Contradictions and Complexities

When Robert Venturi began writing Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1962, Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) was the subject of dinner-table conversation across the country. Apart from Jacobs's direct influence, among the parallels that emerged from their Townscape affiliations and other interests, the concept of complexity stands out, with Venturi's conception echoing Jacobs's historic introduction of complexity science into architectural and urban theory. While Venturi did not seek to extend the scientific research put forward by Jacobs, favoring instead the complexities suggested by gestalt theory and New Criticism, he cited similar scientific sources and derived similar principles for urbanism, as revealed by his Copley Square project of 1966.     

‘Downtown Is for People’: The street-level approach in Jane Jacobs' legacy and its resonance in the planning debate within the complexity theory of cities

Jane Jacobs suggested that ‘just and diverse streets’ reflect the functioning of the city as ‘a problem of organised complexity’. The topic has recently been at the centre of the debate on her work. This paper looks at Jane Jacobs's reconstruction of the way a city works with reference to self-organisation and ethical aspects (trust and respect for diversity). The paper uses ‘Street-Level epistemology’ (SLe), which is a theory on the knowledge of ordinary people, in order to examine different ways to approach contemporary complex urban systems, resulting from myriads of self-organised practices and ‘vital little plans’. The paper employs Jacobs's early works on cities, in particular, a chapter in her book titled ‘Downtown Is for People’, to outline a proper Jacobsian Street-Level approach (SLa) substantiated by an ethical-cognitive component. This SLa is associated with the Complexity Theory of Cities (CTC), to improve the understanding of how complex, non-linear, discontinuous, and contingent urban systems work while constantly progressing and transforming. The paper draws on Jacobs's legacy and advocates progress through specific advancements in the debate around theoretical planning within CTC that describes the city as an emerging complex order.     

Op Arch

Abstract

JAE's White Issue is long overdue. The notion that architectural experimentation requires a rigorous feedback between design and research has been at play in design pedagogy since at least the 1960s and 1970s, which included the seminal research studio by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas ¹; the rise of operations research and systems engineering; the urban networks research of Shadrach Woods, the Smithsons, Constantinos Doxiadis, or Kenzo Tange; and the structure and materials research of Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, and Robert Le Ricolais, to name but a few. Concerns about the deterministic instrumentalism of systems thinking led to a new wave of humanism and composition, seen especially in the postmodernist uses of both historical examples and junkspace vernaculars as a Disneyesque brand image. The work of Venturi and Scott Brown, ironically, was to lead the way on the heels of the “duck vs. decorated shed” conclusions of Learning from Las Vegas.² Unlike most postmodernists, however, Venturi and Scott Brown did not abandon research, and their understanding of the relationships between pop culture, branding, and marketing techniques remains sophisticated and timely.     

From Jacobs to the Just City: A foundation for challenging the green planning orthodoxy

Now that Jane Jacobs' ideas are seen as urban planning orthodoxy, it is unclear how her institutional goal of progressive change for the field will carry forward. In the 1960s, Jacobs created the conditions for institutional change by offering a thorough critique of the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” orthodoxy of urban planning and presenting a solution for the problems that she saw with this approach. She argued that the top-down, design-oriented planning of her time hurt the lives of individual residents and diminished society as a whole. Her solution was a new way of seeing the city: as a functional and efficient social system. Since the 1990s, a global planning orthodoxy – of which Jacobs' ideas are part – developed around the “Smart Sustainable Resilient City.” This orthodoxy has been subject to critique, but Susan Fainstein's Just City theory offers tools for comprehensively challenging the approach and a solution for addressing the problems. In order to demonstrate the need for institutional change within the Smart Sustainable Resilient City orthodoxy, I use the Just City theoretical perspective to interpret the results of an analysis of green gentrification in New York City between 1990 and 2014. I argue that the over-valuation of Jacobsian diversity within the current urban planning orthodoxy generates unjust outcomes. The just green city, then, requires de-emphasizing Jacobs' intellectual project in favor of her far more important institutional project.     

