Just in case you ever thought I was going to turn my attention away from regurgitating info from the New York Times, the New Republic, and Deadspin, let me slam the door nice and hard. Last night I read Sarah Williams Goldhagen's essay on American infrastructure that just appeared in TNR. Let's see. Hmmm. Shrill? Check. Wonky? Yes. Self-righteous? But of course (this is the woman who got the ball rolling by calling out Calatrava's warm-fuzzy indicing design for the Ground Zero PATH station the kitsch it really is).
But, after some beating the reader about the head and shoulders with unfathomable statistics, she brought up an issue that is really the total mystery to me at the center of the architectural profession: how we could have such a poor relationship between the public and the professionals. She captures the stalemate pretty well from both sides, and then takes a swing (something the biggest names have been begging, just begging for) at the leading lights of the profession for happily giving in to the terms of this acid environment.
Today's city planners are seen as clueless and well-meaning bureaucrats at best, and as anti-democratic elitists at worst. Architects, landscape architects, and urban designers (including the many who do not merit the slander) are depicted as divas who care more about fancy forms than about the people who live in their buildings or the clients who build them. Expertise in the built environment is often held in public ridicule. As a result, folk wisdom has it that it is up to the public-spirited citizen--the community board activist, the local environmental review agency, the historic preservation commission--to stop them: thus unwittingly validating a salient quotation that was prominently displayed in one of the Moses exhibitions. "The critics," he once said, "build nothing."
I don't know why we let ourselves fall into this trap--letting the public tell us that they know better than we do and then proving them right time after time. Goldhagen would have the widely held views above as part of the made-for-TV dialectic between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, but somehow I am tempted to locate it somewhere else: in a basic anti-intellectual bent to American culture. After all, we gladly feed our babies toys made with leaded plastic from China only to scream bloody murder when we have to pay the price for our credulity, but as a culture, we wouldn't take the most earnest and well-documented piece of advice from an educated professional bred in one of the countries best schools and practicing in a major artistic and corporate milieu. Goods are good; ideas stink like some much Froggy cheese. A Harvard-educated doctor is a trope of trustworthy achievement. A Harvard-educated architect would be lucky to be paid the respect of the shoe designer SWG would have him reduced to.
. . .
Sadly, the public's mistrust of the experts who should be advising politicians on how to address the multifarious problems of the American infrastructure is not wholly misplaced. To be sure, there are many talented public officials, city planners, urban designers, and architects who are committed to working in the interest of the public good. Yet there are also many professionals who have resigned themselves to working within the ever-narrowing constraints that the public assigns to them of designing mainly signature projects. . . . As a result, American architects sometimes run the risk of appearing to be little more than glorified shoe designers.
1 comments:
Poignant, insightful post, George. Although I enjoyed Goldhagen's article, I was disappointed at how it lapsed into a typical architecture editorial (a la Harvard Design Magazine). In other words, 3/4ths of the article is criticism, the rest is name dropping. I thought that being affiliated with a decidedly non-architectural publication would alleviate this. But alas, no.
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