Sustainable Architecture and Sustainable Cities
It wasn’t necessarily my intention to immediately continue the discussion of sustainable cities and how we define them, because I wanted to spend some time on my other interests. However, considering this issue has some urgency for many people, I keep finding great articles. Today, I came across two fantastic pieces that I must pass along for you to read.
[Image: (left) Jules Lubbock interviews Leon Krier. Courtesy of bdonline. (top right) Thomas Bender author of (bottom right) The Unfinished City. Courtesy of NYU.]
The first is Jules Lubbock’s interview with Leon Krier about the role of London and traditional buildings in sustainable architecture.
The second is an article by Thomas Bender that discusses Abu Dhabi as a creative city, a means of social sustainability, by understanding the history of New York City. If you only have time for one of these, please spend it on this one.
However, the two together create an important dialogue about the future of cities, in part because they provide a balance of attitude - one pessimistic, one optimistic.
Jules Lubbock interviews Leon Krier, excerpt:
Jules Lubbock: An important question is the control of the skyline in modern cities and particularly what’s been happening to London in recent years.
Leon Krier: The problem with metropolitan developments like London or New York is they are not a product of reason and voluntary decision, but are rather accidents. Like in London [with the Congestion Charge]. Of course this makes traffic lighter but it transforms the city into a privatised zone for a certain class of people. It is not an intended outcome but is an accident…
JL: There is an argument that with mobile communications, with your iPhone and BlackBerry, the need for the physical office is beginning to decline, that people can work in a nomadic fashion, on the move, from their homes, from cafés, so maybe something radical is going to happen to these highly congested commercial cities.
LK: That would mean there had been a need for these high densities. I’m absolutely convinced there never was. They developed because there were lifts and cars and mechanised transport but there was never an absolute need. One could have reorganised modern office building in such a way that you’d never need utilitarian high rise.
JL: That’s an interesting theme between the rationality of these decisions and the irrationality of them.
LK: And also the complete ignorance that when you have a historic network of streets of a city, which was an extremely refined network of streets and railways, it’s beautiful. When you look at 19th century planning, it was a rich pattern, which was planned for two or three storeys, sometimes four. And then in the late 19th century, [the developers] started packing really dense, becoming more specialised and moving residents out because of the pressure on land.
One of Le Corbusier’s great analytic schemes, Ville Radieuse, had a famous stella diagram which shows how as you get into a city there is density of traffic. Yet the contrary is true when you look at the street pattern: we have big streets outside and very thin, tiny alleys in the centre. How do you get this density into those streets? It’s absurd. And therefore Corbusier’s response was to blow it to smithereens and rebuild.
The other way was to say this is a pattern which is highly intelligent, works extremely well. Clean out the things which don’t work and build the modern city, the really dense, highly mechanised city elsewhere…
JL: When the Prince was making the Vision of Britain film in the mid-1980s, there was nowhere to study traditional architecture. Now, in the US there are about four places for the whole of the western world. This monopoly of modernism over architectural education still strikes me as quite monstrous.
LK: Particularly because traditional architecture is not a matter of ideology but of technique: how to deal with natural materials when you build, what forms come out of putting materials together. And yet it’s treated on the modernist side as something that is not technological but historical. It’s seen as something we can’t do now because things have changed.
The only thing which changed is that through the dominant use of synthetic materials, you can do things which before you couldn’t do. Modernism would not be possible without the use of synthetic materials.
Any idiot can cast a piece of concrete that stands up, despite its illogical form and nonsensical expression. Now when we look at what these materials cost environmentally, we see that concrete is a material which has colossal carbon footprint.
JL: Brick uses four times the amount of embedded energy to wood; concrete five times; steel perhaps 10 times; aluminium is the highest of all, and glass, of course.
LK: Now we are overtaken by environmental problems that are going to wipe out modernism like it was never dreamed of. If you see it purely as a style, you can be charmed by it because they are very nice things.
I calculated that the volume of kerosene I burned flying across the world to design the Miami University building was larger than the volume of the building itself. It is clearly unsustainable. The way we live is absurd. We are in a situation of extremes because of the imperial centrality of Europe and the US for more than 200 years. The architecture of the past 200 years is the architecture of excess, which is largely to do with drawing energies from other countries.