Urban theory since A Theory of Good City Form (1981) – a progress review

Kevin Lynch's magnum opus A Theory of Good City Form (1981) is well known as a normative theory of the city. The intersection of human purposeful activity and city form is a principal feature. However, little attention is given in the literature to a small appendix in the book, A Theory of Good City Form (1981), in which the theories that explain the form and function of the city are classified and reviewed. The brief review insightfully reveals embedded values that are implicit in urban theory. We use a similar classification to review the progress of urban theory since Lynch's brief assessment noting the city's complexity can only be effectively explained through multiple historical and theoretical, value‐laden perspectives. The values are the bridge between human purpose and city form, between substance – the city – and procedure – decision making about the city, that is between urban theory and planning (procedural) theory. Finally, the review is concluded with the implications of urban theory, informed by A Theory of Good City Form, for urban morphological design theory as well as planning (procedural) theory.     

“I Will Try My Best to Make It Worth It”: Robert Venturi's Road to Rome

Robert Venturi's Rome Prize fellowship (1954–56) is a familiar, pivotal episode in his early career. But why did he want to go to the American Academy in the early 1950s? Venturi approached his fellowship with rare determination at a time when modernism made the Rome Prize's architectural relevance unclear. What made him certain this opportunity would be the key to his success, and how did this influence the book he published a decade later? As Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture marks its fiftieth anniversary, clarifying why Venturi valued the Rome Prize further illuminates his views on history, context, and meaningful design.     

The Palmach History Museum,Tel Aviv

In 1928 the Austrian architect and engineer Franz Löwitsch (1894–1946) published the article ‘Sensation of Space and Modern Architecture’ in Imago , the psychoanalytical journal edited by Sigmund Freud. Based on Richard Semon's theories of Mneme, which Löwitsch connected to psychoanalytical theories, the prevalence of dissimilar sensations of space throughout the stages of the development of western architectural history is presupposed, and Löwitsch offered an explanation of how their symbolic meanings reflected psychological conditions of a particular time and culture.

By connecting Semon's theory with psychoanalytical deliberations that equip the inherited memory of spatial sensations with pleasurable or unpleasurable emotions, Löwitsch furthermore argued that spatial sensations produce spatial concepts, and that the dominating shapes and forms of the architecture of a time therefore reflect the dominance of a particular inherited sensation of space. The unifying psychological make-up of a populace thus leads to spatial concepts that form an architecture which reflects these concepts and contain symbols that possess ‘satisfying powers’ valued by the majority of people of that particular time and place.

But Löwitsch's theory speaks of more than a mere justification for the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory as a methodology for the humanities. Löwitsch contrasted his findings meticulously with Oswald Spengler's controversially critiqued book The Decline of the West , Karl Scheffler's The Spirit of the Gothic and Eckhart von Sydow's Primitive Art and Psychoanalysis . The discussion of these contemporaneous writings that essentially sought to find the driving forces for the development of styles helps in formulating Löwitsch's final hypothesis. Here, he proposes the emergence of an ‘energetic space’ in architecture, which is the prevalent sensation of space that he predicts to emerge in the near future. His ultimate aim was not to enter academic discourse but rather to provide a scientifically based explanation, with which the impact of space on the inhabitant can be measured, explained and utilised in architectural practice.     

Displacement and re-placement: the international friendship bell as a translocative technology of memory

ABSTRACT

The International Friendship Bell is a traditional Japanese bonshō bell that was installed in Oak Ridge, TN, in 1996 to mark the city's fiftieth anniversary. I interpret the bell as a highly ambivalent site of cultural memory, drawing on memory studies theory to analyze its multiple meanings. Its backers represented the bell as an elegant tribute to Oak Ridge's post-World War II scientific legacy, while its detractors interpreted it as offering an unacceptable apology for Oak Ridge's role in constructing “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Describing the bell as a translocative technology of memory, I argue that the selection of a Japanese Buddhist bell served two important functions. First, despite having appropriated the bell from its original ritual context, its designers used it to sanctify Oak Ridge as sacred space. The bell was thus secularized, precisely as it sacralized civic space. Second, the bell's alien nature enabled it to serve as a screen on which Oak Ridgers could work out their ambivalence and anxieties about their civic identity. The bell thus provides a lens for understanding how religious ritual objects acquire new meanings when displaced from their intended contexts.     

