Good evening, and welcome; my name
is Philip Bess. I am a professor of architecture at Andrews University in Berrien Springs,
Michigan; and I live in a traditional urban neighborhood in the city of Chicago, where I
also have my professional office.
I am one of the two coordinators of the design workshop—or
"charette," as many of you have come to know it--that begins today, and that
will end next Tuesday evening with a proposal for traditional neighborhood design here in
Ada Township. And based upon my involvement in preparing for this event, I suspect that
many of you are curious about what we are going to be doing during the next week; that
some of you may be suspicious; and that a few of you may even be inclined to hostility.
Well, welcome to you all. I hope that what we say tonight will at least begin to alleviate
your misgivings; and that what we present next week will not only satisfy your curiosity
but also pique your interest and prompt your enthusiasm.
John Anderson is going to speak a little later about the focus, scope,
and location of our activities over the next week; about the physical and spatial
characteristics of traditional villages and neighborhoods; and about how the charette
process itself is structured in such a way as to identify and address the wide variety of
issues that a project of this magnitude and complexity necessarily raises. What I would
like to do to begin the charette is to briefly talk about another aspect of traditional
towns, neighborhoods, and cities. This other aspect is arguably central to what takes
place in a charette such as this, but is typically overlooked or unarticulated. Some of
you may be thinking that what this charette is about is a really big real estate deal;
well, indeed it is a big real estate deal. But it is not just a real estate deal, or even
primarily a real estate deal. Rather, this project is primarily about traditional
urbanism; and what traditional urbanism is about is the good life for human beings.
But here let us pause; for I have just used the words
"cities" and "urbanism" in a way that many if not most Americans are
not used to. That is to say, I have just used these words to connote something good, to
refer to something positive; whereas we all know (don’t we?) that cities are bad:
dangerous places, full of drugs, crime, and underachieving poor people, arguably not a fit
place to live, certainly not a fit place to raise children. Cities are bad for the soul;
they are what we move up from and out of as we pursue the American Dream. Far better for
us to dwell in the purity of the unspoiled landscape; and if we were to think of a single
image to capture the essence of the American Dream, it is much more likely that we would
think of "the cabin in the woods" than we would the house on the city street
within the city neighborhood.
Well friends, I’m here to tell you that even if there are
understandable reasons why we have come in the last 200 years to think of cities as bad
things, it hasn’t always been this way. And one clue that it hasn’t always been
this way is rooted deeply in our everyday language. Take words such as "polite,"
"politics," "police," and "polish"—all of them are
derived from the Greek word polis, which means "city". To be polite is to
possess the moral refinement of one who dwells in the city, the polis; it is to be
polished in one’s manners and one’s character. Politics is the art of governing
that intrinsically complex entity that is the polis—and the police force, regardless
of the corruptions to which it is always vulnerable, is in its essence one of those
civilizing institutions that frees city dwellers from recourse to more primitive and
frequently lethal pre-urban means of resolving conflicts. Or take some of the words that
come to us from Latin: from the Latin urbs we get the words "urbane" and
"urbanity"--words that even now do not first call to mind scenes of drug deals
and burning buildings. From another Latin word for city, civitas, we get words and ideas
like "civic," "civilization," "civility," and "civil
society"—again, words that even today connote good things, and that retain a
hint of their origins in city life. Many of us today lament the decline of good manners,
polish, and civility that characterize contemporary culture. But why should that surprise
us? For more than fifty years now we have been a sub-urban culture, and a
government-subsidized sub-urban culture at that. So what I would ask you to do for at
least the next twenty minutes or so is to suspend your assumptions and your suspicions
about cities; and to think along with me about the nature of cities in our shared western
culture, their origins, their possible future, and—not least—what this has to do
with what we are going to be doing at this charette and with the future of the greater
Grand Rapids region.
