To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. “Visual order: its limitations and possibilities,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p373)

Despite all the sketchy renderings - watercolor, colored pencil, and that fancy Prismacolor(TM) marker - the true power of architecture lies in the construction documents. Add to that set a specifications regarding a whole host of details including materials and manufacturers, and there’s little flexibility for the contractor, who can request substitutions only before bidding and maybe unexpected change orders later. The architect and their consulting engineers literally put their stamp, or rather seal, on it. That’s control.

Today I got some good planning advice: “Only publicize results.”

Now, the governmental authorities most planners work under may not let them reserve PR opportunities to this extreme minimum, but there’s wisdom in such anti-braggadocio. The skills required to make a pretty plan are much easier to come by than the skills, time, and wherewithal to craft and implement a plan that can only be borne out on the decisions of hundreds, if not thousands of independent actors.

Plans can be pretty, art-like. Art isn’t bad. Even Jane Jacobs admits that art is rigorous. No matter the medium, artists must select what to show from the living world. That is, what fits within the frame, within the time span of the play, etc. Planmaking can be an art, but if one only designs the plan with little regard for the messy choices of life before and after the planning snapshot, it is all for naught - worse than staying quiet.

Agency is the word I prefer to use - not as it is used to describe organizations, but as it refers to action. Individuals have agency. As swept up as we might get in environments and how they might determine the behavior of those using it, there’s really no telling what individuals might do.

Economics helps. People are serving their own needs: making a living, recreating, traveling to work, eating, etc. There’s a personal economy at stake. Ignore it at your peril. That’s not to say folks will always act in their own best interest. We’re limited beings with limited time and limited information (for more, see Herbert Simon in the references).

This isn’t just splitting hairs. The design strategies are different between the art of planmaking and allowing for the life that takes place in placemaking.

Here’s an example:

I can make a rendering. Let’s say it’s photorealistic - really fancy, maybe a 3D massing model done in SketchUp with exterior materials rendered with an extension like Podium, probably with some clean up in Photoshop, which will also give me a chance to drop in a bunch of people using the space. The cost of all that software is nothing compared with the investment in time.

The design strategies are all different if you’re more interested in reality - in making spaces that people want to use and visit, rather than just be superimposed over. William Whyte and Kevin Lynch never had access to such tools, yet they developed design strategies that understood the life of city spaces.

I’ve done my fair share of working for and with architects - maybe more. While I have the utmost respect for what they do, their design abilities, and their knowledge of materials and structures, it gives me pleasure to dive into Jane Jacobs’ indictment of architecture as applied to cities. Because I get such pleasure out of this indictment, I’m going to spend a few days reveling in Jacobs’ chapter on “Visual order.”

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The functional order of the city demands that the intensity and diversity be there; their evidences can be removed from the street only at the cost of destroying necessary functional order. “Visual order: its limitations and possibilities” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p379)

Take a good look at city streets - perhaps the primary way of experiencing a city. Forget about the fly-over map-driven plan view you might only experience as a bird, from a plane, or on your GPS.

Jacobs sets up two ways of viewing the street:

1. Streets announce endlessness, repeating variations on the street-level scene well past your viewpoint
2. Streets announce activity: life and useGuggenheim - (cc) Daniel Huggard

There’s some cognitive dissonance to correct for when combining these views. Such activity, if seen as endless, becomes a cacophony - insulting all that is proper and orderly. But, when viewed without such detachment, the streets announce such activity necessarily: you’re carrying out your life in this realm amidst the variety of places of commerce, residence, industry, and recreation. The limits are not within your view, they’re within your ability to be present along the street - as far as your legs or any other mode of transportation can carry you.

Jacobs states that architects typically place more weight on number one, which can generate outright contempt for street life. Rather than just stop at “typically,” I’ll illustrate with the example of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Fallingwater - (cc) Rahul DeshpandeIn May, the New York Times covered an exhibit on Wright celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim. Many love and enjoy his buildings (including me), taking trips to such destinations as Fallingwater.

Wright held an explicable distain for cities, as an architect, which the article details well. Broadacre City - his vision for the community of the future - was hardly a city at all, but rather a highway-driven, automotive and individualistic repetition of Usonian houses in isolation. It wasn’t so far off from suburban sprawl, the geographically dominant human-driven landscaping of the twentieth century (at least in North America).

This fantasy has, in many ways, become reality. Yet, life still has to happen. Critics of sprawl abound, proclaiming it ugly, stultifying, inefficient, and unjust.

The problem isn’t in the activity or “cacophony.” The problem is in correcting the cognitive dissonance. Jacobs details design approaches to this problem that in appearance or function end the endlessness of the street view - terminating such vistas, absent an already irregular grid from history and/or geography. Oh, how less grand the solutions!