Some smart ideas from our old pal Robert Campbell, in
last month's ArchRecord.
Some free advice to President-elect Obama
January 2009
By Robert Campbell, FAIA
President-elect Obama, we?re informed, intends to create an Office of Urban Policy. Obama is a lawyer, and I?m sure he?s thinking more about social issues than about architecture or urban design. But at this writing (in early December), nobody knows who will occupy the new office, or what its brief will be. Maybe architects will begin to have some influence on public architecture? It doesn?t happen often. Architects aren?t known for their political skills. My friend Dick Swett, who used to be a United States Representative from New Hampshire, believes he was the only architect to serve in Congress in the 20th century.
Not so long ago, though, the State Department maintained an active panel of architectural advisers, many of them distinguished architects. And the Public Buildings Service of the General Services Administration (GSA) ran its superb Design Excellence Program, based on Daniel Patrick Moynihan?s famous 1962 memo, ?Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture.? Wrote Moynihan, memorably: ?The policy shall be to provide requisite and adequate facilities in an architectural style and form which is distinguished and which will reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American national Government ? Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa ?? Under Design Excellence, the GSA recruited a ?National Register of Peer Professionals? to help it select architects and monitor their designs. (Disclosure: I was one of the first batch of 26 peers, back in 1994).
Fear versus dignity But those admirable efforts were dissipated under the current administration. The State Department retreated to cookie-cutter, standardized designs for its embassies ? designs (and sitings) that say more about our fear of terrorists than about our dignity or enterprise. And the GSA, while it still maintains its roster of peers, is far less active than in the years when it was building its fine string of federal courthouses.
For starters, we can ask Obama (hey, what else does he have to worry about?) to restore the active presence of the architectural profession in these two key federal functions.
My other suggestions are a little weirder. But nobody says I have to make them politically feasible.
Raise the gas tax through the roof. I remember hearing the economist John Kenneth Galbraith propose this at least 15 years ago. It?s obvious common sense. Gas is incredibly cheap. You pay $20 for a gallon of paint today, but a gallon of gasoline ? which has to be extracted, refined, shipped maybe halfway around the world, and delivered to your pump (with the source, perhaps, protected by expensive warfare) ? comes, as I write, to less than $2. Back in the early 1950s, when I was a kid, my Dad paid about 30 cents a gallon, which means that the price has been dropping, in real value, all my life. Thirty cents in the early ?50s would be worth at least $2.50 today.
Exxon says
My newspaper recently carried a full-page ad from Exxon Mobil, informing us that only about a fourth of the world?s oil reserves have been extracted to date, but that (hooray!) Exxon is busy inventing new technologies to extract the rest ? in order, says the ad, to lower the cost to the consumer. This from the company that last year posted the largest profit in corporate history.
It?s madness. It?s as if Exxon were telling us to save and use our old slide rules and typewriters and forget about computers. That?s how backward-looking its energy policy is. Exxon should be finding new energy sources, not looking for new ways to carbonize the world?s atmosphere.
A stiff gas tax, like those in Europe, could pay for the improvement of our disastrous national infrastructure ? our failing roads, sewers, bridges, tunnels, all that. It would make alternative sources of energy more competitive. And people would again collect into walkable, bikeable communities, which could be efficiently served by public transportation. That gain in density might do wonders, too, for the social health of cities, towns, and villages. I?m not as appalled by our scattered car-culture suburbs, as, say, Jim Kunstler, who writes: ?The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins.? Infilling them, surely, is a fourth possible destiny. But I agree that a lot of Americans in those thinned-out suburban worlds are feeling the lack of what used to be called togetherness. Not being members of a genuine, close-knit society, they create surrogates. They watch and discuss the lives of media celebrities as if they were friends or relatives. Or they join one of the fantastically successful so-called megachurches. Those, too, are surrogates: they supply, seven days a week, many of the social qualities that used to be supplied by actual communities.
The bigger picture
There needs to be a caveat here, though. Density is a plus word today, and it?s often said that New York?s Manhattan is the greenest community in the U.S., because its high density leads to low per-capita consumption of energy for heating, cooling, and transit. But throw the frame a little wider, and you realize that a lot of the food for New York is coming in carbon-powered trucks and airplanes from California, or even Brazil or China. Maybe there?s a more optimal city size, one that would permit us to raise more food nearer home.
Create a great national rail system. It?s embarrassing for an American to get on a bullet train in France, Spain, or Japan. Here, as in other ways, we?re falling into the status of a low-tech, third-world nation. Amtrak, which I often take, is pathetic by comparison ? slow, unreliable, with poorly designed passenger features and services. People argue that the U.S. is too big to be served by trains, and it?s true I wouldn?t take one from coast to coast. But there are several potential regions, each as big as a medium-size country, that could benefit, the way the BosWash corridor in the east does today. Trains, as everyone knows, are far safer and consume far fewer resources than other modes of travel or shipping. And like my gas tax, the rail system would tend to center a, pulling us together in communities, gathering, perhaps, not too far from the station. The new rail system should have at least the priority that the interstate highway system had in the 1950s and ?60s.
Stop development from places where floods happen. I can?t believe the way developers are building at the water?s edge of my own city of Boston, and many others. Guys, the water is rising. Nobody knows how high it will go, but it appears certain that it?s too late to prevent a drastic problem. I?ve always thought that a rational government would long ago have banned all building on the barrier islands, from New England to Texas. They?re basically sandbars, and they?re all doomed to suffer a hurricane sooner or later?and in some cases, to be wiped out completely. What we should have had, instead, is a Barrier Island Park, a national necklace of waves and beaches. I feel the same way now about oceanfront city building. Maybe we should pull back? It?s time to at least begin to think about what kind of controls might be appropriate.
The other side of this coin concerns the regions that don?t have enough water. The American Southwest has long been the fastest-growing part of the country. Yet cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas are like hospital patients on permanent life-support. They depend wholly on all those intravenous tubes that bring them water ? for drinking, for cooling, for irrigation. But water reserves are being drained. I know it sounds like socialism, but especially as we face unpredictable climate change, it might be wise to figure out some fair way to discourage rampant development in arid lands. Sooner or later, I suppose, there will be a successful method of desalinization. But the mind boggles at the thought of pumping vast amounts of water from the ocean to the desert.
On the other hand, don?t act like God. I?m quoting Bill Mitchell, the former dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, in his terrific new book The Greatest Architect in the World. Writes Mitchell: ?God?s limitation was his authoritarian, top-down approach ? He had never heard of Jane Jacobs, and he had no idea that the most complex, diverse, and interesting cities emerge gradually over many years, from countless incremental interventions and adjustments. It?s a bottom-up process, without a master plan. One thing just leads to another, and the most amazing results evolve in completely unexpected ways.?
I totally believe that, but ? There is always a master plan, of some kind, from some source. Jacobs lived in New York, a city, like so many, shaped by the grid. A good city needs both a plan and what I?ll call an insurgency. There must be an order (some of it provided, top-down, by designers, planners, and the government), and there must be an insurgency, a bubbling up of private initiatives from the bottom, in opposition to the plan.
Emerson said it long ago: ?There is always an establishment, and there is always a movement.? Or as Paul Verlaine put it, ?Mankind is permanently threatened by two disasters; they are order and disorder.? A good city is in a permanent state of tension between the two.
Contributing editor Robert Campbell is the architecture critic of The Boston Globe.
Even in-line skated to work in NYC. That was treacherous! 