An Empty Victory: When urban planning fails to live up to expectations

As the current severe recession shuts down countless buildings and spaces everywhere, it is a good time to take stock on why some real-estate ventures succeed and others fail. The generous financing available the past five years not only led to lots of construction but also enabled the consideration and speculation for new models of development. Many large-scale buildings and instant communities were planned and built to a degree never seen before. Urban concepts that were confined to academia not long ago were suddenly put to the test as built projects. For example, entire abandoned airports were transformed into attractive neighborhoods with commercial town centers. Many cities seized industrial brownfield sites as a way to regenerate urban life by masterplanning dense mixed-use districts. After decades of rapid suburban development, the central city was due for a comeback, as demographic developments, pollution reductions and changing tastes conspired to make downtown living look enticing. It was just a matter of finding an ambitious project to kickstart it all.

Dallas was no different. Having for a long time failed to populate its dowtown with any residents, the city made a concerted effort (i.e. gave lots of tax incentives) to refurbish and even repurpose vacant office buildings into top-of-the-line apartments and condominiums. It even subsidized a neighborhood grocery store to get residents to stay. Yet these efforts were modest compared to one of the largest new mixed-use developments just outside the central business district, Victory Park. The brainchild of Ross Perot Jr. (the son of the former presidential candidate), Victory was advertised as the the premier masterplanned urban community, designed for the on-the-go single professional who desired place to live, work, shop and play. Anchored by a state-of-the-art basketball arena and a luxury condo-hotel, Victory was going to be a district defined by high-rise apartments, fashionable street retail, trendy restaurants, and a public plaza surrounded by gigantic and moving digital projections. Apparently, what Dallas needed was an instant Times Square, complete with a glassed-in television studio at the corner to highlight the crowded pedestrian-filled sidewalks that are common in the city (...uh huh). After an early flirtation with a low-rise, historicist architectural theme, it was decided for this district to appear distincitively contemporary, with multiple glass skyscrapers of at least 25 stories, bamboo landscaping and reflecting pools with clean edges.

Now, only a few years later, Victory Park seems to embody at the local level the wreckage wrought by the global real-estate bust. The trendy restaurants have been shutting down one by one, the public plaza feels like a ghost-town when basketball and hockey games are not taking place at the arena. Most of the shops have closed their doors and many residential units remains unsold. Another major hotel flag, the Mandarin Oriental, backed out of the project, leaving a large parcel at the center of the development undevelopped and further undermining viability of the planned street blocks. The local television newscast still broadcasts from Victory, but struggles to show an outdoor shot due to a constant lack of passerbys. Despite civic groups' efforts to stage rallies, awards ceremonies, film festivals and new year's parties, Victory continues to fail as a favorite place for everyday people to regularly congregate. Ross Perot Jr. has had to sell a majority stake to a German financial entity to keep the place going. There's no sign of deterioration or neglect, just on overall impression of emptiness, an utter lack of street life. Affluent yuppies do live there, and the luxury W hotel stays busy. A brand new office building just opened, with high-profile corporate tenants such as Ernst & Young. But most Dallas residents agree that the story of Victory is much like the one where someone throws a party and everyone is invited, only to find that no one shows up. Where did it go wrong?

In Rockwall, a surburb 25 miles away, just a stone's throw from the interstate highway at the edge of a large reservoir lake lies a much more modest, less showy, mixed use development-The Harbor. There are no condos, apartments, or offices. There's no professional sports arena and definitely no fancy LED projections. There is a hotel anchor, a small Hilton, but nothing as ambitious as the W in Victory. There is also a 12-screen movie theatre, fountains and a collection of relatively middlebrow restaurants. A green lawn with a gentle slope serves as an outdoor amphitheatre. A small marina lies at the edge, complete with an abnormally small lighthouse. In contrast to Victory Park's cutting edge modernist style, this suburban development chose to emulate, however clumsily, the look of a Mediterranean seaside town. Hip roofs covered in red clay tiles, arcades, pergolas and warm palette of colors evoke the Southern European architectural tradition, but it is nontheless a vocabulary promotes a sense of ease. In spite of my own personal quibbles with its cheap construction (tilt-up with EIFS...ugh!) and plain cardboard-like facades, I question most the neo-Italianate style's genuine appropriateness for a community in North Texas.

