When I edited a city magazine, a smartass friend suggested a department called Why So Ugly? There would be no shortage of examples from the built environment. Big boxes, glass towers, strip malls—it is as though a child drew these shapes, then crafted them from whatever cheap stuff was close at hand and got called to supper before there was time to paint all those gray surfaces.
All this ugliness might be one reason I love to travel. So many other countries look brighter, less blandly uniform, more respectful of place and culture and history. The U.S., insisted H.L. Mencken, has “a love of ugliness for its own sake.” Maybe rooted in the profit motive, or our love of speed and efficiency?
In The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy, Vishaan Chakrabarti tackles this ugliness—and the despair and social isolation it engenders.
Cities, once smoggy, crowded places where you had to live to find work, are now a choice. Remote, abstract jobs let many of us live wherever we like. That makes cities intentional, Chakrabarti writes. They can be designed to connect—really connect, with shared ideas, chance meetings, and common purposes—their eclectic residents. Even smaller places, like neighborhoods and college campuses, can use design to orchestrate diversity and density. Sensitively done, it can ease loneliness, giving people public spaces where they feel comfortable lingering instead of racing home to an isolated screen. Architecture can help repair a culture in crisis, encourage democracy, alleviate climate change, even increase joy and health and prosperity.
But not architecture as it is usually done. Chakrabarti, a prizewinning architect who taught at Columbia University and was dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, is blunt about this. Here in the U.S., he finds it hard to justify advocating for architects “when the vast majority of architecture firms seem content to take almost any commission that comes their way, whether to foist another blue glass tower of arbitrary shape upon our cities or to blithely draw up execution chambers and exposed stainless-steel toilets in jail cells to build their ‘Justice’ portfolio.” As for residential architecture, he says “most single-family homes in the United States are built and renovated by merchant builders and DIY Home Depot devotees with little regard for the quality of the built environment.”
This matters more than people realize. Just ask someone in the emerging field of neuroarchitecture, which looks, through the perspectives of many disciplines, at the ways the built environment affects “human brain function, behavior, cognition and psychology.”
Chakrabarti’s solution was founding PAU (Practice for Architecture and Urbanism), a Manhattan-based studio whose architects refuse any commissions that will tug society in the wrong direction—whether toward more suburban sprawl, more unimaginative and ugly high-tech solutions, more social division, or less integrity. He is the consummate idealist, and when I first read his description of “connective design and its ability to reknit the fragmented cultures of our ever more polarized world,” I was dubious. Then I thought of people I grew close to just by sharing a common cubicle wall or living next door—people with wildly different values and ways of living. Who you run into, who you see frequently, how welcome you feel to stop and chat—all this does make a small difference. So if you scale that up….
Chakrabarti is pushing his profession to tie things together in every way possible, “whether it be the placement of a door, the creation of an arcade, the planning of public space, the place-based evolution of a skyline, or the deployment of materials or tectonics that reflect local narratives.” A new building that nods to its surroundings by using the same brick lets you feel that you are in a cohesive place, a place where people want to honor both past and future.
I have never dared slip this into a suggestion box—admittedly, it is barmy—but I keep wishing the residents and businesses in our little town of Waterloo would use as much dark green as possible. The color already marks the city hall and several signs, roofs, and awnings, and when we first drove through, house-hunting, my eye swept across the central square and saw a pretty little jigsaw puzzle whose pieces all fit together. It was charming, seeing all those little shops and pubs, each distinct but also part of the whole. An old-fashioned, neat hodgepodge, none of it bland or uniform.
Our everyday environment “used to be quaint and quirky,” Chakrabarti writes. “Now it is mundane and monolithic.” The cookie-cutter monotony lowers developers’ costs and dulls our senses. Why would anyone want to feel they belonged? Placeless developments make every city look the same; their buildings have “little hold on one’s attention, imagination, or memory.” So what makes a place? “The ability to connect humanity, hold our gaze, offer contemplation, and trigger recall in ensuing years.” We all carry examples of those places with us, whether they are old stone churches or Art Deco hotels or enclosed courtyards with worn, uneven brick and bubbling fountains.
Chakrabarti offers gorgeous examples, from Paris’s Place des Vosges to Saha Al Qassas in the West Bank. Examples of PAU’s work reinforce his point, as do the whimsical drawings at the book’s end, illustrations of people happily appropriating urban spaces in the interest of justice, joy, and connection. We need this approach to architecture. We need to feel welcome again; to feel a sense of comfort and shared delight; to honor the past; to remember we are all here together.
We need to build ourselves a more hospitable world.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
