The Quarterly
The Forgotten Art of the City
by Eberhard Zieldler
Art is not a substitute for life.
If I talk here of art, I should not be misunderstood. I am not
considering a city as a piece of art in a singular way. I am talking of the
amalgamation of a thousand pieces that develop, touch and flow into each
other and create in each area of the city a special visual coherence which
in the end creates a whole.
In a city, this visual order does not relate to the individual building
but to the street or the plaza as its prime spaces. The individual building
must be seen as a part of this urban space. It is obvious that visual order
can be achieved through many means but the purpose of visual order in the
city is not an aesthetic issue alone. The two major tenets that are
essential in its creation are urban activities and urban space in which the
activities can unfold. Therefore, this urban space is not merely a
functional event but must contain in itself also a visual and emotional
quality.
Queen’s Quay Terminal, Toronto
This is a building that contains all the functions a city should have:
living, working, shopping and entertainment. The building echoes its
setting and has the complexity that makes it interesting. It stands at the
edge of the harbour, linking the city life with nature.
Jane Jacobs gives a powerful warning, not only to planners but also to
architects, that is as meaningful today as it was thirty some years ago:
“Do not make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life.” But
that does not mean that there is no order for art in the city. Jane
continues, “instead of attempting to substitute art for life, city
designers should return to a strategy of ennobling both art and life: a
strategy of illuminating and clarifying life and helping to explain to us
its meanings and order–in this case, helping to illuminate, clarify and
explain the order of cities. To see complex systems of functional order as
order and not as chaos, takes understanding.”
She calls back to our attention a forgotten tenet that was clearly
understood in the past, of clarifying the order of cities. Camillo Sitte, a
Viennese urban planner of the 19th century, was perhaps the last who
defined such urban order. But there was a lapse of over half a century
until Jane Jacobs said again, “streets provide the principal visual scenes
in cities,” and sadly few architects and few critics have understood the
true meaning of her insight. Jane recommends “heightening and celebrating
the intense street use by giving it a hint of enclosure and entity” and
she talks of “unifying devices to suggest that the street with all its
diversity, is also an entity.” Landmarks are not isolated elements in a
city, they are orientation clues, which emphasize and dignify the diversity
of cities and “visually acknowledge” certain city areas and their
function.
The Rational and the Emotional in Cities
Intuitively we seem to feel that the rational approach to-wards our
understanding of the city does not achieve the desired results for which we
are longing. There are issues that we cannot reach through reasoning merely
on a rational basis. Research into environmental psychology indicates some
of those hidden issues. The environment, as we respond to it emotionally,
influences our well being, the way we feel, the way we work, even our
health, in a more profound way than was until now assumed. However, the
full depth of our emotional response to our environment has only been
partially explored through environmental psychology. Yet there are enough
indications that indicate the importance of such reaction: we no longer
ignore our emotions and rely only on rational reasoning.
Let us explore the changes that we are facing. While we are not at the
“end of science” as John Horgan attempted to convince us in his book by
the same name, we have reached a moment of bifurcation in science that we
must recognize. We can no longer consider only that which we can prove
rationally and discard the rest as unimportant. Karl Popper stated that
only that which can be falsified is science. He left things that we cannot
falsify as essential issues in existence; however, they did not belong in
the province of science.
Mühlendorf Housing Development–Tetlow, Germany
In this green part of Berlin, densities maintain the minimum required to
create a subway station. The housing types are complex and
varied–rowhousing, condominiums in garden houses, and towers, which
incorporate retail and entertainment and, at the same time, form the centre
of the settlement around the transit stop.
Horgan believed that science is not cyclic but linear. In other words, we
can only discover the periodic table, the expansion of the universe and the
structure of DNA once. His obstacle to the “resurrection” of science,
therefore, is its past success. In other words, he believed science is a
has-been and all that scientists can do now is write footnotes to past
discoveries. He also included in his thesis the end of philosophy, as long
as one regards it as the handmaiden to science and dismisses Karl Popper,
Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend and others who attempted to relate
philosophy to science.
Architecture, of course, seen in such a rational approach could only be
realized through function and construction. Any expression not captured
through these factors was meaningless. But that left the whole realm of
emotion out of such equations and, if we consider architecture as the
building block of the city, then the whole realm that was touched by
emotion was neglected in its planning.