And yet, the people come-in droves. Having spent many weekend nights at The Harbor, I can attest that the place is packed everytime, restaurants overflowing with diners, live music acts at almost every corner, and hundreds of people strolling past the marina and standing by the mini-lighthouse. The Harbor has a compelling reason for people to come- it's the only place on the town's long lakefront the public can access. The creation of the lake 40 years ago transformed Rockwall's identity, from a quiet rural county seat to a rapidly growing suburban community defined by the water and all the kinds of leisure activities associated with it. Hence, the Harbor in my mind has achieved something Victory has yet to have-a real sense of place. Given that there are little to no civic spaces in Rockwall other than historic courthouse square, there was already pent-up demand to create a place that interfaces with the lake.

One can hardly say that there was much public inertia for to create a place like Victory Park. Although many people can agree that an entertainment district adjoined to a major sports arena would be nice, there was no convincing reason why this was to come at the expense of established nearby areas. Both the Harbor and Victory Park were public-private collaborations, but the need for having the latter was never obvious and was thus perceived as a much more speculative venture. Though the Harbor was as much speculative venture as Victory, its unique location and the lack of other places for public gathering made it appear a a more organic result. Even if it were to take on a different scope and architectural character, a mixed-use retail development on the lakefront was inevitable given how Rockwall bills itself as a lakefront community, down to its official logo.

There was never anything self-evident or organic about Victory Park. Worse, it was envisioned as a district too exclusive to most Dallas residents. Mr. Perot wooed the most luxurious retailers, the priciest chefs and the upcale hotel tenants. Whether you were interested in buying chocolate, jeans, artwork, you could be sure that the stores did not expect middle- or even upper class customers. During a stay at Victory over a year ago, though the stores were open, my wife and I were the only ones in the stores, and the salespeople 'working' in them never appeared more bored. In spite of having hundreds of people living in apartments and condominiums just above street level shops, the stores were void of customers. Somehow, more serviceable retail for the neighborhood, such as a small grocery store, a drug store, even a dry-cleaner were nowhere to be seen. For some reason, it made perfect sense to Mr. Perot that upscale yuppies could live in his neighborhood and buy $400 dollar jeans on daily basis. Nothing is more bizarre than to watch the thousands of sports fans making their way to the arena dressed in team jerseys walking past restaurants catering to the fashionably dressed and high-spending clientel. Other than a gelato shop (since closed) there is no other retail attraction for middle-class families in the entire mega-development other than what's inside the arena (ahhh- a Chili's restaurant). After almost everything has shuttered, desparation has finally forced Victory's owners may finally get its tenant mix right- a Hard Rock Cafe is moving in.

In addition to the district's misguided social exlusiveness, Victory suffers from the kind of planning that unnecessarily isolates it from the surrounding existing urban fabric. The first fatal move was to force the location of the new light-rail line designed to feed pedestrians to the arena to the very periphery of the site. It seems that there was no intention to make Victory a functional 'transit-oriented' development, possibly because it may have gotten in the way of clientel showing off their cars at the hotel drop-off. For a place that bills itself as the ultimate walkable community in Dallas, Victory is not that easy to walk to. Whether you are coming from the historic West End immediately to the south or the uptown district a quarter mile away to the east, there is no natural pedestrian flow or wayfinding to the main plaza. The site is bound on two sides by highway overpasses, on one side by a vast lawn, and the north side by a sea of parking servicing the arena. Alhough there is a strong visual axis that ties the series of spaces within Victory into a cohesive whole, it is imperceptible from other major points of view elsewhere in the city. Useful gateways to the area are strangely obscured, with monumental corners taking precedence over the space defining the street. The result is that one's view is focused on the sculptural corner buildings, while the actual promenade that frames them is pivoted at an angle that makes it hard to see the end of the axis. This undermines a pedestrian's ability to make a quick mental map of the place, and unsurprisingly discourages people to wander towards the shops and linger. It has been observed that when the crowds walking from the West End make their way to the arena, they unknowingly bypass the main promenade and continue along the back side of the development. It also doesn't help that the main promenade is not lined on both sides by retail, further weakening the viability of the project.