Traditional western ideas about good cities descend from Athens,
Jerusalem, and Rome. From Athens we inherit two seminal ideas: that the good life for
individuals is the life of moral and intellectual excellence, and that the good city is a
community that makes possible for its individual citizens this good life. Perhaps the most
eloquent Athenian exponent of these ideas was Aristotle; and when Aristotle argues that
the good life for individuals is the life of moral and intellectual excellence, he simply
means that a human being is happier—and by "happy" Aristotle means
"lives a better life" rather than "is always in a jolly mood"—a
human being is happier if he or she is habitually brave rather than cowardly, habitually
temperate rather than compulsive, habitually just rather than unjust in dealing with
others, and habitually prudent rather than foolish in making judgements. And over the
course of western cultural history, this understanding of the relationship of good
character habits to human well-being has been extended. It has come to include the
recognition that a life of faith is better than a life of mis-trust and cynicism; that a
life of hope is better than a life of despair; that active love is better than
indifference; that friendship is better than loneliness and self-centeredness; that
generosity is better than miserliness; that forgiveness is better than revenge; that
steadfastness is better than inconstancy.
But for Aristotle, human well-being was also related to the possession
of another kind of excellence: what he called "intellectual virtues." These are
located chiefly in a variety of human practices that are necessarily both cooperative and
competitive in nature; that are typically directed toward common ends; and that are guided
by standards of excellence defined with reference both to past achievements and future
objectives. And although these habits of intellectual excellence in the fine or manual
arts, or in various sciences, or in athletic activity are typically acquired communally,
they also require for the achievement of their particular goods a concurrent development
of individual habits of moral excellence.
So the Athenian contention is that the good life for human beings is
the life of moral and intellectual excellence lived in community. And how this
understanding of the good life relates to the city is spelled out in the very first
sentence of Aristotle’s Politics:
Every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind
always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at
some good, the city. . .which is the highest [community] of all, and which embraces all
the other communities, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest
good. . . .
Again, this "highest good" of which Aristotle writes, and at
which the city aims, is nothing less than the very best human life possible. Which is to
say, in Aristotle's view the very reason for the existence of the city is to make possible
the very best kind of human life. And for those of you to whom this idea seems strange, it
is instructive to understand that when Aristotle talks about the city, he is generally
referring to a community with a population of between 5000 and 20000 persons. This is
about the size of what we might regard as a village or a small town; or, in the context of
a large city, it is about the size of a traditional urban neighborhood. It is no accident
therefore that we somewhat interchangeably call what we will be doing during the next week
"traditional urbanism," "traditional town planning," or
"traditional neighborhood design." And this size component of traditional
urbanism is critically important, because it suggests that regardless of how far flung and
abstract and anonymous human relationships can become in an age of advancing
telecommunication and E-commerce, there is nevertheless a degree of physical immediacy
necessary to our communal relations without which human life is deficient.
So we have these two ideas about cities from Athens: that the good life
for individuals is the life of moral and intellectual excellence, and that the good city
is a community that makes possible for its individual citizens this good life. From
Jerusalem comes a third idea, rooted in biblical religion: that a city’s excellence
is also measured by the care it exhibits for its weakest members. Again and again in both
the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament we read that communities are judged good by
their inclusion of and care for the poor, the sick, the widow and the orphan; and for
their hospitality to strangers. The heavenly Jerusalem--which is for many of us our model
and hope--may have walls and twelve gates; but the gates are always open, and citizenship
is not denied to anyone because of their race, ethnicity, or station in life. And finally,
from Rome we inherit the idea that a city’s beauty is both warranted by and
represents its greatness. Caeser Augustus, who governed the Roman Empire at the height of
its glory, and who oversaw the most extensive building program in the city’s history,
said proudly near the end of his life "I found Rome a city made of brick, but I have
left it a city made of marble."
To put the work we will be doing here this week in some perspective,
this western understanding of the city I have just described is over 2500 years old; and
while it recognizes the primacy of economics in the making of urban life, its essential
view of the city is moral and aesthetic. Moreover, this traditional city has always
coexisted more or less harmoniously with the natural and cultivated landscape—in
fact, the traditional city is the only way for large numbers of human beings to live
harmoniously in the natural or cultivated landscape. And while human beings have always
understood the city to be an artifact, we have also understood city-making to be in some
way natural, insofar as culture and city-making are what we do in order to thrive, in
order to fulfill our nature. It is only with the rise of the industrial city of the past
two centuries that the city has taken on the kind of sub-human connotations with which it
is now burdened, and for which suburbia once seemed to offer relief. But suburbia is in
truth the enemy of the natural and cultivated landscape; and I will have more to say about
this a little later.
