It seems very ironic to me that America, following WWII, would have put together a propaganda campaign that portrayed Modernism as something well-suited to democracy. (1) One of British philosopher Richard Wollheim’s arguments in favor of democracy is that “the ordinary human being is the best judge of her own interests. Only by controlling government through a democracy do these best interests prevail.” (2) Modernist planning, on the other hand (in the schemes we have been looking at, at least) entails a system where the only interests that prevail are those of the master planner, the architect, or the engineer – in a word, the elite. This view can perhaps be summed up as: the ordinary person is not a scholar, a scientist, or a technician, and therefore is not the best judge of her own interests. As James Scott points out, Le Corbusier wrote of his plans as being “correct, realistic, [and] exact,” yet created “well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate…” Yet the plans somehow still miraculously manage to contain, according to Le Corbusier, “nothing but human truths.” (3)
Le Corbusier’s “correct” plans, however, are frequently nothing more than wildly subjective expressions of his own personal aesthetic tastes. (4) He claims, for example, that “we rarely care to look at the silhouette of houses seen against the sky; the sight would be too painful… the silhouette seems a gash, a ragged, tumultuous line with jutting broken forms. And our need of delight and enthusiasm finds nothing to evoke it in this incoherence…” (5) Also read: “What would it matter if… behind the screen of trees there stood the tremendous silhouettes of the sky-scrapers? They would supply a background bathed in light, radiant with their glazed facades…” (6) In these passages, Le Corbusier is expressing his own aesthetic tastes and nothing more. It may indeed come as a great surprise, then, to someone so proud of being tucked “well away” from public opinion, that many people actually find, in shambolic skylines, a “delight and enthusiasm” that they would say is often evoked by looking upon scenes of wide-ranging detail and variety. On the other hand, there are those who, obviously unknown to Le Corbusier, feel bored, dehumanized, anxious, or out of touch when in the shadow of a monolithic, uniform slab of glass and concrete. Why would these people shun straight lines and absurdly simple layouts; are they just pack donkeys, or are they humans with more on their mind than just machine functions?
What elite Modernist thinking ignores is that ordinary people have had a wide variety of empirical experience with different living conditions, many of which the elite planner knows nothing of. This reservoir of workaday empirical experience is something that would prove immensely useful to any planner or designer trying to build places where people can not only function, but feel comfortable, happy, nostalgic, gregarious, contemplative, spiritual, creative… all the other things that life includes. I would argue that Modernist planning is inherently undemocratic in that it explicitly and proudly ignores the diverse empirical experiences of ordinary people (that is, where it doesn’t seek to reroute them completely in the name of “social engineering”). Ordinary citizens are not allowed to have plans for the Modernist city; on the contrary, the city has very detailed, rigid, and uniform plans for them, and for what their houses and workplaces and many of their actions will look like. Beyond the master planner or architect, there is no room for an individual who might want to express her own emotions or ideas of beauty through architecture.
Christopher Alexander is one contemporary architect, designer, and urban theorist whose use of ordinary empirical experience might come as incredibly refreshing to anyone fed up with the continuing elitism of architects who pat each other on the back for monolithic projects that often come off as inscrutable, bland, and depressing to many of the ordinary people who have to live in or near them. Even a cursory glance at Alexander’s A Pattern Language will reveal a way of planning that is, in its emphasis on actual human interaction and emotions, very much at loggerheads with Modernism. For instance, his warning never to build “large monolithic buildings,” is backed up with many empirical observations to support the claim that “the more monolithic the building is, the more it prevents people from being personal, and from making human contact with other people in the buildings.” (7) Or contrast with Modernism his assertion that “building set-backs from the street, originally invented to protect the public welfare by giving every building light and air, have actually helped greatly to destroy the street as a social space.” (8) He instead outlines other ways to ensure air and sunlight, such as height limits and building wings, all while preserving spaces for vibrant and varied social interaction.
Alexander’s ideas are brilliant and benevolent for their observations of how people actually use and relate to buildings; his plans create more human and less machine-like spaces. Alexander’s work addresses questions like: What kind of rooms and lighting do people gravitate towards? What kind of environments facilitate easy and friendly interactions? What kind of staircases, outside building walls, and columns connect you to your environment, or can you lounge on and feel comfortable and not stifled? (Some possible solutions, by the way, include open stairs connected to the ground, building edges with places to sit and lounge, and thick columns (9)). These questions can be answered by ordinary people everywhere – who have all sorts of different traditions, emotions, and preferences, and who use buildings and cities everyday – much better than they can be answered by solitary and dispassionate mathematicians and architects.
1) See “Science, Technology, and the International Style” in Cor Wagenaar, ed. Happy: Cities and Public Happiness in Post-War Europe, 78-79.
2) Richard Wollheim’s ideas are from “Democracy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 225-42, especially 241-2, summed up in H.B. McCullough, Political Ideologies (Don Mills: OUP, 2010), 65-66.
3) These quotes are from Le Corbusier, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization, trans. Pamela Knight (New York: Orion Press, 1964), 154, quoted in James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 112.
4) James Scott corroborates this often in Chapter 4 (“The High-Modernist City”) of Seeing Like a State.
5) Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its planning, trans. from 8th French ed. of ‘Urbanisme’ by Frederick Etchells (New York, Dover, 1987), 232.
6) Ibid., 240.
7) Alexander et al., A Pattern Language (New York: OUP, 1977), 468-472: Pattern 95: Building Complexes.
8) Ibid., 593-595: Pattern 122: Building Fronts.
9) Ibid., specifically see 740-744; Pattern 158: Open Stairs, 752-756: Pattern 160: Building Edge, and 1064-1067: Pattern 226: Column Place.
