Do architects hate cities? - The impossibility of what Jane Jacobs calls "visual order"

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!