Many urban spaces are bland, colorless and have no textures. They convey a message of neglect. They speak of an authoritarian attitude of governance toward citizens. I am reminded of a photograph in The Natural House, labeled ‘Find the Citizen.’ It is an aerial image of the East Side of Manhattan through the billowing exhaust of a thermal power plant.
Is Quality Measurable?
What should disturb us, as urbanists, is the quality of life being generated, and the scales on which we are able to conceptualize ‘quality.’ Kevin Lynch taught us that cities have several aspects, or elements, which can be enriched to improve the quality of urban places. He noted landmarks, boundaries and districts, amongst others. Lynch proposed that good urban fabric is not homogeneous; it is varied and articulated. In The Image of the City he emphasized boundaries and landmarks, which give further articulation and meaning to urban places. An urban core can have its own unique edge, can have distinctive entries and can sponsor movement through a network of walkways and paths. Small parks, gardens and courtyards can further accentuate these experiences. Exploring an urban core can be an odyssey through places, challenging one’s senses, demanding one move further and deeper into unknown domains and precincts. Laying out such a scenario is no less than conceptualizing the cinematography of a film. We are designing experiences. There are urban elements, urban components and urban relationships, amongst and between them, which generate urban systems. It is essential that we identify these parts, analyze them in terms of how they work on us, and assess how we feel and how we think they should be used.
There are also systems of architectural values that are used and abused (contextual relevance, honest expression of materials, human scale, building modules based on anthropometric dimensions and production sizes, graphic proportions, etc.). All these come to mind when lamenting the banality of the emerging urban forms. These forms are more about ‘appearances’, skin, packaging, than about any of the concerns and values I have noted above. While we should be moving into the four-dimensional world of experience, such forms move us back into the two dimensions of graphics.
Most important are the unplanned, serendipitous and pleasant human interactions which happen and are enriched by catalytic urban spaces: a chance meeting; eye-to-eye flirting; boy meets girl; and boy meets boy. Good urban fabric leaves the parks and the boulevards open for all to walk upon, hawk upon and play upon.
Images as Antidotes
America becomes a focus of thought because it has a narrow vocabulary of traditional patterns from which to evolve new forms. There have been a plethora of books on American barns; on highway hoardings; on shopping centers; on massive industrial complexes – all intent on proving that there is, indeed, an American urban tradition that we can learn from. While such studies are popular American doctoral thesis topics, they exhibit little virtuosity in terms of defining an urban language. The repertoire to draw on is very limited. It raises the question: Is Learning from Las Vegas possible? While bland America provides, so to speak, a ‘clean slate’ to work on, the reality is a milieu of ‘sameness’ or, at best, the trivia of endlessly repeated Disneyland imagery. The New Urbanism is a remake of the Levittowns of Long Island. We have added sidewalks, Victorian gingerbread motifs, front porches and declared that a kind of miraculous ‘smart urbanism’ has resulted. Indeed the sameness, the trivia and the banality of the Levittowns is more hurtful, because they have become the norm. Disney knew well the boredom of his compatriots as well as their lack of exposure to varieties of experience. He provided an antidote of sorts, in the form of packaged milieus, each with its own contrived traditions and fantasized geographical settings, which were then effectively marketed as lifestyle themes. The problem here lies within a kind of reality warp; a large and influential society began to gain its intellectual and emotional stimulation from fantasy and escape. Substance began to fade away and wither into a new virtual reality, created and produced by corporations.
One recalls with nostalgia that real places did exist in America as recently as the early 1950s, with their own styles, local dress mores, accents and even food habits. There were places like Cross Creek in Florida that ate its own alligator soup, Key West where Hemingway could escape to write, New Orleans with its own music and style, Cannery Row with its unique culture of poverty, Greenwich Village with real thinkers and painters. Even Faulkner’s hometown, Oxford Mississippi, has been transformed into a caricature of the Deep South, a stylized hyper-image of itself. Any ambience that had genuine qualities, or a unique character, was ‘made over’ into a kind of hyper-reality of what the place once was in the public imagination, depleting its authenticity. These ‘made over’ packages were then marketable – products for sale. Tourism became a vehicle to distribute them to millions of consumers. These hyper-real settings provide relief to the real urban ambience of Coca Cola signs, McDonald’s Arches, and curtain-walled buildings. If religion was the opiate of the masses in the nineteenth century, Walt Disney and hyper-reality are the opiate of the masses today.
