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 8^th 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.)

The architecture of Raymond Unwin represents one of Letchworth’s small triumphs.  Unwin’s working class cottage rows used the modest materials at their disposal with great economy while still maintaining a craftsman’s eye for detail and natural elements.  Unwin, as part of the 19^th century arts-and-crafts movement in architecture, idealized the 14^th century medieval village as “the truest community that England had ever known” (Robert Fishman), where social stability had manifested itself in a unified style of architecture that organically graced the land’s natural contours.  It expressed neither modern confusion nor the “calculated prettiness” (Fishman) of symmetrical layouts.  It also failed to accomplish any of the social changes which Ebenezer Howard had envisioned.

It is a strange irony that Barcelona’s ‘Park Guell’, planned as a gated aristocratic community of 60 houses in the first decades of the 1900s, was also commissioned as a kind of ‘Garden City’.  The park, designed by Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi, though it failed as a housing development (only 2 houses were built, one of which Gaudi lived in, and it is now a public park), represents the zenith of an architecture of natural contours.  Indeed, far more than a mere complement to natural forms, it fuses with them while it flips them on their heads; it’s the aesthetic benchmark for (surrealist) utopian medieval arts and crafts villages.

But the irony of Letchworth’s aesthetic triumphs too, as has been pointed out in class, is that Howard saw the Garden City as a vehicle for social change far more than a path to pretty parks.  Unwin’s ingenious designs remained unaffordable to the poorest workers, showing that under existing conditions, truly affordable housing required government intervention.  When the government did get on board with public housing after WWI, Unwin, to whose influence they often deferred, had abandoned Garden Cities in favor of commuter satellites, which upon completion rarely lived up to his standards.  Instead, they morphed into the thoughtless and oppressive urban sprawl which has been so well documented in the songs of the Kinks.**  One can’t help but wish that Unwin and the British government had preferred garden cities to satellites; though government-funded Garden Cities might also have ignored Howard’s social principles, their aesthetic qualities would still have trumped sub-par ‘garden sprawl’.

As for Howard’s social goals, it is interesting to note that the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921, whose ideas of “free co-operation and communal ownership”, according to Alan March, were integral to Howard’s ideas), like Unwin, idealized the European medieval village, stating that “never, either before or since, has mankind known a period of relative well-being for all as in the cities of the Middle Ages.  The poverty, insecurity, and physical exploitation of labor that exist in our times were then unknown.”*  But March points out the historic failure of modern communes under Kropotkin’s authority-jettisoning model, instead praising Howard’s well-considered, democratic compromise between communitarianism and individualism at the municipal level.  Of course, as we all know, Letchworth’s liberal-capitalist shareholders paid little heed to Howard’s democratic solutions.

Howard’s Garden City never received the support from philanthropists, radicals, or the co-op movement, which might likely have made it a success, so he compromised with his financiers, believing that the snowballing success of the Garden City was imminent.  To my mind, Howard was something of an anarchist, in that his plans implied at least a subtle erosion of authority, and at best an almost entirely cooperative city reminiscent of the “vital society of communes and free cities created by brotherhoods, guilds, and individual initiative,”* which Kropotkin believed had characterized medieval Europe.  So perhaps he would have been comforted by Herbert Read’s assertion that “the task of the anarchist philosopher is not to prove the imminence of a Golden Age, but to justify the value of believing in its possibility.”*

*These quotes are from Richard A. Falk’s essay, “Anarchism and World Order.” In Anarchism: Nomos XIX. Edited by J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman.  New York: New York University Press, 1978.

**Ray and Dave Davies from The Kinks grew up in the London suburb of Muswell Hill:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muswell_Hill … The spiritual malaise of suburban London was an oft-recurring theme in their songs, especially on the albums Muswell Hillbillies, and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), which make excellent companions when one is studying British urban planning.  The song ‘Shangri-La’ is a favorite example.

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Guell