Also See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language (I highly recommend looking at this book if you’re interested in design for anything from cities down to individual houses, rooms, and yards. It’s very accessible and easy and fun to read and contains about a million good and simple ideas that anyone could use, and there are a couple copies at the UBCO library.)
This quote by Christopher Alexander from the front bookflap of ‘A Pattern Language’ sums up all my thoughts on this: “At the core… is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea… comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people”.
I think that this concept of Christopher Alexander’s sounds very interesting and if it could occur, it would be a very eclectic and beautiful place to see. I agree to an extent that people should design their own houses as that is their personal space in a functional society and do with it what you will. Alternatively though, people attempting to build the streets and general planning elements of the community would result in dysfunction and a lack of professional and safe building methods.
Though Le Corbusier was a man of aesthetics, he was a trained professional at the art of urban planning. He dedicated his life to learning about how people would function best in a given place and democratically, was given the freedom of speech to share his ideas with the world. As all democracies work, many people hate Le Corbusier’s ideas and others worship them. The bottom line is, that even if Le Corbusier had shortcomings in his planning, he was an adequate planner that had the proper education to make city plans. If the general public attempted the task, they would be begging at Le Corbusier’s coattails within a few hours of squabbling because the one crazy guy on the street wants to build a chocolate fountain in the middle of the road. Aesthetic technocrat or not, Le Corbusier was a master of his art though I do wonder what the city would look like if the general public developed the skills to build cities.
I’m not talking about citizens literally drawing up plans for every aspect of the city. Experts and technicians are needed in all manner of planning and design to make projects actually come true and work well. An ordinary person will probably not be able to draw up appropriate plans for an entire city, a highway or a large building. Yes, the actual implementation and technical aspects of plans need to be handled by experts. The problem I’m pointing out occurs when they are handled by experts who don’t have any regard for even the input or opinion of the citizens who will be using their plans. In a democracy, these experts and technicians should be drawing up their plans while keeping in mind public opinion, desire, and the reality of how spaces are used, insofar as this is practically possible. Of course, the person demanding a chocolate fountain will probably have to be ignored, because chocolate fountains probably turn out to be expensive and maybe even gross. One might argue ‘democratic planning won’t work because there might be a tiny minority who want something totally unworkable and crazy’. But in a well-functioning democracy, their wishes usually won’t come true, because even if they were the majority, we have legal constitutional safeguards that work against the ‘tyranny of the majority’, and that are designed to prevent truly bad and unworkable things from ever happening. But the groups of people voicing legitimate concerns – i.e. clamouring for a kitchen that isn’t separated from the eating area, a reasonable request we saw being explicitly ignored in post-War France – would have a fair chance of being heard and responded to, in a well-functioning democracy. But the whole programme of Modernism (and nowhere more than Le Corbusier) is built on the premise that these plans contain objective scientific knowledge that cannot be refuted. It makes no difference whether someone requests a chocolate fountain or a slightly different kitchen if these aren’t part of the “objective” plan to begin with. Also, all good scientists and planners test their theories and respond to changes. (Actually Jane Jacobs talks about all of the above in the readings right now; even pseudoscientific theory can sound plausible if written a certain way – see her example about the archaic medical practice of bloodletting). Le Corbusier, on the other hand, (who is a pseudoscientist if there ever was one) claimed his plans were perfect and everlasting right from the start. Part of the problem occurs, as well, because the buildings of elite architects, though they may be relatively useless and boring to an ordinary person, can still be considered a runaway success if considered on that architect’s own terms. If the architect never defines her terms for success as anything more than meeting a select few functions (sleeping, working, eating, efficiency, practicability, etc…) than many Modernist buildings can be, and have been, considered runaway successes – but the more you start judging them by other, also very obvious criteria – the need to socialize, relax, daydream, meander like a donkey, etc… – the more of a failure they become. Beyond functionalism, fellow architects often fawn over them because they see them as embodying a high level of technical or aesthetic achievement that is presumably extraordinarily exciting to experts in engineering or math; never mind that ordinary people couldn’t care less. Look at the winners of some architectural contests; they sometimes seem like elaborate hoaxes. Never mind if you can sit or relax or feel comfortable in these buildings; they apparently involve some new geometrical orgy that us non-architects could never appreciate. Clearly, some of these buildings are built to suit the artistic tastes of an individual or a small group, which is fine, depending on the type of building. But many of these buildings are purporting to benevolently serve the masses; public buildings or housing projects which thousands use, live in, and look at, and if they are really just satisfying the artistic tastes of a small elite while failing to be attractive and useful to the people who use them, then they are a failure in my opinion, and also a failure in democratic terms.
Woah… that’s quite a reply!
Is the reference to a chocolate fountain taken from Lisa Simpson’s campaign to be a class representative?
Also, Le Corbusier was a recipient of democratic rights like free speech, but I have seen no evidence that he sought to extend these rights to others through his planning; quite the contrary, his planning was thoroughly authoritarian. (As were the plans of his heroes; read the incredibly ominous last page of ‘The City of Tommorrow’ – “Louis XIV… Homage to a great town planner. This despot conceived immense projects and realized them…” He certainly makes no qualms about Louis XIV being a despot.) Le Corbusier certainly thought he knew how people would function best, but he would’ve done a lot better to actually go and find out how they do.
By contrast, Christopher Alexander’s ideas are a collection of suggestions based largely on empirical evidence (obviously never perfect), that can be and have been implemented on many scales, and don’t claim to be perfect or unchangeable, but actually specifically ask the user of the plans to observe how things are going and respond to new evidence.