Architecture and the City — The Big Rethink

Peter Buchanan’s essay on architecture at a moment when the nature of change has itself changed, not merely its pace.

Part of the New City reading list — the books Kyle worked through while building the The New City thesis. Indexed on that page.

Notes

• By Peter Buchana
• These are critical times. Throughout history, change has been the background to our lives. But now the nature of change has changed. We are in the grip of widespread and systemic ecological and economic meltdown. This necessitates that we rethink everything, including architecture and the design of the larger environment. For architects the most immediately challenging issue has been the environmental crisis to which buildings and our dispersed cities are the major contributors.
• Constant change has been the backdrop to our lives. But now the nature of change has changed. Instead of, or besides, being subject to the forward propulsion of “progress,” we are in the throes of comprehensive systemic collapse. Along with other potent forces for change, this suggests these are time sod major transition—times in which to rethink almost everything, including architecture and the design of the larger environment it is part of.
• So how did we get into this situation where even big names fail to produce decent architecture? In London, part (but only a small part) of the problem must lie with Britain’s reactive rather than proactive planning system. With the exception of such things as protecting specific views, planners usually offer little or no initial guidance to the architect but instead respond to design proposals and negotiate changes to them. And even then, after weeks of this, there is no guarantee how members of the planning committee will respond. It is a stupid and wasteful system that leads to arbitrary judgements of approval or non-approval (how did some of these schemes, for instance, get approved?) and favors the legal profession and the rich who can employ it to make appeals against these judgements.
• Common to all these architectural approaches is that the buildings fail miserably in urban terms. Yet surely one of the most fundamental requirements of architecture is that it aggregates into satisfactory urban fabric? But these buildings relate neither to their neighbors, nor articulate public space. Nor can they create a sense of place. Conceived of as isolated object-buldings oblivious of all around them, they exacerbate one of the most pathological aspects of modern architecture—‘sunset effects’, all of them, and irrelevant to the future. And yet behind most problematic trends, of which only extremes have been mentioned, is the collapse of the simple certainties of modern architecture, with its reductive concerns and criteria, and the advent of Postmodernity, the relativist mode of throughout rather than the architectural style.