What's the antidote to the numbing subdivisions planted by rote in sprawl zones from Boston to Baton Rouge? The secret to a vibrant neighborhood lies in the ad hoc ingenuity found in slums and shantytowns. So says Teddy Cruz, a San Diego architect who has spent years studying Tijuana and other poor border towns where free-form structures are patched together from concrete blocks, corrugated metal and scavenged packing crates.
Borrowing from slums may be a hard sell with the Trumps and Ratners, but it's gaining ground in design circles. Cruz, who discussed his approach last night at the Tate Modern in London, argues that humanizing our cities and towns is more important than making them beautiful in a formal architectural sense. In other words, better to be part of a spirited community than unhappy in a Richard Meier condo.
Cruz's appearance last night at the Tate comes four months after Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. That may not be a coincidence, given that Slumdog featured the Garib Nagar neighborhood of Mumbai. While the film did not sanitize the filth and poverty, it did treat the neighborhood as a picturesque backdrop. It was not the one-dimensional portrait of misery you might expect from Hollywood.
What would Mr. Cruz's slum-inspired ideas look like in a town like yours? Two years ago he drafted a redevelopment plan for a poor section of Hudson, N.Y., which called for an intricate weave of public and private spaces that encourage mingling, chess playing and gathering around food. Small apartments in garage-like structures would be stacked beside intimate playgrounds, with space left below for improvised uses--food stands, market stalls, gathering spots. Some units would share terraces to foster community, and they might extend over the park to provide shade and shelter.
If Cruz succeeds, Hudson, and a second development at San Ysidro, a border neighborhood in southern San Diego, will become models for a new kind of development that helps residences share resources and run their own businesses alongside their homes. Is this the new American dream? It could at least be a framework that, unlike easy loans that go unpaid, extends a foothold to poorer Americans. "Beyond designing buildings, architects should design political and economic processes as well," Cruz says.
Until recently the landscape departments of architecture schools were something of a ghetto. The modernist dream of high-rise slabs and glass-and-steel pavilions discounted the surrounding grounds. Manicured and shrubbed, the landscape’s role was to look pretty and deferential while buildings stood in splendid isolation. They might not say it, but the men enrolled in architecture programs tended to dismiss landscape as a girly pursuit. You know, gardening.
But the old order is now undergoing a shake-up. It’s not that landscape and architecture are moving towards parity, but that they’re mixing and blending in new ways. What’s the evidence? Patric Blanc is planting on walls. Fritz Haeg is replacing lawns with vegetable gardens and architects like Joel Sanders are finding ways to bring landscape indoors.
Here’s another example: the Spanish architects Jose Selgas and Lucia Cano have created a studio for their firm, Selgascano, nestled in the woods near Madrid. The office is encased in a long pod-like tube that is half-submerged in the ground to diminish its profile on the land.
The north facing wall of the tube is enclosed in curving transparent acrylic, which allows staffers some exposure to the seasons and a dappled light filtering through the overhanging trees. The desks and monitors are shaded from direct sunlight by a fiberglass and polyester covering. The seam between the open and covered portions is accentuated by the yellow and white color scheme.
One of the benefits of designing your own space is that you can sign off on details clients might reject. At the Selgascano studio, climate control is dead simple: a weighted pulley at one end of the tube opens and closes a hinged opening.
The most fitting symbols are often accidents. When flames engulfed the Mandarin Oriental Hotel inside the titanium CCTV tower design by Rem Koolhaas in Beijing last February, it felt like a comeuppance borrowed from a Tom Wolfe novel. The fire occurred in the thick of the financial crisis, a time when celebrity architects like Koolhaas appeared headed for a mighty tumble.
Another case of accidental symbolism occurred at the art biennale underway in Venice, where a suburban home built as a floating sculpture capsized in a canal. Artist Mike Bouchet, is known for sardonic takes on middle-class American life, built a full-scale replica of a two-story suburban home that he intended to float in a canal beside the biennale for six-months. Bouchet rode on an upstairs balcony as the house was towed on a barge through the harbor to the heart of Venice. After the house was unloaded from the barge a pontoon failed and the house tilted like the Titanic and sank.
Was it a disaster, or an unplanned performance that captures the subprime era? There has been some speculation that the long suburban experiment may come to an end as easy loans dry up and energy costs make oversized homes and long commutes prohibitive. So what better artwork for the post-boom era than a foundering McMansion?
