course, 90 percent of these buildings were bulldozed to make way for the goddam glass boxes and linoleum tombstones that currently litter the landscape.

I’ll admit, some of the older buildings could be pretty awful—a few mansions on Fifth Avenue looked like an architectural textbook exploded. “We can cram one more cupola on there!” But how can anyone look at the old Madison Square Garden or Penn Station or Casino Theater or 1904 Times Building and say that the world isn’t devolving, architecturally speaking?

It’s not just New York, either: I have those Dover “Then and Now” books on half-a-dozen cities, and all of them looked better 100 years ago. I’m NOT talking about standards of living or medicine or any of that—just about how cities LOOKED back then. But, what IS it? Why couldn’t, say, Bergdorf’s have said, “Let’s use this beautiful old Vanderbilt mansion,” instead of demolishing it to put up some undistinguished box?

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Seattle’s pretty good. As is downtown Norfolk and Ghent. Sections of Philly (read: around the convention center), too.

Though, I don’t think the Pompeiians are really trying…

3

Well, here in Montreal we’ve got

Bonaventure & McGill metro from the 1960s,
La Salle and Angrignon metro from the 1970s,
Acadie & U. de Montreal metro from the 1980s,
the IBM building and 1000 de la Gauchetiere from the 1990s.

I think that reports of the death of architecture have been greatly exaggerated. At least in French Canada.

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Here in Dallas (and I’d bet elsewhere) the problem is that the property is much more valuable than the house sitting on it. The end result is the demolition of the old, interesting, houses with charachter and replacing them with monsterous houses that look out of place and take up every square inch of available property. It’s enough to make you want to ask the owner what the hell they were thinking.

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If folks wante those “quirky” buildings, and there’s enough financial support behind 'em, they’ll get built.

Witness the current affinity for “retro” ballparks.

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Eve, dja see this article from today’s Times? One of things it describes is how difficult it’s become in NYC to undertake innovative architecture. I think part of the problem is an overreaction to some of the disasters of the 1960s, like Madison Square Toilet’s triumph over Penn Station. Another part of it is also zoning - an interesting contrast between Hong Kong, where zoning is apparently minimal and the architecture is often very interesting, and New York, which has extremely tight zoning and preservation laws and the result is nothing but timidity and square-footage maximization. For a real extreme take a look at K Street in Washington, where the 10-story height limit begets a miles-long wall of tin-and-glass breadboxes.

I don’t think there’s much of a way to deal with the problem: we can’t get rid of zoning (and Houston is not exactly a ringing endorsement of what a no-zoning regime might look like here in the US), and although I think the preservation board is finally wising up to its potential role in encouraging interesting new architecture, it really can’t do that much as a practical matter.

A couple of other thoughts: I know you don’t want to get in to standards of living, etc., but do remember that a lot of what made buildings ornate and pretty was the availablity of masses of very cheap labor. If the builders of the New York Public Libary or Rockefeller Plaza had been forced to pay a contemporary equivalent to today’s scale, we’d have ended up with a very different architecture, I suspect.

At the risk of incurring your wrath, I’ve developed a taste for High Modernism. The trouble with it is that although it’s gorgeous when produced by its top practitioners using the best materials (e.g. Mies’s Seagram Building, one of the most expensive buildings ever built), Modernism was disaster when it filtered down to anyone lesser. The price we paid for a few masterpieces (I’d add Lever House, 140 Broadway, One Chase Manhattan Plaza, the new LVMH/Christian Dior building and, peculiarly, the WTC) was truly horrific, both inhumane and inhuman.

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And that’s the reason in a nutshell - $$$

Steel and glass is cheaper to build, goes up faster, and is probably cheaper to maintain. Economics is a mighty force…

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There’s plenty of blame to go around.

Suburbanization: The modern notion of “suburbia” is a fairly recent phenomenon and with the exodus of folks from the city to the hinterlands has come a gradual decline in interst in nearly all things urban. Cities were once seen as centers of commerce, trade, entertainment, sophistication, intellectual pursuits, hell, everything worth seeing, doing, hearing, or experiencing (broad generalization, but you get my drift) was happening in “the City.” With the advent of the suburbs “the City” became more or less only where you worked. You live, shopp, and play out in the cookie-cutter tract houses that spring up seemingly overnight.

