Jane Jacobs Changed My Life… or, Modernists Should Die

What makes a good neigh­bor­hood? I’ve started read­ing every­thing I can get my hands on regard­ing urban plan­ning and issues sur­round­ing sprawl, and I think it’s so inspir­ing that Jane Jacobs had it all fig­ured out in 1961. I think it would not be mag­nan­i­mous to say that she saved Green­wich Vil­lage from becom­ing another Robert Moses high­way. Check out this dis­cus­sion about Jane’s life and the state of urban plan­ning. (Real Audio)

As a designer, I’ve always loved mod­ernist design — it’s big, it’s human­ist in the sense that it is utopian and egal­i­tar­ian, and it shows off our won­der­ful tech­nol­ogy. Look at Empire Plaza in Albany, NY, and you can’t help but think that we are capa­ble of amaz­ing things. How­ever, this HUGE plaza is mostly use­less, except on sunny days during noon and 1pm, when work­ers might stroll out­side for fresh air. Nev­er­mind that there aren’t any delis or con­ve­nience stores within a 5 minute walk. Also, think of a place like this in the evening, or at night. Dead. I’ve been there! Prob­a­bly unsafe. But the 19th cen­tury State Capi­tol is won­der­ful, and human-​scaled. One might imag­ine shops or restau­rants on the sur­round­ing streets. It’s dig­ni­fied, and worthy of a civic build­ing. I think our post-60s mis­trust of gov­ern­ment makes us think that spend­ing the money and time to build last­ing mon­u­ments to public life is some­how waste­ful or bad. Albany Dan’s own neigh­bor­hood (not far from Empire Plaza) is a tes­ta­ment to How We Used to Do Things. It’s a mish­mash of income levels and uses. It’s won­der­ful too.

Urban renewal is a fuck­ing sham. No news there. Look at Boston’s own place of civic activ­ity, city hall. Mod­ernist archi­tects can argue all they want about the ‘greatness’ of build­ings and plazas like this, but I doubt anyone but a few intel­lec­tu­als actu­ally appre­ci­ate it as such. (Myself included) It flies in the face of hun­dreds of years of prece­dent and exper­tise, and yet we call it ‘brilliant’. Listen to the architect’s own words:

“Kallmann: ‘We dis­trust and have reacted against an archi­tec­ture that is absolute, unin­volved and abstract. We have moved towards an archi­tec­ture that is spe­cific and con­crete, involv­ing itself with the social and geo­graphic con­text, the pro­gram, and meth­ods of con­struc­tion, in order to pro­duce a build­ing that exists strongly and irrev­o­ca­bly, rather than an uncom­mit­ted abstract struc­ture that could be any place and, there­fore, like modern man’ with­out iden­tity or presence.”

Does the build­ing and plaza create a good urban space? nope. The lan­guage itself is specif­i­cally crafted to sound unin­tel­li­gi­ble, and to ele­vate the archi­tect to the status of some Ayn Ran­dian demi-​God. Even the weird geom­e­try of the plaza is psy­cho­log­i­cally unset­tling, not to men­tion what I feel from the build­ing itself. There is some­thing pro­foundly anti-​social in a build­ing that is set back from the street so far with that much brick. The ‘style’, (if the mod­ernists let you call it that), is Bru­tal­ist Modern, for christ’s sake.