Tourism/Urbanism
In such a confused milieu, it seems appropriate that the most talked of architecture is in the form of new art museums. And the most valued art is found in those museums. Galleries where something ‘new’ can be seen, either sell high-end ‘art investments,’ or trivial ‘arts and crafts’ bric-a-brac. Again these places are largely destinations for tourists, who are the consumers of these products. There was a time when people ‘traveled’ without any planned schedules or destinations. They were seekers – adventurers. In fact the entire concept of ‘tourism’ has emerged from consumer societies over the past several decades. The key requirement of the new tourism is that ‘nothing should happen!’ There should be nothing unexpected, unplanned or serendipitous. The new tourism that is preconceived and packaged allows people to consume places. Tourists use expressions like ‘let’s do Spain next year. Having ‘done Spain’ they will have to ‘do’ someplace else the following year. Again, consumerism. Tours have been designed, packaged and produced so that the essential qualities of a traveler, an explorer, or god forbid, an adventurer, are methodically distilled from the product. All risks, all dilemmas, and all strange people have been removed. Tourists do not need ingenuity to solve problems, to mediate with people, or to just plain make friends. In fact they want to consume people, instead of meeting them. They feel uncomfortable unless they are paying something to the ‘natives’ to do something for them.
Tourism has become an analogue for urbanism. Variety, diversity and experiences are to be removed. Nothing unplanned, nothing unforeseen, in short nothing new, should happen.
Meaning Systems
Having thrown up that paradigm, I would now like to focus on my work in the Himalayas. Here we are planning a new capital city that is an overlay on an existing setting. To describe it fully would take thousands of words. So, instead, I will explain to you what a prayer flag is. In a way it is an analogy of urban design.
In its simplest form, a prayer flag is a form of votive offering. A very long strip of cloth is tied along a very tall pole. The color of the cloth signifies a mood. The mood may signify an event, like a death in a community, or the initiation of a new house, or the start of a new season. It may just be an auspicious omen. If one looks closer at the cloth, there are characters hand painted or block printed onto it, which are in fact words that form mantras. As the wind blows over these flags, it is believed that the mantras are endlessly let off into the breeze, and that they float about over the city.
Walking through Thimphu valley along the Wangchhu’s clear streams, one is surrounded by verdant forests, which stretch up the steep mountain slopes from the river. There, at the top – or rather the edge, making a silhouette of the hills against the endless blue sky – one can make out a strange articulation. If one looks more closely at that edge, one finds it finely articulated by rows of large prayer flags, of varying heights
and configurations, presiding over the city, diffusing their favorable mantras. So we have this image and there is also this hidden meaning. The city is being protected, enriched and empowered by this guardian wall of auspicious prayer flags.
There are other artifacts, with other meanings. There are mani walls, or prayer walls; there are prayer wheels; there are chortens with prayers inscribed within them; there are lakhangs, or temples, and there are monasteries full of monks. There are also gateways, which welcome visitors. There are decorative signs and symbols, which emanate good vibes. And there are prayer flags that preside over the Thimphu Valley and gather the geographic space into a ‘place.’ Spaces are empty; places are full of meaning.
All of these artifacts – all of the meanings they communicate – charge the atmosphere with an aura. The mutual understanding of this meaning system, and the sharing of its aura, generates a deep form of conviviality. The artifacts are mechanisms created to generate meanings. These meanings are the shared feelings and sentiments of the inhabitants – the essence of their community. Thus, ‘places’ are imbued with the elements of ‘shared meanings’ and ‘conviviality’.
Urban Verbs
Just as Kevin Lynch defined districts, boundaries, landmarks, etc. as the nouns of urban design, I would propose that the meanings discussed above are the ‘verbs’. They begin to move feelings and sentiments in directions, just as static, immobile ‘nouns’ in literature need verbs to ‘get things going’.
All of these signs, symbols and elements become a language, which ‘speaks’ a knowledge system.
In this context decoration becomes important because different motifs become symbols of various intangible attributes: like ‘good luck’. By applying what appears to be decoration onto these components, additional meanings and emphasis are provided. Are these, then, not the adjectives and adverbs of urban design? All of these signs, symbols and elements become a language, which ‘speaks’ a knowledge system. The ‘auspicious’ is elemental to the Bhutanese knowledge system; just as the ‘rational’ is elemental to Western systems of thought.
The Urban Uniform
New York City, the Cartesian grid, the ‘x’ and the ‘y’ axis, are all our tools for thinking. We Westerners are mental animals of paradigms; we tend to think of one thing versus another, of ‘x’ versus ‘y’. We like a world of good versus bad, of polar views. We feel very comfortable with questions which ask if there is a god or not, but the idea of multiple manifestations of something, or many aspects of an idea, is not a comfortable proposition. Part of this emerges from our written, as opposed to oral, tradition. This means we must write things down, and that begins to mold how we think. For example there are thousands of Hindu gods. It is not really practical to write about several thousand gods – one god, with a few saints thrown in for good measure – that is within the bounds of the written word. Oral traditions are more expansive, flexible and imaginative. Pānini’s Ashtādhyāyi comprises close to four thousand sutras (aphorisms) on language, which were written down four hundred years after they were created. They were passed down those years through rote learning and recitation from teacher to student. Consider a mandala. It is a two-dimensional diagram of the universe, which describes matters in terms of mythological beings and places and relationships between places. Most important, every significant thing is a manifestation of something else and has hundreds of forms, which can be avatars or accretions. And these are not mere forms of things, but interpretations of feelings, moods and attitudes.