All is not lost, however. By its shear location as a connector between the central business district and the booming uptown district, and by the fact that it is the only place to root for the Mavericks and the Stars, Victory Park will succeed over time. Mr. Perot gambled that he could create an instant high-end urban district that would be a magnet for the public. 3 years later, it's evident he lost that gamble based by underestimating the importance of catering to all the public, not just the cool few. The W hotel still stands, but the nightclub on the 33rd floor, popular with a few Dallas Cowboys and a handful of celebrities has recently closed down. More middle-brow restaurants would help, and some common anchor stores wouldn't hurt either. Something else to do when a game isn't playing would be nice, and rumors have been floating that some kind of movie theatre could be a part of the mix. A brand new Morphosis-designed Children's Museum is being planned, which should help. A city-subsidized grocery store should be opening its doors soon, which is better late than never. Victory will eventually become a lively district, but it will have a considerably different feel and image by that point. At any rate, it will definitely feel like a natural extension of the city, if it is to prosper.

Unfortunately, fixing the country's most ambitious urban mixed-use district will have come at tremendous cost to the city and its taxpayers. The enormous scope of the project posed a higher-than-normal risk for both public and private partners. Given the exclusive character of Victory, it's apparent that most Dallas residence helped finance a supposed public good that was not really oriented to all of them. The Harbor, for all of its faults, did not make that mistake- all types of people come there to spend time- from teenagers hanging out and playing music, to hispanic immigrants who watch their children revel in the interactive fountain, to middle-aged doctors and their families enjoying a 4-star meal at an outdoor dining veranda. The Hilton hotel at the end is constantly booked with wedding receptions, which adds a different dimension of family-centered activities in the Harbor. During the summer on Thursday evenings, several hundred people (and several dozen boats) fight for space to listen to a live music on the stage. This makes for quite a memborable scene for all the commuters driving along the interstate highway bridge as they approach the Harbor. It crystalizes an image of the family friendly and leisurely lifestyle of this emerging suburb by the lake.

This isn't to say that everything works at the Harbor. Some retail spaces have never been leased, and a number of shops swiftly went belly-up. The upper floors designated as office space remain unleased as well. What disappoints me most, however, is the harbor's poor quality of design and construction, as it permanently compromises the setting in which all the social interaction of the community takes place. It also serves as an indictment on the lack of aesthetic and cultural sophistication that characterizes the suburbs. Victory, though not perfect compared to older parts of downtown, still exhibits a quality of construction and detail that is dignified enough for a grand urban gesture for a some time to come. Even with its modernist vocabulary, it looks much more durable than the Harbor's cardboard-like appearance and obvious cutting of corners.

What can be learned from these projects? For one thing, scale matters a lot. Trying to do too much too fast sets one up for failure that much more easily. One of Dallas' most successful new districts is West Village, an area not much older than Victory but a lot smaller. It includes several blocks of low- to mid-rise blocks dressed in historicist (yet high quality) clothing and incorporating a lively mix of shops, restaurants, bars, a movie theatre and bookstore. It sensitively integrates with the surrounding neighborhoods and densities, incorporates the streetcar and the lightrail system. West Village functions as a connective tissue to smaller yet fast emerging neighborhoods, such as Knox-Henderson, with their traditional commercial cores lying nearby. Victory suffers from feeling like an isolated precinct, placed on a large abandoned site with nary a relation to the surrounding city. Its self-imposed architectural conformity in the use of the beige masonry, satin-finished metal panel and blue-tinted glass lend an unnecessary sterility to the place. By contrast, the random hodge-podge character of the older more established districts or the deliberate heterogeneity of styles in newer developments promote a lively feel for pedestrians. And lastly, when masterplanning a district it is more important to appeal to as many potential users as possible before creating a niche-based identity. It's understandable that selling a brand is critical in attracting high-paying residents to a new development, but this has to be balanced with the need to supply as broad pool of customers to support the retail. Apartment dwellers alone can't keep the street-level businesses below in business.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I'm convinced that Victory's boosters were so enamoured with their project's futuristic vision that they had completely ignored the traditional realities of how communities and urban districts come into being. Planning a popular urban hotspot is indeed an art and at its heart a speculative exercise. A certain amount of humility is called for among planners and financial backers within government and the private sector, something I suspect is scarcer than we would like to believe. Start small and let the users sort out what fits in a district, allowing flexibility that certain elements will fail and unexpected successes emerge. It's sort of a democratic approach, but the results are a truer reflection of the community compared to the more authoritarian alternative. So long as people believe that their private truth can will itself into the world through the built environment, costly follies like Victory will forever go on.

