by Joel Garreau
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Alexander’s foes are correct. Let us say that if developers followed the precepts that Alexander claims are necessary to produce Edge Cities with life, they would have to alter everything they do. Let’s say they’d have to rethink how they use land, the technologies they use to build buildings, the zoning methods, the “safety” standards that waste resources, the financing, the priesthood of planning and architecture.
Let’s say that’s all true.
Here’s the key question.
Does this hoot Alexander’s commonsense patterns out the door?
Or is this just another example of an apparently impervious twentieth-century system that is heading for a collapse once its contradictions are acknowledged?
All it takes is for a system—no matter how seemingly unassailable—to have flaws that consistently outweigh its benefits.
Stephen Grabow, former director of architecture at the University of Kansas, thinks this raises Alexander’s ideas to august company, indeed.
People used to think that the earth was the center of the universe, around which all else revolved, Grabow points out. The logical corollary of this was that man was the most important thing in the universe, the prime thing on God’s mind. Then along came Copernicus. His model of reality fit the observable facts better, with the earth revolving around the sun, a not particularly distinguished star on the outer edge of a not terribly important galaxy. And ideas have consequences. People were forced to think about themselves in a more broad way. It affected theology, literature, government.
That kind of wholesale rethinking of who we are, and what kind of world we live in, is referred to by the students of such things as a “paradigm shift.” A paradigm is a basic model of how things work. It touches everything. After a shift in world paradigms, it is tough to remember how or why people used to think the way they did.
Another paradigm shift occurred in this century when Einstein’s discoveries began to seep into the public consciousness. Realities that we thought to be distinct—matter and energy, space and time—were different aspects of the same thing. We began to realize that everything really is relative.
Grabow thinks we may be on the verge of such a paradigm shift in our cities. In his 1983 book, Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture, he says: “Modern architecture no longer produces buildings that satisfy people’s needs … Modern buildings are dysfunctional … They do not look and feel pleasing to an increasing number of architects themselves.”
What heralds a paradigm shift? A period in which “the existing or current paradigm starts to break down in the face of novel events that it cannot explain or deal with,” he says.
Could such a paradigm-shifting event be the rise of Edge City, the first urban agglomerations of the values and attitudes of the late twentieth century?
Alexander, Grabow notes, was a scientist (trained in mathematics, physics, and chemistry) as well as an architect, and he approached the dehumanizing qualities of the concrete, steel, and glass boxes of our era with a scientific rationalism not usually associated with architecture.
This is how Alexander ended up examining cities as if they were spiderwebs or snowflakes or humans. They can be beautiful, and never the same twice. But could not each one be the result of some simple, basic rules that are there for the discovery?
Indeed. “Like H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, or Teilhard de Chardin … Alexander is convinced that the deep sense of human purpose and meaning previously provided by religion can be objectively rediscovered,” Grabow writes.
This too puts Alexander in august, if disconcerting, company.
Many physicists now seriously believe that in order for quantum mechanics to mesh with general relativity in a “theory of everything,” the universe must be thought of as having at least eleven dimensions.
If you do not find that sufficiently unnerving, on the frontier of “chaos theory,” other physicists state that only about 1 percent of reality can be described by direct, mechanistic, linear equations. Life itself, they say, is most especially the kind of thing that can not be modeled by Cartesian reduction.
Thus, what should perhaps come as no surprise is the direction that cosmologists are taking as they look at the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of the birth of the universe. “There appeared a singularity, a dimensionless point containing all there was to be,” they write about the moment of quantum fluctuation in which everything was created out of nothing. Sober reviewers read this stuff, shake their heads, and mutter, “This sounds an awful lot like ‘And God said, “Let there be Light.” ’ ” Cosmologists shrug their shoulders. They do not disagree.
It is into similarly spooky terrain that Alexander has headed as he searches to uncover his rules for what creates “life.”
ALEXANDER: One of the things you haven’t asked me very much about is God, and spirit and soul.
GARREAU: I knew we had to get to that.
A: The only thing I want to say is we’ve been talking about these amiable little things—is death visible in everyday life, is the window painted, et cetera. You might think, well, those are practical matters; now let’s talk about spirit and soul. And my statement to you is we have been talking about spirit and soul.
What I am saying is, that is God and spirit and soul. All of that. All of that. The discussion we’ve been having for the last hour has been about that. The “life” which really exists in space and in the world is not a separate issue from the issue of God and soul. You’ve got to take it as seriously as the question of “What is ‘life’?” or “What is ‘wholeness’?”
It isn’t enough to say: Well, yes, the developers are looking for wholeness just because they happen to want to throw a bunch of shops in. That’s not wholeness. I mean, that may be an intelligent idea. But it’s not wholeness. And just because they want to mix workplace with housing, that’s also very intelligent, a good idea.
G: Is the logic that somehow this is an affront to God?
A: You mean in what they do? I think the answer to it is yes, it is. It’s a somewhat quaint and old-fashioned way of talking about it, but if I take it at face value, the answer is yes.