Most important, every significant thing is a manifestation of something else and has hundreds of forms, which can be avatars or accretions.
The experience of ‘this life’ then is an adventure, that of a traveler, not of a tourist. Nothing is certain or truly understood; or if it is, it can be looked at in many different ways. Milan Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, opines that ‘uniforms’ possess the Western mind. He explores the possibility of a culture of ‘multiforms’. He laments the fading of individual choice, the loss of the inner freedom; the absence of uniqueness. I feel we must address the same issue in urban planning and design. In another essay, Slowness, Kundera vents his anguish on the ‘hyper-experiencing’ that characterizes contemporary life. Everything is momentary, fleeting, at high speed; one image comes quickly over another, like the nervous clicking from channel to channel, from website-to-website, while one is bored even of the clicking itself. What is most disturbing about the emerging, consumer generated ambience is that it is a medium for Cartesian, monosyllabic kind of thinking, devoid of variety, differences and manifestations, fundamentalist in the worst sense. It is subtly fascistic. Boredom is the least of its sins; linear thinking, intolerance and a kind of mental blindness are its deeper pathologies, which give cause for concern.
The Ethos of Urban Space
Image-makers are media makers, and we define and design the ‘ethos’ that controls essential feelings. ‘Ethos’, according to Gregory Bateson who coined the term, is the way a culture emotes about events and happenings. Bateson saw it as a tool to distinguish between cultures according to their defining elements. He knew that the way people felt about events and places was the way they were – their essential culture.
Different spaces evoke different behavior. In India, visitors to Hindu temples instinctively remove their footwear, regardless of their own religion. Entering a mosque will evoke hushed silence, while in a wedding shamiana there may be a lot of chitchatting. Places, then, give out signals, which request specific forms of behavior, let off an ambience. Imagineering, no! A thread of history woven into everyday behavior, yes!
A Design Approach: The Differentiated Web
The basic concept of the Thimphu Plan is to create a network, or movement system, which separates pedestrians from vehicles, and which promotes movement. By movement, I do not mean movement for fun or pleasure – I mean movement that engenders social interaction. The concept is not so much geographic as it is conceptual. If there are ‘server’ and ‘served’ spaces, as in Louis Kahn’s sense of things, then the web is a facilitator to various specialized modules of spaces that have to fit into it – houses, shops, religious and institutional structures. We decided at the outset to use the traditional building components of the Himalayas as a kind of Lego Set to play with. The Served Spaces, or Buildings, could be plugged into or ‘set-into’ this network. We see the network as a ‘differentiated web’. One line becomes a long corridor, or as Shadrach Woods would have said, a STEM. The stem runs parallel to the riverbed and is so planned that over decades it can adapt to newer and varied technology. Trunk infrastructure would also run along the corridor. The corridor will be differentiated by nodes and by hubs. The nodes and hubs are points in the system that are in fact public transport stops, places of modal split, as well as the centers of various types of pedestrian precincts.
(Presented at the European Biennale at Graz, Austria in October 2001 and published in Architecture: People, Time and Space)
Letter
Why Europeans Sleep with their Dogs and
Other Architectural Theories
Modern society has brought young urbanites economic independence from their parents; for the elderly it has brought relative security of health care and income. Working women, equal opportunities and fast-track professions have made the traditional family redundant in many societies and in a fair segment of India’s urban youth. The glue that bonded society has lost its adhesiveness. Maybe a more sticky glue has taken its place?
Architecture is as much an engine of this change as it is a result of this phenomenal transformation in our cities. Indian architects are quick to fall in line with the new world order, eager to appear creative and different by copying the banal and the mundane. The cell-phone has replaced physical neighborhoods and the internet is the street-corner for gossip. The surfeit of media information has made news boring
, and just to catch attention one has to yell ever louder. The design profession is likewise promoting sensationalism and ‘the spectacular,’ rather than good urban form and human values. True, this trend is found in only a fraction of Indian society, but most of the new built form in the metros has turned its face away from community building. Moreover, this model is willy-nilly the road we are pursuing in every aspect of daily life. It is the reality of the urban niche that is in the limelight, growing day by day and setting the trends.
City form has responded with a myriad of branded eateries that are replacing kitchens. Multiplexes, lounges, cyber cafes, bars and discos are replacing living rooms. Beauty parlors and spas are replacing our bathrooms. Practically all that is left of the traditional home is the bedroom. Every building wants to spread over its own full city block; each plot is walled-in and guarded; gyms and health clubs are replacing neighborhood play areas; buildings are becoming monumental and impersonal, with harlequin façades. Roads are widening, sidewalks and cycle paths are shrinking, and the scale of cities is morphing from human to the machine in motion. More is more and big is beautiful in the new city.
Letters To A Young Architect Page 14