For now, I would like to posit five assumptions about human nature,
cities, and contemporary culture; and then show a few slides:
- Human beings are both part of and transcend "nature;"
- Human beings generally regard both personal freedom and communal belonging as goods;
- The good life for individual human beings is the life of personal excellence lived in
community;
- Cities are competitive and cooperative enterprises that human beings have built to
achieve the good life; and
- "New Urbanism" or "neo-traditional urbanism," whatever the
strategies it adopts to market itself, is best understood as traditional urbanism promoted
in a contemporary cultural context of individualism and sprawl.
This painting is called "The Mystic Adoration of the Lamb,"
and is attributed to the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck, circa 1432. It is the central panel
of twenty that together comprise the altarpiece of the cathedral of Ghent, in present day
Belgium. From the time of its completion, Van Eyck's painting has been regarded as a major
masterpiece, noteworthy in part for its advancements in the use of oils, for the quality
of its color, and for its pictorial realism. But these are not the only reasons for its
importance. Great religious art both refers to and tells a story; and here part of the
story being told is about the relationship of architecture and cities to the good life for
human beings, in a context of sacred order.
"The Mystic Adoration of the Lamb" is nothing less than a
tableau of heaven, of paradise, of what is by definition the very best kind of human life
possible. Now, because Van Eyck was a Christian, we can hardly be surprised to find that
the figure at the center of his painting is Christ, here depicted literally as the Lamb of
God. And while this reference to sacred order is in fact central to the traditional
western understanding of the good life, for the moment I want to look past this
theological iconography and focus upon another order of iconography that is at the same
time both biblical and cross-cultural. This iconography is explicit in Christian
revelation, but is common to the natural order Christians share with all of humanity as
well. This is the iconography that depicts the physical and spatial context of "The
Mystic Adoration of the Lamb:" specifically, the representation of Heaven as both a
garden (seen here in the fore- and middle-ground of the painting) and a city (seen here in
the background); of heaven as both New Eden and New Jerusalem. Architectural historian
Norris Kelly Smith has written that, perhaps more ingeniously than any other work of
western art, the Ghent Altarpiece has managed to represent together the usually separated
biblical themes of Eden and Jerusalem. "Plainly," he writes
there is an order of goodness in the world that is best symbolized by
the garden--a goodness that resides in personal freedom, in mobility, and in experiencing
all the sensuous delights of Eden. But there is another ultimate goodness that has to do
with membership, security, and above all with those products of human inventiveness, of
the imaginative human spirit, that we gather together under the rubric of civilization. .
. . [And this] is the aspect of ultimate goodness [that is symbolized by the city
skyline]. . . .
In both my experience and my reading, most human beings indeed do seem
to value and long for both personal freedom and communal belonging. And most of us
understand intuitively that we are both biological and social beings, and take pleasure in
both our biological and social natures. Nevertheless, anyone who lives long enough sooner
or later recognizes the inherent tensions between these two aspects of our human nature.
Pressed too insistently, assertions of individual freedom can become forms of
self-centeredness that undermine the goods of communities. At the same time, communities
themselves are ever tempted to different forms of tyranny that threaten the great good of
individual freedom.
The genius of the Ghent Altarpiece, suggests Smith, is twofold. It
resides not only in the painting's juxtaposition and affirmation of the ultimate goodness
of nature and culture as both are redeemed by God. It lies also in the way that redeemed
nature and culture are portrayed. For it is in the garden—which could have been a
symbol of the inherent anarchy and Darwinian self-centeredness of nature in its fallen
state--where we find the highly ordered assemblies of the faithful. And it is in the
city—which in its fallen state could have been a symbol of communal tyranny--where we
find the skyline portrayed not as the rigid order of Le Corbusier’s ideal modernist
city [FIGURE 2], but rather as a casual assembly of buildings. Thus does Van Eyck
represent—importantly, under the aspect of redemption--two features of the very best
life for human beings: individual freedom devoid of selfishness, and communal belonging
devoid of tyranny.
If I may switch from this depiction of the Heavenly City to a
consideration of our earthly cities, I would begin by pointing out that every city is a
multi-dimensional order; and if it is a good city it is a multi-dimensional order that
also allows significant play for individual freedom. If we think of any good city, we can
identify at least three kinds of order: an economic order, a moral order, and a formal
order—and I would hasten to say that to me it is one of the most exciting features of
this charette project that we will be giving at least some extended thought to each of
these orders.