Cities have grown through the centuries and will continue to do so in the
future. They are huge mosaics, not planned utopias. We accept from the city
what each one offers us and attempt to influence their future form. Cities
have been created in many different forms and have influenced our lives
differently. We have to be careful trying to change them, because it is not
only their physical form, but also the social structure housed in the
physical form that determines our urban life. This symbiosis between
structure and activity can undergo tremendous changes, from creating urban
life to destroying it, all within the same physical structure as we have
seen in American cities.
We have been attempting to find the reasons for such successes or failures
using a rational methodology. We have condensed from these findings
concepts that will improve our cities, avoiding the mistakes of the past
and integrating its successes. While we cannot advance without such action,
based on rational reasoning alone, such action does not reach the fullness
of the city.
A city will need also an emotional approach that reaches for the many
shades of life. This is difficult to assess on a rational level. I have
used emotional as the opposite of rational. I would have liked to call it
irrational, but that would have too many incorrect connotations connected
to all the issues science has discarded in the past as “folklore” or
“myth” as well as irrational aberrations. We are reaching a point where
we realize that science and its rational approach will not solve all the
mysteries that still exist. While we will, in time, solve some of them,
there will always be a fuzzy borderline between the rational and emotional.
We cannot merely ignore it. Attempting to understand the emotional in the
same way as the rational will lead us to a questionable pseudo-science. Yet
we can probe and comprehend in a certain way this world of the irrational
through our emotions. The streams of rational understanding that we
inherited from the scientific past and that flowed uninterrupted into
hoped-for conclusions are suddenly joined by different emotional streams.
Out of the confusing whirlpool of the old and the new knowledge, a new
current seems to develop. Yet we are only beginning to grope for the
meaning of it.
Toronto Eaton Centre Galleria
Shopping is a major activity of the downtown, along with all the other
amenities: entertainment, food, working and living. The Eaton Centre has
provided this, not as an entity in itself, but as an integrated part of
pedestrian traffic paths and the city street grid. Its galleria attracts
some 50 million visitors a year. Yet at the same time it enlivens Yonge
Street through its stores and has brought the area back to life. There are
today more pedestrians along Yonge Street than there were before the Eaton
Centre was built.
The Influence of Nature on the Human Psyche
When we look at our present situation we have to accept the fact that
the majority of humanity has to live in metropolitan areas that seem to
grow rather than diminish and seem to remove us farther and farther from
nature. While we must make this human habitat physically pleasant and
enjoyable there is another condition in our psyche that we cannot overlook.
Roger S. Ulrich discusses this in Biophilia, Biophobia and Natural
Landscapes: “If natural selection has favoured the development of higher
thinking capabilities in humans generally, what role might natural physical
surroundings play in a person’s performance of higher tasks? Cognitive
science research [shows] that one’s emotional state has a profound effect
on virtually all aspects of thinking.”
He concludes that “[N]atural settings exert positive emotion states [that]
may facilitate creative problem solving or high-order cogitative
functioning.
“[A] growing number of studies have found that unthreatening natural
environments are effective in eliciting broadly positive shifts in
emotional states.” Returning to the “functional-evolutionary
arguments–those natural environments that affected abundant primary
necessities such as food and water in conjunction with
security–savanna-like environments, in open settings with non-turbulent
water.”
Garden cities seemed to pay heed to these findings yet at the same time
disregarded the urban necessity of density as well as their integration
into the metropolitan area. If we, however, look at the organization of a
transit-oriented metropolis, we find that we can introduce the natural park
space of a savanna-like setting between the transportation nodes and bring
nature within a short walking distance from the living areas. Each five to
nine-minute walking node would contain approximately 250-850 acres and
could have a population of approximately 20,000-60,000 people. The streets
would be lined with trees to bring the savanna-like feeling close to the
houses. This schematic outline should not be executed in strict rigidity
but used as a foil for development. Such a setting could be achieved even
in the existing Toronto area, with minimal changes to its existing
structure.
I used our relation to nature to begin the discussion, as it is the one in
which coherent research exists that links our emotional state to the
physical environment. This link does not exist with the same clarity in
research that relates the manmade environment of the city to our emotional
state. It has been developed in detail for individual elements in this
field but to my knowledge there has not been an investigation as to how the
total built environment influences our emotional reaction. Intuitively we
know that it does.