Adolf Loos's Raumplan Theory

This article presents an argument demonstrating the complexity and generative capacity of Adolf Loos's raumplan theory. In pursuing this goal, I have used the first raumplan scheme to be realized—the Rufer House, built in Vienna in 1922—as a medium through which to review the definition of raumplan developed by Loos's modernist disciples. As an alternative to traditional interpretations, I propose an analysis of the theory based on four characteristics of raum—site, presence, gathering, and staying among things—posited by Martin Heidegger in his 1954 essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking.”     

Jane Jacobs's urban ethics

The 2016 centennial of Jane Jacobs's birth was an opportunity for scholars and pundits to reflect on the legacy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and the author's other works and activism. Such reflections naturally reflected on her enduring appeal and readership, but also sought to find shortcomings. Among the critics, and even some otherwise admiring biographers, was a theme that while Jacobs was keen to observe the importance of “eyes on the street” and other street-scaled phenomena, she was weak on such overarching structural concerns as racism, power, and capital. From such charges arose claims that Jacobs was race-blind and a neoliberal, accusations made more dramatic in the context of the polarizing rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential election, Brexit, and other ideological divisions. By examining Jacobs's ideas about the freedom of the city; segregation and discrimination; public space and social capital; neighborhood organization and self-government; and her rejection of the “Plantation mentality,” this paper challenges those claims and shows Jacobs as an important theorist of ethics in the city, which she described as an “ecosystem” of “physical-economic-ethical processes” ideally characterized by “mutual support.”     

Jane Jacobs,cities, urban planning,ethics and value systems

This article deals with the philosophical and ethical background of Jane Jacobs's ideas on cities as organized complexity and her criticism of urban planning and urban renewal in the form of demolition and area remediation. Many publications have already examined her influence on development projects in as far as this is verifiable. Her contribution to the paradigm shift in urban planning has been reflected in many ways. However, her - not explicitly elaborated - ideological value system that runs through her publications and determined her actual conduct, still remains a desideratum of research.     

“Watchful Wandering”

Abstract

Through close readings of John Ruskin's notebooks and diaries (related to The Stones of Venice) and the city itself, this paper explores his “watchful wandering”—as he characterized it—as a mode of urban experience and analysis, and that connected vision wherein the concrete fragment emblematizes the whole. Within a long history of ambulatory urban contemplation and journeyings, the paper locates Ruskin at the cusp of the pre- and early modern, exposing thereby a tension between the ethical and the aesthetic; between Ruskin's threefold vision—imbricating the romantic, scientific, and symbolic—and the blasé detachment of the urban flâneur.     

Reinventing Reality: Reconstructing Architecture

This article is based on a paper originally given as keynote address at the Ontario Association of Architects Convention, Toronto, March, 1988. Three issues are explored in this article: the historical background to the present situation in architecture and architectural education, with special reference to the work of Christian Norberg-Schulz, Robert Venturi, Colin Rowe, Bruno Zevi, Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves; the value of focussing again on the agenda of Norberg-Schulz's Intentions in Architecture (1962) as being a more reliable guide than the scattered opinions offered by other architects; a strategy for redesigning architectural education to reflect Norberg-Schulz's fundamental concerns about the role of architecture and architects, offering an integrated curriculum based upon a vertical rather than a horizontal structure of learning.     

Environmental health problems indoors: A comparison between the 1930's and 1990's

This article is inspired by Ulrich Beck's risk theory, which helps researchers raise new questions about environmental problems. The environmental problem in focus here is poor indoor air quality, particularly as found in Swedish housing. I compare this problem in its contemporary form, sick building syndrome, with indoor air problems of concern during the 1930's. The manner of causal thinking is similar in the two periods, and also the way in which publicity contributes to risk definition. However, housing standards in the 1930's were lower than those of today. The increase in standards was a manifestation of efforts to reduce illness caused by the earlier housing, and involved a re‐distribution of risk that exemplifies Beck's notions regarding the risk society.     

The New Urban Scale in Italy

Abstract

The publication of Aldo Rossi's L' architettura della città in 1966 marked the conclusion of several years of research and writing on architecture and urbanism. Rossi wrote the book as a treatise for a science of urbanism in an attempt to establish the principles and terms for analyzing existing urban conditions. His thesis responded to a polemical debate within Italian architecture of the early 1960s over the future form of the city brought about, in part, by unprecedented transformations in the postwar city. In this essay, I chronicle the cultural context of the debate over urbanism in Italy that motivated Rossi to establish objective principles for a new urban theory, distinguishing between “the architecture of the city,” autonomy, and the concept of la nuova dimensione.     