I do appreciate Krier’s definition of traditional architecture and the plea he is making, but I think his predictions discount a very important fact. Manual labor costs have risen dramatically in the developed world, and continue to do so in the developing world. This is all a good, though, because it is a result of balancing wages to create fair compensation.
This is coupled with the fact that the monumental projects being constructed are becoming more private, and less civic in use. This changes the incentive structure for completing a project. The bottom line is now more important, with less margin. This is a problem for creating sustainable building that are well designed and well crafted, but is not a problem that will go away.
I do agree that environmental problems are going to change the face of architecture, but that has more to do with the economic theory of tipping points. Global conditions will reach a point where other incentives are far greater than the bottom line. Then, and only then, will we see a broad shift in focus toward sustainable, well crafted buildings.
Abu Dhabi - Building a Creative City, Thomas Bender, excerpt:
What makes a creative city – a city marked by both artistic creativity and technological innovation?
This is a question of great significance for Abu Dhabi, which is investing serious energy to shape itself into the cultural capital of the Middle East. Vast plans for urban development are on the drawing boards, as are designs for a series of world-class cultural institutions.
[Image: Saadiyat Island is the cultural center that is highlighted in Thomas Bender’s article. Masdar is the carbon neutral development by Foster + Partners. Courtesy of Google Earth.]
Is the formula that made New York an economic and cultural centre pertinent to Abu Dhabi? It is, of course, not a model that can be replicated. But the experience of other cities, New York among them, may allow us to consider the possibilities for Abu Dhabi’s cultural development.
Long ago I came up with a phrase that captures the essence of the culture of New York: Dollars, Diversity, and Democracy. New York has always been about commerce as well as culture: it was established by the Dutch (who called it New Amsterdam) in 1624 as a trading post, and these commercial origins shaped its culture. Because it was established for trade, it was an open city from the beginning…
What is so striking about New York City is the battleground quality of its intellectual life. The uncentered, but not utterly formless, character of intellectual culture in New York is its special, though not always welcome, gift to the life of the mind. The combination of authoritative institutions and multiple alternatives makes for contention. But it also combines tradition and innovation, ensures continuity and standards while allowing space for the new, and sometimes surpassing qualities of creativity that transform the tradition…
My point here is that invention requires a social world that crosses class and cultural lines, and brings individuals with very different forms of learning and craft into casual contact with one another…
The spirit of invention depends upon very complex and highly specialized habitats of knowledge. Innovation often involves connecting them. It also demands, even in modern times, the same collaboration between classes, and the ability to join theory and craft …
It is possible, of course, for an ambitious city to create the conditions for both making and consuming culture. Cities can use public policy, as New York has done, sometimes inadvertently; they can provide rent subsidies for artists’ housing and studio space, to take one example. But unless the making bears some active relation to the consuming and vice versa, one has a showcase for culture, not a creative centre…
If the secret of New York’s creativity has indeed been its fruitful mix of dollars, democracy, and diversity, I would add that the easy part is the dollars. It is the democracy and diversity that are hard. By democracy I mean the participation of many classes and cultures in the life of a city; and by diversity, not merely the presence of varied races and ethnicities, but a diversity of habitats of knowledge.
Abu Dhabi possesses the potential to fulfill all these conditions. It has shown genuine commitment to culture and to the creation of a great cultural centre. But the city’s success as a creative metropolis will require careful stewardship beyond the investments made so far to bring great cultural and educational institutions to the city. It must also ensure that the daily life in the city nourishes the conditions and opportunities that sustain talent and offer a creative environment of a lively, diverse urbanism.
There is still much more meat to this essay that makes it worth reading, especially if you’re interested in the history of New York.
This article is really important because it illustrates the complex, and varied conditions necessary within a city for it to be a breeding ground for innovation and progress. We can attempt to simulate these conditions across the world, but not every condition can be planned. There is still a ’street level’ condition that must emerge on its own. The best we can do is try to create a system in which this can happen through open, continuous, and flexible landscapes.
If we allow our cities to be diverse, there will be both the positive and negative friction that instills a richness within culture.
Articles
Leon Krier Talks Sustainable Architecture, bdonline
Abu Dhabi - Building a Creative City, The National
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