The economic order of a good city is characterized by marketplace
diversity and by entrepreneurial freedom. Its purpose is twofold: to create and distribute
those material goods and services necessary to the material well being of the populace;
and beyond this to create the surplus wealth necessary for the various kinds of
non-subsistence cultural endeavors—music, art, scholarship, sport--that are the very
hallmarks of urban culture.
Equally important however is the recognition that a good city is also a
moral order. The marks of this order are the existence of various religious, civic, and
political institutions that are sufficiently strong and influential to restrain the
excessive individualism that a free economy encourages. Such institutions will seek to
educate individuals in a variety of moral and intellectual virtues, and to promote among
individuals a sincere regard for the common good. If these institutions are in good
working order, they will be promoting and sustaining a shared sense that the city is not
only a marketplace but also a moral community; and that the market is made for the
community and not the community for the market.
The formal order of the city is what architects typically deal with,
and is what architects typically think of when we think about the city. Most people
intuitively understand the relationship that exists between the formal order of a city and
its economic order, because it requires economic power to build significant buildings. We
probably have more trouble seeing the relationship between the formal order of a city and
its moral order. I want to suggest that the traditional western view of the good life as
the life of individual excellence lived in community is evident in the formal order of the
traditional city. And I want to suggest further that the formal arrangements of the modern
city and contemporary sprawl manifest a different (and in my view regressive)
understanding of the good life.
On the screen is a diagram by the European architect Leon Krier
illustrating several features characteristic of the traditional western city. Traditional
western cities were compact; and their formal order was characterized by the closeness of
residential, commercial, civic, religious, and recreational uses, and by certain recurring
features. They had discernible centers, usually a public square or squares and a primary
street. They accommodated both pedestrian and vehicular traffic in an understandable
network of streets and blocks. They had a variety of dwellings--often on the same
block--that enabled persons of different ages and stations in life all to find places to
live. They had workplaces within walking distance of residences. Their network of through
streets was fronted and defined spatially by buildings placed close to the street. And
they typically reserved their most prominent sites for civic and religious buildings and
community monuments--sites on high places, or fronting a public square, or at the end of
an important street.
As I’ve said, the traditional western city was compact; typically
not more expansive than about a half mile, or about the distance that a human being can
comfortably walk in 10 minutes. This slide illustrates the size of historic European urban
settlements of about 15-20000 residents on about 100-150 acres (e.g., historic Berlin,
Florence, Bern, Venice, Dresden, etc.). It also suggests the population density, mix of
uses, and quality of culture that could be achieved in a low-rise city where most of the
activities of daily life were within walking distance.
The present and former Andrews University architecture students here
this evening may recognize these slides as plans of Mr. Bess’s neighborhood in
Chicago, a neighborhood with a population of somewhere between 4000-5000 people on 160
acres. I show it to indicate that although the building and population density are less
than in the previous slide of historic European urban quarters, certain features are the
same even in an American urban neighborhood laid out in the late 19th century.
In particular there are the mix of residential, commercial, civic and recreational uses;
the low-rise high-density character of the building stock; and the ten-minute / half-mile
walk within the area bounded by the major commercial streets of Chicago’s grid.
This final Leon Krier slide illustrates the way that traditional urban
neighborhoods (such as mine) relate to the larger city of which they are part. They are,
says Krier, like a slice of pizza: a portion that shares all of the most important
features of the whole of which it is part. And this, observes Krier, is in contrast to our
post-war patterns of zoned suburban development that separate the basic ingredients of
daily life one from another.
Now, just as the Chicago urban neighborhood is a less dense version of
the historic urban quarters of Florence or Venice, so the traditional American small
town—certainly a more appropriate model for our traditional neighborhood design here
in Ada Township--is a less dense version of the Chicago urban neighborhood. But the
European urban quarter, the American city neighborhood, and the American small town are
all similar to each other in the way they concentrate a mix of uses—housing,
commerce, civic buildings, public spaces—within pedestrian proximity of one another.
Their differences have to do with population density, not use, or physical and spatial
form.
My next slide is of the Villa Rotonda, designed in the 16th
century by Andrea Palladio for a site about a mile outside the Italian city of Vicenza. It
is for many reasons an icon of western architecture, and deservedly so; and is recently
restored, and continues its prominence in the landscape, and to operate as a working farm.