Accommodation, Transportation and Nature
To live, work and enjoy a city on an emotional level, we have to
integrate the various activities into a harmonious balance and make them
visually enjoyable. Not that there is a standard solution. There are a
thousand variations and that is the mystery and delight of the city;
however, there are certain conditions that help to make the city more
enjoyable to live in. They have to be considered in relation to each
other.
Cinedom–Cologne, Germany
This development has added not only to Cologne’s workplaces, but also to
its living places and places to shop and to enjoy oneself, not as an entity
onto itself but as an attraction for the city as a whole. The two million
visitors that Cinedom attracts do not come only from MediaPark but make
MediaPark the centre of attraction. It shows the way in which open space
and nature can be combined. On one side, MediaPark looks into Herkulesberg,
the beautiful park system that winds itself through Cologne; on the other
side there is a place similar in size to the plaza in Siena. All of the
activities of MediaPark open into this plaza, as do cafes, restaurants and
places to sit. At the same time, it displays MediaPark from Cologne’s
major feeder street where 30,000 cars enter the city daily. Yet the plaza
is separated from the traffic by an artificial lake that gives the plaza
its quiet and special charm.
I think that the problems of ecology that we face today have taught us that
we must live within a certain discipline to maintain our world. The
unlimited expansion and rape of our environment that we have practised in
the past must be curtailed. We must integrate our working, living and
entertainment environment in connection with the natural environment and
the mode of transportation that is necessary to foster such urban life. At
the same time we also have to consider the societal structure that makes
this life possible, and finally our emotional perception of this
environment.
No decision in any of these sectors can be taken in isolation, because each
will influence the other. In the end we must restructure our life in the
metropolitan area. The living environment for the future will be different
and should enhance not only our rational material life but also our
emotional one.
The first condition we must achieve is to create a certain density of
living accommodation which maintains connections to public transit and
nature. Without limiting the movement radius of the individual, we don’t
have to make miles of car travel a necessity that consumes unnecessary
resources and hours of daily life. It is a precarious balance, but I
believe it is worthwhile to attempt such dense integration. For example, to
achieve good living environments it is not necessary to build endless
tracts of space-consuming one-family housing, nor is it essential to press
families into dense high-rise buildings. The majority of the population
demands a living place that creates, on the one hand, contact to enjoyable
social life and, on the other hand, solitude and the possibility to
communicate with nature. These conditions can be achieved in various
building types that in the proper combination can achieve a density of 40
units per net acre, interspersed with entertainment and working. However,
such density requires public transit.
Despite the traffic disaster that has been created by the individual
automobile – the dream that has become a nightmare–at present there is
little forethought given to public transit. Despite Toronto’s success in
its early transportation planning, its later decisions were fraught with
mistakes.
A transit oriented city must develop not linearly but centred around the
points of its subway stops. These concentric circles will have a decreasing
density (three-minute walking distance) most desirable with the greatest
density (five-minute distances). This would tend to develop satellite nodes
around these stops, all fused with each other as part of the metropolitan
area. The beauty of such organization would be that these stops could be
slightly separated, as the train would only need seconds to transverse this
space. Natural parks could interweave these nodes and at the same time be
short walking distances from the urban nodes, satisfying our emotional need
to find connection with nature.
The Hospital for Sick Children
A hospital should not be an isolated entity, it should be an integral
part of the city. Not only attractive to those who have to be there, it
should also become a place to visit. The atrium of the Hospital for Sick
Children in Toronto is such a place. Its cafeteria invites passersby to
rest for awhile. The activities of the hospital are viewed through
playrooms in the atrium to create a healing community. In addition, the
hospital becomes a pass-through connecting two city streets.
Urban Coherence
While architecture is the building block of the city, its rules–so
well defined by Vitruvius and translated by Wotton as commodity, firmness
and delight–must now adhere to urban coherence. In other words, one cannot
follow these architectural rules and only consider them in relation to
their isolated self; they must relate to the setting in which each building
stands in order to resolve the urban situation. A wide variety of urban
functions, whether within the same structure or in different buildings,
must be related to each other so that they can create the vital urban
symbiosis that makes a city work. Furthermore, the physical form of
building must express this and also bear a relation to its neighbours.