Urban Renewal: A code word for tearing apart lots of established inner-city neighborhoods, which in many ways feed into the suburbanization phenomenon. Who wants to live in an old neighborhood that has had the guts removed from it when you can get a cheap FHA loan and own an eighth acre lot with a split level, cardboard siding clad piece of shit complete with harvest gold appliances and wall to wall shag carpet?

One-size-fits-all zoning schemes: Sure, it made sense to establish districts when you had a slaughterhouse cheek by jowl with a school right next to a pants factory right next to a apartment house; however, many city’s use the same zoning schemes that suburban locales do and it just doesn’t work. Large setbacks, large parking requirements, restrictions on living-above-the-store type commercial aren’t conducive to in-fill development and the type of building densities that have to occur to make an inner-city project economically feasible.

Transportation planning that stresses road construction over efficient use of existing infrastructure: Hmmm, there’s a traffic jam ever day here at 5:00. Let’s build 4 more lanes. Result, folks fill 4 more lanes and there is still a traffic jam. All of the folks in the traffic jam are leaving downtown because that’s just where they work. They live in the 'burbs.

Interestingly enough, lots of cities (and Richmond is included in this group) are experiencing little urban renaissances. Its now cool to live downtown, people are realizing that the commute is hell, stores are reopening. Prices for arts and crafts style American four-squares and bungalows are skyrockeing and the “white flight” of the past is now “black flight” as inner city neighborhooods get gentrified.

Long story short: When the only interest you have in downtown is that its where you work, and the developer knows that there is no incentive (or opportunity) to do better, you end up working in whatever is cheapest, fastest, and easiest to build. Who’s going to build a Chrysler Building when he can get the designer to pull “Design A101”, which worked just fine in the 15 other cities its been constructed in?

Also, thanks Eve for letting me actually use my professional time for something related to my profession. I don’t feel guilty at all about being on the board right now.

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Matt—I’ve seen Montreal. It ain’t no Quebec.

Johnson—You’re right, of course, it mostly boils down to money. And lack of taste. As far as new architecture, well . . . The AT&T building on Madison & 55th is OK, and at least Frank Geary’s buildings have the advantage of being FUNNY. But the World Trade Center? Ummm, they’re boxes. Two glass boxes. What the hell is so “masterpiece” about THAT?

Plnnr—Yeah. Urban renewal. That’s what encouraged Mayor Daley to tear down every decent-looking building in downtown Chicago in the '50s and '60s. All those gorgeous “Chicago Style” masterpieces? "Gone to rubble every one. When will they ever learn . . . "

Not that any of this is new—the first U.S. capitol, in NY, was torn down 150-some years ago. And the 1930s–'50s were probably the worst years in NY for the destruction of some of our greatest buildings. Which wouldn’t have been so BAD if they’d not been replaced by CRAP.

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I agree with plnnr. Suburbanization was the first thought that sprang into my mind when I saw your post. When I was a kid a lot of people still lived in NYC, and it was a very different place. The movies and plays from the late fifties and early 1960s describe a very different city than the one we had when I was in college, or now. Lots of middle-class people lived there, worked there, dined there, and played there. Even the folks living in suburbia would come in to the City on weekends. Now that the cities aren’t the Hubs they once were, and now that it’s so damned expensive to site a business there, you’ve had a change in the people, the businesses, the offerings, and even the buildings. To me, vintage Manhattan is 1930s Art Deco. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center. The World Trade Center and Bauhaus and expensive little boxes filled with non-ticky-tacky don’t move me, but it seems like there’s more and more of it and of urban decay and Disneyfication.

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Actually, they remind me of saltines. Seriously - each tower’s about the same proportions as a single sleeve of saltines, from one of those four-sleeve boxes.

I was at the Barnes & Noble Public Library reading a recent photobook on skyscrapers, which included some better-than-average criticism. The author somewhat reluctantly admitted that the WTC’s rep has improved markedly since its completion 25 years ago. What helps it inordinately is its site, so close to the water that its very monumentality works as a real asset. It’s inhuman, but on such a grand scale that IMO it works. Inland it’d be an unmitigated disaster.