Nevertheless, I show it here because it illustrates the contemporary suburban ideal better
than any other image I know. This is what people are fantasizing about when they move to
the suburbs, and it is not hard to understand its appeal. It is the dream of individual
freedom in the natural order—a genuine good, you will recall, evident even in Jan Van
Eyck’s portrayal of the good life that we considered earlier; and it remains the
dream of millions of Americans, including perhaps many of you here tonight.
But Van Eyck’s view of the good life was both more subtle and more
complex than our contemporary suburban ideal, with which there are several difficulties.
One difficulty with our suburban ideal is that human beings achieve our good as much
through communal belonging as through personal freedom. A second difficulty is the adverse
environmental implications (adverse in the long run for us!) of the air pollution and
forest and farmland consumption that result from suburban sprawl. Indeed, I’ve
already suggested that compact, mixed-use villages, towns, and city neighborhoods go
hand-in-glove with a distinctive and discernable agricultural and natural landscape; but
while I’ve been emphasizing here the human social and cultural advantages of the
traditional urban neighborhood, someone else could just as forcefully emphasize the
environmental advantages of the traditional urban neighborhood when these are contrasted
with the environmental consequences of suburban sprawl. But the foremost practical problem
with suburbia is that the democratization of the suburban ideal makes its realization
impossible, because the contemporary suburb consumes that which it promises.
Suburbia promises the beauty and pleasure and imagined safety of the
open landscape, combined with the culture and convenience of the city. But the very
success of suburbia simultaneously consumes the landscape and drains cities of their
economic and cultural capital. In the late 20th century automobile suburb, the
dream of the Villa Rotonda in the landscape has become the reality of the single-family
house in the residential subdivision [FIGURE 11]; and the beauty of the landscape and
convenience of the city have become the environment of sprawl, where the market [FIGURE
12] and the workplace [FIGURE 13] and the civic realm [FIGURE 14] are all separated from
both home and each other—in the process transforming the automobile from a
convenience to a necessity, recreating and exceeding the traffic congestion of the city,
but not the latter’s redeeming culture and convenience.
The sad but inescapable truth is that the automobile suburb ultimately
cannot deliver on its promises of convenience, mobility, the beauty of the natural
landscape, and individual freedom and well-being for all. The best evidence of this is
that the persons who have most recently arrived in suburbia are very often the people most
opposed to its continuing expansion. But our suburban cultural habit is perhaps most
insidious in the way it undermines the formal and cultural patterns—the urban
patterns--by means of which human beings have traditionally sought to achieve the good
life. Someone once defined the post-war American suburb as a 20th century
cultural conspiracy catering to the illusion that unpleasantness in life can be avoided.
It is certainly understandable for persons to want to avoid unpleasantness, especially if
they are raising children. But the fact is that unpleasantness in life can NOT be avoided;
and it is not too much to say of the traditional city that it is an institution designed
to address and transform the unpleasantries of human life by means of community, culture,
and civil society.
Our work this coming week takes place in the physical, economic, and
cultural context of Ada Township. But I am suggesting here that it also takes place within
a larger intellectual and cultural context that embraces all of us, a context of which
most of us (including myself) are just barely aware. So I invite those of you here tonight
to come to the charette site between the hours of 6pm and 8pm during the next week to see
what we are doing; and to return here next Tuesday at this time to see what we have done;
and throughout to keep and open mind, but also to feel free to raise the questions that
are important to you. And though I am conscious of being on your ground--in your
neighborhood, as it were--I extend this invitation not as the hired professional from the
big city, or as the architecture professor from the small college, but rather as a fellow
heir with you of western civilization—of the Greek and Roman traditions of beauty and
excellence, and the Jewish and Christian traditions of love of neighbor and care for the
weak as fellow members of the community.
Those of us committed to traditional urbanism, traditional towns,
traditional neighborhoods—whatever you wish to call them—in every job we do are
re-learning an ancient craft that in the past fifty years has been largely forgotten. The
charette in Ada this week is in the short run a real estate deal; but in the long run it
is the latest battleground in the long fight to first reclaim and then improve the rich
moral and aesthetic cultural heritage that belongs to all of us.
We look forward to an exciting week. Thank you very much. . . .