This, of course, is an issue of complexity that did not exist in
Vitruvius’ time. When the functions of living, working and entertaining
were combined in the home. The buildings that accommodated these functions
were similar, as were the techniques used to erect them. For this reason,
these buildings could be arranged naturally in coherent urban settings. Of
course, there were a few building types that needed different
expressions–the temple, the public bath, the theatre, etc.–and these
created orientation points.
Initially, it was the Industrial Revolution that separated working from
living. While this had been foreshadowed in prior times, what had been an
exception became the rule with the Industrial Revolution. Of course, in the
beginning the various building types were mixed. In fact, people were proud
of the smoke-belching factory chimneys dispersed throughout the city, as
many of the old “progress pictures” show. However, modern planning
theories decreed the strict separation between working districts and living
districts. The two building types were set apart from each other and the
ritual began of men leaving the housing district in the morning and coming
back at night. The segregated location of these working districts seemed to
eliminate some of the worst problems of the previous times, namely noise
and pollution but started to destroy urban life.
While in the early industrial city transportation was restricted to
railways and trams that demanded a relatively dense settlement, the
industrial attraction of more people to the city and the parallel invention
of the car created vital changes in the settlement pattern. These changing
conditions in the urban equation brought about an unanticipated total
restructuring of the city. It allowed the dispersal of the city over huge
areas as the car could now accommodate a separation between living and
working. This concept got further confused through the belief in the
self-contained “sleeping” suburbs which seemed to make the old image of
the city outdated. Concepts like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacres, where
every American lived on one acre of land, became the prototype for our
suburbs.
Automation and the dwindling labour force, which was related to the old
smoke-belching, noisy industry, eliminated the need for separation between
living and work place. Furthermore, the never-ending growth of the
metropolitan areas made it necessary to create greater densities.
We must now consider the emotional needs of human kind that require a
different city form, perhaps more related to the late 19th century than the
cold visions of the 20th century. We need a city form that creates urban
visual coherence and integrates living, working and entertainment with an
allusion to nature within a transit connected density.
Canada Place
A building can become a landmark combining the downtown with the
harbour again. Canada Place in Vancouver brought the joy of embarking on
ships back into the awareness of the city. Its terraces connect with the
downtown streets so that one can stroll, enjoy the view over the harbour
and the mountains, watch the workings of a harbour, and also visit the
convention facilities, a world trade centre, hotel, shopping centre and
entertainment.
Furthermore, its urban coherence has to respond to the emotional needs of
human kind, the city should be not overpowering or frightening but create
the positive emotional stage that has a profound effect on virtually all
kinds of human activities.
Conclusion
Urban coherence is an aspect of architecture seen not only from the
rational level, but also from the emotional level. It relates to the visual
expression of urban structure.
There are many examples, from humble streets to landmarks, that follow
these rules. I would like to use as an example the Galleria in Milan which
connects the cathedral to la Scala and provides shops and offices in
between.
First, the activities that are included have to be of a compatible nature.
They must relate to each other to create an urban symbiosis. We cannot
connect a meat packing plant to a church.
Second, the urban space has to be of a certain quality for the given action
to unfold in the right framework.
In Milan, the glass enclosure is big and grand to contain the shops; it is
a fitting connection between the two important civic monuments.
Third, the constellation of this framework, its surroundings and its
activities has to create a delightful and beautiful setting to evoke a
feeling of fulfillment within the participant. Without this, the first two
conditions become meaningless.
The beauty of its architecture has made the galleria in Milan a wonderful
place for such urban interaction. Slowly we weave the knowledge together:
the fabric of the city should delight our emotions without neglecting its
rational needs.
The city is not only a container for our life, it is our life. It has to
fulfill the dichotomy of life which in the end is one, like the yin and
yang in Chinese philosophy. The city must respond to our material and
rational needs; it must also lift us beyond these needs. Like Calvino’s
Venice, the city must weave together the dreams of the Romantics, the
delightful, the beautiful, the small and the large.
Eberhard H. Zeidler is a Senior Partner with Zeidler Roberts
Partnership, one of North America's leading architectural firms,
internationally renowned for excellence in architectural design and urban
planning.
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