Are recessions good for architecture? As painful as downturns may be, a bracing change often betters the built environment. A go-go economy licenses too many complacent ideas, and too much overwrought styling. (How many of us would mourn McMansions?) Fewer buildings go up in a recession, but those that do are subject to more thought and self-examination, and they tend to be more sensitive calibrators of a changing culture. In other words, a recession is often the moment when architecture finds its future. Or maybe it's just one of those quirks of history, like the old adage about lower hemlines and a bull market. Either way, I offer some examples of good architecture in bad times:
Walter Gropius built this modest home for his family in an apple orchard in Lincoln, Massachusetts in 1938, two years after leaving Nazi Germany. It may look unprepossessing to us, but it was one of the most influential residential designs of its day, introducing modern principles of efficiency and simplicity at a time when America was ready for them.
The decline in government spending at the end of World War II led to a brief recession and a period of scarcity. During this dip, the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames built a home for themselves in Los Angeles using ready-made parts. It was comfortably cluttered and colorful--a revelation to those who dismissed modernism as a cold white abstraction. The house was the centerpiece for a design practice devoted to making lasting works out of plywood, resin and other cheap materials.
In the early Seventies OPEC quadrupled oil prices. That, combined with Vietnam spending, led to stagflation and recession. In architecture it was a time of experimentation as modernism loosened its hold. Peter Eisenman built a defiantly impractical house, the Frank Residence, with an intricate arrangement of walls and columns jutting from a simple box. As much sculpture as architecture, it was a pioneering example of how Eisenman and his fellow travelers in the Deconstructivist movement would try to remove buildings from conventional expectations.
The Iranian Revolution and the subsequent jump in oil prices induced an early 1980 recession. The iconic design image of the day was Philip Johnson's Chippendale crown on the AT&T building (now the Sony Building) in Midtown Manhattan. Historical vocabulary had been effectively banned during modernism's long reign, and Johnson's flourish was a provocation and turning point: post-modernism had arrived.
We like to think design is a field of unfettered creativity—an industry that abhors the proverbial box. In actuality it sags under an abundance of rules: Less is more. God is in the details. A good copy is better than a bad original. When in doubt, leave it out. Good design is when it's finished…and so on.
As the book demonstrates, "form follows function," the most common design adage of all, did not come from a European modernist like Walter Gropius or Mies van der Rohe, as is commonly believed. It originated with Louis Sullivan, the American designer of early skyscrapers. For the record, what he actually said was: "Form ever follows function." Frank Lloyd dissented by saying "form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union."
In 1964, Marshal McLuhan, a communications theorist, coined the catchphrase "the medium is the message." In the book, William Bernbach, a founder of the ad firm DDB, responds: "Word of mouth is the best medium of all."
The most cliched design rule of all has to be "…is the new black." Van Gaalen attributes the phrase to Diana Vreeland who allegedly responded to a pink Asian fabric by saying "pink is the navy blue of India," meaning it was the basic building block of a wardrobe. Her pronouncement somehow led to grey as the new black, brown is the new black and, finally, black is the new black. (Not to mention endless variations, like Heath Ledger is the new Matt Damon.) By way of rebuttal, Bruce Oldfield, a British fashion designer, said, "When someone says that lime-green is the new black for this season, you just want to tell them to get a life." And Michael Beirut, the graphic designer, said, "Innovation is the new black."
Footnote: The book title is a phrase borrowed from advertising giant David Ogilvy, who was famous for impressing slogans on his staff. Among other things, he famously said, "If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative" and "Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals."
Design no longer has a single dominant school, as it did in the heyday of modernism. Instead of one organizing principle we have a thousand flowers blooming, to borrow a coinage from Chairman Mao. The design scene is a rich plum pudding of small and medium-scale ideas variously driven by fashion, technology, sustainability and pure whimsy. It's an unordered Darwinian field: Some inklings will evolve into full-blown trends over the coming season; most will snuff out after brief runs.
The modest resurrection of trompe l'oeil is one such trend-in-embryo. It's the kind of visual trickery that serves as a backlash against the earnestness of modernism and a trippy corrective to modernism's super straight rectitude. For example, in the months leading up to today's opening of the Magritte Museum in Brussels, the building has been cloaked in a tromple l'oeil screen. The construction site itself became a surreal tableau the master himself might have produced.
The current tromple l'oeil may be an offshoot of the photorealistic wallpaper that started showing up in the last few years, like these birds in flight from the wallpaper firm Trove.