Yamasaki also made some choices that really help it - his love of arches helps the tower bases and gives interest to WTC 3, 4 and 5 (the smaller buildings ringing the towers). His skin has great texture, partly because windows are actually only 30% of the surface (the book mentions that Yamasaki had terrible vertigo, and speculates that he thus made the windows, at 18", narrower than his own shoulders). The rest is alumninum, and a particular aluminum alloy he chose because of its warmer cast. If you’ve ever commuted in to NY at sunset, the effect is spectacular.

Even the plaza, which could easily have stayed windswept and empty, attracts lots of daytime workers. He must have been doing something right.

Right now, I’d say the critical weight still dismisses WTC as kitsch - but then again, forty years ago the same was said of Chrysler.

The ATT-now-Sony is catty-corner to my office. It’s nice, but I actually prefer the neighboring IBM building, which faces us; it has one of the best, most livable and well-used atria I’ve ever seen.

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OK, tastes do differ. But how can anyone look at photos of any of the late, great buildings I mentioned—the old Madison Square Garden, Penn Station, the Casino Theater, the 1904 Times Building—and compare them to the WTC, the AT&T or IBM buildings? It’s like comparing a Constable landscape to, oh . . . one of those “Flat Blue Box” paintings. Only imagine if they’d painted OVER Constable to use the canvas for a Flat Blue Box!

The WTC, in my opinion, is not amusing enough to be kitsch. Now, Frank Geary—THAT’S kitsch!

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Eve and everyone else,

Two excellent books pertaining to this subject are The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler. plnnr actually provided a pretty good outline for them. Kunstler also describes some other factors as well, such as the devaluation of public space, the rise of the Modernist Style (an oxymoron for the ages), and the decline in populatiry of Classical architecture styles due to their association with Fascism.

And there is one chapter with the best anti-car rant I have ever read in my life.

-fh

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Well, 100 years ago (next month - May) my home town - Jacksonville, Fla. - was burning to the ground. The entire downtown and a huge portion of the surrounding area burned. The SE spread of the fire was stopped by the St. Johns River. This event prompted architect Henry J. Klutho to come to town. He designed a great many buildings. Now, those that remain are targets for preservation.
Our City Hall is in a restored department store / office building that dates from the 20’s (?). They did a beautiful job restoring this structure, including a breath-taking atrium with a vintage-looking glass roof. It is on a block-square Plaza. A great public space and setting for municipal government.

But on the whole, downtown and suburban buildings are ugly. It is telling when we comment on an attractive building - it is the exception among a sea of uglies.

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I agree. Modernism as such isn’t so much the problem as the cheapness which characterizes so much of its execution.
Stucco and plaster are far cheaper than marble and masonry; a miserly swath of lawn is far cheaper than a fountain, and a small functional lobby is more cost-effective than a double-height, richly decorated one. When we get to postwar domestic architecture, that’s where the ugly black pit really opens up. L.A. is full of stucco crackerboxes built after WWII which are sadly deficient in many amenities. A door between the house and the garage? No way. Any exterior power outlet? Fuhgeddaboudit!!

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      • I will second that emotion. Generally speaking, the only reason that anyplace looks crappy is because the property owner isn’t making enough profit to keep it fixed up. That’s why the newest suburbs look nice and the oldest slums look like Shinola. - MC
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Darling, did you look at the buildings I mentioned? They take my breath away every time I go through or past them.

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Monterey isnt a big city, but it has kept most of it’s very historical buildings. In fact, it’s the only city in California to have preserved so many of the adobes from the Spanish and Mexican periods. But, there are some nice places for cool architecture. Case and point, Alvarado St. Which has a few buildings from the early 20th century, complete with ornate architecture. The old state theater was built in the 20’s and they have restored the facade, and also the inside, which was made to look like youre in a Spanish courtyard with a canopy tent over head (there’s a painting on the ceiling and an ornate chandelier). The walls have these fantastic balcony like niches (i know, it’s inside, but the outside is fabulous as well).
The Naval Post Graduate school used to be absolutely splendid when it first opened. Unfortunately the first building was all wood and burned completely down. This is what it looked like: http://caviews.com/delmonte.htm

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Whoops, forgot to add: The Naval Post Graduate school was formerly the Hotel Del Monte, which when it first opened was considered the most fabulous and upscale resort on the west coast.