G: This is the core of my question. These places lack soul. How then do you get soul into 580 and 680? Your position would be essentially that there does exist a sense of spirituality and Godness? What we are trying to do is no less than create places that are as spiritual and as whole as the old villages and cities of Britain and France that everybody loves when they go there?
A: Right. And churches. In a nutshell.
G: Not trying to re-create those villages per se. But how do we do our vernacular version of that?
A: Exactly. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. Good statement.
G: It’s not just that we’re talking good architecture or good dollars, but if this works you are aiming at a reconnection between humans and their world and by implication the universe and a Godhead?
A: Yes, and the ultimate stuff the universe is really made of. Yes, it’s a godlike stuff, yes. And may be God. I’m not sure.
G: You think there are principles out there which you are discovering and stating?
A: Yes. Right. Absolutely. Discovering is the operative word. Actually, I view myself almost as a physicist. You know, a lot has been written about these so-called paradigm shifts. And the main test is not—does this experiment work or does that experiment work? The main test is—afterward so many more things all make sense. You just gradually abandon the other thing. I think that one of the things people are beginning to say about what I’ve done is that, apart from appearing to be true in the small, somehow the whole picture just seems incredibly more similar to what we actually believe deep down but haven’t had a model for. It conforms to human experience as she is, more.
The curious thing is, you still have stars in your eyes that money is the driving force. That it’s backs topping American freedom and freedom of
thought and freedom of action and the best of all possible worlds.
G: I have a very healthy regard for greed as a social motivator.
A: Right. I think that’s where you and I differ. I believe that motive will not produce what you are looking for. That seems to me a very serious matter. I’m not sure I’ve faced it ever quite that straightforwardly. I suspect it’s fundamentally incompatible.
Let me just tell you the extreme. I don’t know that it’s correct. But one extreme version is: The only way to produce life is—to be religiously inspired. That’s definitely what happened in the Middle Ages for sure. It’s what happened in Buddhist constructions in Japan and so on and so forth. We know that. People were trying to make something as a gift to God. One possibility is you can’t get life unless that’s the only thing you’re trying to do.
G: The only thing you’re trying to do?
A: Well, okay, let’s try a couple of versions. That’s number one. That’s the extreme. And the second one is—you can’t get life unless this is what you’re trying to do. That’s the second possibility.
Now the third one is that there’s some mixed motive.
G: If you build life into your building, it pays off, therefore you do it?
A: My guess is that that is complete foolishness. That it just simply isn’t like that.
G: There is one place in Walnut Creek that’s 100 percent full. I plan on going to look at it.
A: Very interesting. Anyway, I’m just telling you that on the one hand you’re concerned about spirit and soul; I think it’s fair to say in some sense you’d like to see it there. Exactly. I think you believe at the moment that by some minor modification in the Adam Smith thing you’re going to get it. Or at least that’s the hypothesis that you’ve been putting to me. If this thing could be quantified and if it pays off, then it’s just going to happen, right?
G: If true, the millennium would be at hand.
A: Yes, and what I’m saying to you is that I assume that it is not true. It’s not like money plays no role. That is just nonsense. I think money plays a fundamental role in this thing. You have to decide exactly how much to spend on what. You can’t be trivial about that. Money plays a fundamental role even in the most extreme version.
G: But your getting a lot of it is not part of it?
A: You understand the difference?
G: Budgets are tremendously important, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you get rich?
A: Exactly. Right. It has never occurred to me that life would quote “pay off” in the way that you’re talking about. Honestly, it seems a bit crass to me. The formulation you gave of quantifying life—the Adam Smith version, exactly. That one I don’t believe in—just from a practical point of view. I don’t think it pays off in monetary terms. It pays off in other terms. It may not translate easily into money.
I know you don’t like that.
G: Edge Cities are monuments to maximization of the individual ego and monuments to profit.
A: Right. So anyway my middle ground, which I’m sort of trying to figure out right now, is some kind of mechanics where there is some sort of profit motive for people who want to spend their lives doing development. Whether such a model is possible, I don’t know. I mean I don’t know that it’s humanly possible to have those two things in your mind in such a balance.
G: Are you saying it is as utterly desirable and utterly unlikely as the Greek ideal of the philosopher king?
A: It’s like that, yes. It’s something like that.
My last evening in Walnut Creek I decided to spend searching for Walnuts or the Creek.
The walnuts were easily dispensed with. Little of their legacy is left. Jim Kennedy, Contra Costa County’s redevelopment director, had shown me one small grove that still stood, jutting into Oak Road. It was perhaps four acres, guarded by a wire fence, and obviously threatened. Oak Road had been widened to four lanes as it approached this grove and as it left. So the trees that had once been beside the road were now out of place, intruding into the new road. The little piece of land had been bought for a park, but the trees in the middle of the road’s new path were obviously an anomaly, their days numbered. A thousand yards beyond them, tower cranes were busy, erecting the precast concrete of the brand-new Pleasant Hill BART Edge City.