Placing Jane Jacobs within the Transatlantic Urban Conversation

After making a comparative historical survey of contemporaneous responses to her 1964 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Klemek concludes that Jane Jacobs' ideas were anticipated by urbanists in Great Britain and West Germany, and were embraced more readily by influential planners and architects in these nations and Canada than was initially the case in the United States. Unlike the almost reactionary outsider and opposition figure she seemed to be in New York, Jacobs was accepted by many types of planners and architects in these other nations, illustrating that her ideas were not as inherently anti-planning, antimodernist, or NIMBYist, as they appeared in the context of the United States.     

The city as terra incognita: Charles Booth's poverty survey and the people of London, 1886–1891*

Charles Booth's great survey of London poverty has not received full recognition as an early scientific inquiry. In defining and identifying social classes, and locating them spatially, across the world's largest city, it broke new ground. The methods of representation used by Booth, in charts, tables and maps, also went beyond anything previously undertaken by social scientists anywhere in the world. Behind this methodology, however, lay assumptions about poverty, work, crime and morality which largely determined the scientific results.     

That Old Thing Called Flexibility: An Interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown hold an unrivalled position within architecture. Now written several decades ago, their classic books Learning from Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction remain unsurpassed for their ability to shock and overturn current architectural thought. Francesco Proto talks to Venturi and Scott Brown on their present thinking about iconography, transparency, spectacularisation, architectural pornography and the contemporary architectural avant-garde. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Plan Reviews

The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield: Little, Brown &; Company, Boston, Massachusetts, 1970. 308 pp. $6.95

Design For Development: The Torontocentered Region: by The Government of Ontario: Queen's Printer, Toronto, 1970.

Design For Development: The Midwestern Ontario Region: by The Government of Ontario: Queen's Printer, Toronto, 1970.

Housing: The Social And Economic Elements: By Wallace F. Smith: University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970. 511 pp. $12.95

The Urbanization Of America: An Historical Anthology: Edited by Allen M. Wakstein: Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1970. 502 pp. $5.50

Chicago: Growth Of A Metropolis: by Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade: University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1969. 510 pp. $32.00

Town Planning In Frontier America: by John Reps: Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1969. 473 pp. $13.50

Monumental Washington: The Planning And Development Of The Capital Center: by John Reps: Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1967. 221 pp. $12.50

Geographic Perspectives On Urban Systems: With Integrated Readings: by Brian J. L. Berry and Frank E. Horton Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1970. 564 pp. n. p.

Explanation In Geography: by David Harvey: St. Martin's Press, New York, 1970 (published in 1969 in Great Britain). 503 pp. n.p.

Network Analysis In Geography: by Peter Haggett and Richard Chorley: St. Martin's Press, New York, 1970. 348 pp n.p.

Reparations: by Arnold Schuchter J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, New York, 1970. 275 pp. $6.95

Rural Poverty And Regional Progress In An Urban Society: by Chamber of Commerce of the United States The Office, Washington, D.C., 1969. 268 pp. $3.00

Book Notes: The Unprepared Society: Planning For A Precarious Future: by Donald N. Michael Basic Books, New York and London, 1968. 132 pp. $4.95

The Citizen'S Guide To Urban Renewal: by Carl G. Lindbloom and Morton Farrah Chandler-Davis Publishing Co., Trenton, Trenton, N. J., 1968. 192 pp. n.p.     

The City Crown by Bruno Taut

Abstract

Translator's Introduction In the early part of the 20th century, Bruno Taut developed an urban concept for the planning and reconfiguration of European cities to overcome national and social differences by means of architecture. A communal center modeled after the medieval cathedral or temple crowned Taut's city. In his anthology Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown) (1919), a critical text for the history of European Modernism, Taut championed the use of individual structures to define and affect the planning of an entire city.¹ Taut's anthology encouraged young architects to envision and build the ideal rather than perpetuate the quotidian. This first English translation of The City Crown maintains Taut's original goal.