Front, a Swedish design group, showed a handful of furniture pieces at the Milan Furniture Fair in April that used photographic images on textiles to create an illusion of movement, or to impersonate materials. The sofa above, for example, appears to be--but isn't--draped in flowing silk. Front also showed a comfortably supple sofa masquerading as a hardwood bench and side tables with fictional shadows. These are tricks performed for the eye alone. Like sleight of hand, the effect is everything.
In Milan, the French fashion house Maison Martin Margiela showed its first line of home furnishings in a re-creation of its Paris studio, with black and white tromp l'oeil doors and rugs, lending it a Gothic Edward Gorey touch.
Tromp l'oeil can be used to unify architecture with its surroundings. On Gotland, an island west of Stockholm, the architect Hans Murman wrapped his summer home, a modest one-story box made of pine, with a plastic screen on which he printed images of the surrounding Juniper trees. The result is a house that becomes part of its landscaping.
Great buildings, he wrote, are like mirrors that reflect our greatest aspirations and "speak of visions of happiness." Thus a Gothic arch pleases our inner selves by conveying "ardor and intensity" and Richard Neutra's early modern homes in California, like the Kauffmann house (above) express "honesty and ease...a lack of inhibition and a faith in the future." In other words, architecture pleases us by expressing how we feel.
This, of course, is what classicism was about. Vitruvius, and later Palladio, believed that people and society would be enriched by following the ideals of symmetry and proportion.
Can a building really make a profound psychological difference? Can it lead to anything more than the same passing pleasure you might get from, say, a sunset? Probably not. At least that's the consensus found in Building Happiness, a new collection of essays by Richard Rogers, Will Alsop, and other British creative types edited by Jane Wernick. The book results from a study called Building Futures on what influences happiness and whether it can be designed into a place.
Asked to name their favorite places, the contributors cited, among other things, a power station, a house by by Luis Barragán, and the Burrell Museum in Glasgow (above). Having made their picks, many of the essayists debunk the idea that design influences our psychology in any lasting way, except in those cases, like the most felicitous dormitories and office buildings, where architecture encourages a sociable mingling of residents.
Is a building more likely to make us happy if it functions well? Not necessarily. As Julia Galef recently pointed out, Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier's masterpiece, leaked prolifically, and it was deemed "uninhabitable" by the couple who lived there.
Over the past ten years the preservation of mid-century architecture has become a cultural fixation. If a house by R.M. Schindler went on the market today, a five-alarm rescue operation would follow. If anything, architects like Richard Neutra and Paul Rudolph carry more cache today than when they practiced.
Their contemporaries in landscape architecture? Not so much. How many of us have even heard of masters like Dan Kiley who designed the Miller Garden in Columbus, Indiana (photo above)?
Of the more than 80,000 properties on the National Register of Historic Places, fewer than 1,900 have an element of landscape. The irony is that mid-century architecture tended to emphasize the indoor-outdoor aspect, but preservationists largely ignore the outdoor portion of the sites.
Why do Americans value buildings, but not landscapes? For whatever reason, we tend to see open space as a blank spot waiting for development. For too many of us, designed landscapes means dog runs, cafés, and skateboard ramps. It's hard to make the case for saving Modernist landscapes like the NationsBank Plaza in Tampa (above) because they depart from the convention of the pretty, pastoral scene fixed in our minds by Frederick Law Olmsted.
If landscapes are now claiming a place on the preservation agenda it's due largely to Charles Birnbaum, founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a group dedicated to saving public plazas, private modernist gardens, estate grounds, and historic parks. Birnbaum acts as the James Carville of landscapes, swooping into cities across the country and organizing grassroots campaigns to save under appreciated sites like Heritage Park Plaza in Fort Worth, Texas (above).
Landscape preservation is one of the few fields to have benefited from the economic downturn. As the pace of development slows, Birnbaum gains time to muster support for places like grounds of Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., which Eero Saarinen designed in the late 1950s. "It is an opportunity for research, documentation, potential designation, deeper and more thoughtful planning and analysis," he told me this week.
On April 10, 1968, Jane Jacobs was arrested and charged with inciting a riot at a protest against the Lower Manhattan Expressway, an eight-lane elevated highway proposed by Robert Moses that would have obliterated a chunk of the SoHo neighborhood and displaced nearly 2,000 families.
Fortunately, the plan was defeated. But Moses prevailed over Jacobs in other cases, such as the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Jacobs and Moses are the polar stars of urban planning. He used his political might to ram home big institutional projects, like Lincoln Center and suburban parkways. She was the searing voice of neighborhood resistance and an advocate of small-scale ingenuity, in all its messy brilliance. Cities were at their best, she wrote, when politicians stepped aside and let the "ballet of the sidewalks" take over.