While I was at it I asked Kennedy if there was in fact a hill in Pleasant Hill. Scanning the near horizon, all I saw were bulldozers.
He said there were several hills, actually.
I asked if they were pleasant.
He laughed.
The creek was harder. Studying maps, I found no watercourse. Just two little roads called Creekside Drive and Cross Creek Road. They turned out to be right where I-680 dumps down into Main Street. I got in the car and did in fact discover the Creekside Terrace “garden apartments.” But the only thing I found that looked like a creek was this muddy little thing that was basically a channelized ditch. It had been lined with vertical concrete walls laid out straight as an arrow. Flood control. It had a little water at its bottom. But this couldn’t be the Walnut Creek creek.
Could it?
The old Southern Pacific line to town was built on one side of this ditch, parallel to it. Main Street was on the other.
I kept driving.
The channel disappeared from view as the parking lots and stores that lined South Main Street came between it and the road. It reappeared suddenly behind the Broadway East Chinese Restaurant. I made a U-turn, came back. Went in, asked the nice young Asian people in the restaurant if they knew where I might be able to find the creek of Walnut Creek. Right up the road, they said, Walnut Creek. No, I said, not the city. The creek. Gee, they said. Sorry. What’s that water thing, I asked, ten yards from the back of the restaurant? Everyone was very mystified.
I got back into the car.
As I was coming back into town, the creek disappeared completely. It seemed to vanish beneath a store called Emporium Capwell, near Broadway. I kept driving, past Nordstrom’s, Victoria’s Secret, and The Nature Company, and came out the other end of the city center. A cop off to the side of Mount Diablo Boulevard was aiming a radar gun at the citizenry. I stopped and asked him if he knew where the creek was. Sorry, he said. I’m new here myself.
I drove back through town and stopped in the parking lot of the Devil Mountain Brewery Restaurant to take another look at the channel. It was maybe twenty feet deep and the same across. A square concrete trough with an open top. “Property of the Central Costa County Sanitary District,” said the sign on the mean-looking fence. In case of emergency call 1–415–933–0955.
I retraced my trail, back through town.
Passing a Mexican restaurant called The Cantina, at Broadway and Lincoln, through the car’s open windows, I finally heard what I’d been listening for. Rushing water. I stopped.
The evening was fragrant with live oak trees. Abundant bamboo edged a very steep rocky gorge. A pleasant wooden walkway stretched along it, with soft lighting. A hole had been cut in the pathway to spare a big tree. Nearby had been placed heavy bronze silhouettes of a man and a woman and a dog, playing. Abundant water splashed over natural rocks.
The screened-in porch of the Cantina overlooked the edge of the water sound. With the soft autumn lights, and the Mediterranean air, it was, in fact, full of life.
Yes, said The Cantina’s manager, dressed in a kelly green sweater, with a mariachi band playing behind him. You have found Walnut Creek.
Prince Charles comes to this conclusion:
It was Edmund Burke who wrote that a healthy civilisation exists with three relationships intact. It has a relationship with the present, a relationship with the future, and a relationship with the past. When the past feeds and sustains the present and the future, you have a civilised society. It was only in this century that we broke that pact with the past and tried to obliterate its meanings and its messages.
So writes the prince at the end of his book.
What is the po
int, for example, of being the most technologically advanced society if, at the same time, we lose our soul, and forfeit the right to be considered civilised? For this is what we have allowed to happen by deluding ourselves that we are somehow immortal; by losing our faith in eternity; by believing that this Earth was made for our dominion, and by losing that proper sense of humility that enables us to live in gentle harmony with our surroundings and with God’s creation. Why else is it that we now find ourselves confronted by such complex and disturbing environmental problems threatening, as they do, the very survival of this planet and all of its living inhabitants?
Everything cries out for a reappraisal of our values and attitudes.
Don’t be intimidated by those who deride such views. They have had their day.
Look at the soulless mess in which they have left us all!
10
WASHINGTON
The Land
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
—William Faulkner
I
Manassas: Long Ago and Far Away
THIRTY MILES west of the U.S. Capitol, out Interstate 66, there is a small Virginia stream, name of Bull Run. Over a century and a quarter ago, in the brutally hot summers of 1861 and 1862, great armies clashed in the swale of this brook, testing no less than whether a nation conceived in liberty could long endure.
In the Second Battle of Manassas, in 1862, Robert E. Lee had his headquarters on Stuart’s Hill, overlooking the field of blood. In 1988, 542 acres of this land, including that hill, had come into the hands of an organization headed by one John T. (Til) Hazel. Hazel was by far the most prominent developer in these parts. He had fledged his law career in the 1950s by condemning the land for the road that would come to be known as the Capital Beltway. And for thirty years he had been a key player in the economic and social revolution that culminated with eight Edge Cities blooming in Northern Virginia. One of them, Tysons Corner, drew astounded observers from around the world to its high-rises and intersections; it was bigger than downtown Miami.