The epic Moses versus Jacobs battle has renewed relevance today as New York and other U.S. cities gear up for a new wave of infrastructure work prompted by stimulus spending and the need to retrofit for efficiency. Yesterday Mayor Bloomberg of New York scored one for the Jacobs team by releasing a street design manual that is meant to coax the city away from car-centric planning and toward a more pedestrian-friendly future.
The manual does not impose rules or restrictions. Instead, it conveys what the city favors, with the understanding that proposals with these features will more likely gain approval. While the plan applies only to New York, it takes a global view. Many of the materials and techniques are already being used in Chicago, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. And the 232-page document contains photos of a bus lane in Paris and a raised intersection in Brighton, England.
Many of the features spring straight from the Jane Jacobs playbook, like mixed-use streets and short, dense blocks. Some would be entirely foreign to her, such as L.E.D. street lights and the colored rubber pavement already in use on Broadway (above).
According to Claire Weisz, a partner in the design firm W X Y, Robert Moses tried to build a level of design excellence into the city infrastructure, but by the 1990s "everything got watered down to 5' by 5' scored gray concrete with cast iron curbs and asphalt streets with painted lines." The real problem, she told me in a recent email, was the mindset of the old transportation bureaucracy: "Even if it's ugly don't change it."
A crucial question for the coming years is this: can the new design consciousness making its way into the public realm of New York and other cities prevail over bureaucratic inertia?
Was this the year the ICFF lost its fizzle? America's foremost design event had always seemed like more than a trade show. It had a certain critical energy in those years when design strode jauntily at the forefront of our cultural life, and in recent years had taken on a more worldly foreign aspect.
The mood was cheerful enough this year, and there was enough good work, such the Divis table by Mike and Maaike (above) to keep editors working the aisles. But there were no molten-hot objects of desire this time around, and the whole affair felt subdued and reduced. The corridors were shortened, with a big empty stretch at the back of the Javits Center, and a certain vital energy was missing, like when the home team is losing and the fans eye the exit. Philippe Starck left for his hotel on Friday night after an obligatory showing at the Conran Shop to promote his new wireless speakers, and flew out the next morning without even going to the show.
ICFF, which closes today, has the misfortune of falling a few weeks after the Milan Furniture Fair, where design's big dogs--Marcel Wanders, Patricia Urquiola, Tord Boontje and the rest--introduce new work before packing it up for New York. As a result, ICFF can feel like watching a good movie for the second time--you may still enjoy it, but the anticipation is gone. After you subtract those significant introductions, what's left is a preponderance of needless spin-offs of aging design trends--frilly draped chandeliers, felt pillows with nature images and laser cut patterning, as in the chair shown above.
Given the show's diminished ambitions, it's fitting that miniaturization was one of this year's trends. The Vitra store in the meatpacking district displayed miniature modern furniture, and the Stilvoll booth in Javits had tiny replicas of its fold-up desk. It was as if the replicas would stand-in for the full-size classics, which now feel like Design Beyond Reach.
I heard no talk this year of limited editions, the recent incursion into the art field that had designers dreaming of art world prices. "As with so much else in today's world, all that feels like the excesses of some ancient regime," Julie Iovine wrote in The Architects Newspaper.
Limited editions frothed to the fore at Art Basel and Milan over the last two years as acquisitions without concern for function. But modern design was founded on functionality, and it may now have returned to its rightful focus with new works like the rainwater collector (above) by Hero Design Lab. This year's ICFF demonstrated how thoroughly the conversation has shifted away from luxury goods and has refocused itself on the pressing matters of efficiency, production and sustainability.
In keeping with the new emphasis on the cheap and reusable, cardboard was a conspicuously popular material, as in the flat packed light by Chun Wei Liao (above). How far we've come from 2001 when Ross Lovegrove introduced Go, which was much ballyhooed as the first chair made of magnesium.
It may have been a down year for business, but if anything the mood was merrier. Like a host resigned to a disappointing turnout, the ICFF crowd seemed to relax and enjoy itself at the cocktail receptions spread across the city, and some visitors lasted long enough to the after hours gatherings at 24 Prince organized via Twitter.
You can't compare one show to another, Chee Pearlman, a design consultant, told me over beer at one of the many late-afternoon parties. "Each show has its own mood," she said, "and the impulse is forever optimistic."
Was it a disaster, or an unplanned performance that captures the subprime era? There has been some speculation that the long suburban experiment may 