Beware of the Aristocrats: Architects and the Elite

Whether it's because humans have evolved in response to the challenges foisted on them by nature or because God wanted to ensure that universal agreement and understanding is impossible, people will always take sides. Humans belong to tribes, social classes, nations that compete against each other to obtain limited resources. Politics is by definition the study of this aspect of human behavior, as it tries to explain who gets what and why. There is much that can be understood about a political issue by taking looking at who represents either side. Knowing what cultural norms, values, and world views govern a tribe/class/nation/interest group will reveal lots about their motives and expectations facing an issue. Since there are as many groupings of values and philosophies as there are people and a finite amount of resources (natural and human) and time, political conflict will continue to remain with us. Compromises merely suppress long-running conflicts temporarily, or create new unforeseen conflicts (unintended consequences).

I keep the above concept in mind when looking at every issue, but in particular when it comes to environmental policy. As an architect these days it is well near impossible to avoid engaging in this issue. From my observation, architects, in desiring a status as independent crafts/artists, are relatively naive about the political dimensions of environmentalism and instead prefer to reflect on its attendant virtues of sustainability and harmony between man and nature. In the real world, our (architects') inability to solidly grasp the theory of economic value and the mechanics of wielding political influence makes us incapable in making lots money or effecting real change. As we strive to improve the look and feel of our communities, we are often blissfully unaware of people's economic interests and the major political factions and powerbrokers that make things happen in the real world (until it slaps us in the face in the form of architectural review committees, value engineering or canceled projects).

For instance, nothing makes us architects happier than to realize a structure that responds poetically to the landscape or achieves efficient ways of harnessing energy. Anything that can result in smaller mechanical rooms or reduced ceiling plenums is welcome by us designers. Smaller A/C units, more compact ductwork, eliminating waterheater closets and elevator machine rooms not only allow us more freedom, they are also usually greener. For urban planners, density in the form of compact infrastructure and utilities is preferred over suburban-style decentralization, and it also delivers greener benefits as well. In isolation such thinking becomes orthodox, and makes design professionals antagonistic to opposing points of view. Outside this architect/planner bubble, such orthodox assumptions look increasingly idealistic. It ignores the valid economic interests of a majority of people, and it is too myopic to consider unintended consequences of translating their ideals into public policy. Issues of cost, personal freedom, and social winners and losers are often not understood fully by us architects.

This myopia among architectural professionals also makes us unaware of where we stand in the existing political landscape. As a result we are repeatedly manipulated by outside factions and movements, with questionable benefits to our profession. Our willingness to side with whatever faction to bring about our own aesthetic and enviromental ideals contributes to the paradoxical way architects are portrayed in society: in spite our fairly middle-class incomes, architects are perceived as elitists. The values that drive our work and our thinking often mirror values of the economic and political elite. That's not surprising when we realize that our profession almost exclusively depends on these elites for our paycheck. After all, it is extremely difficult to derive an income from middle-class clients alone. Whether we recognize it or not, our political objectives as a profession rarely diverge from those pushed by entities at the very top of society. Architects throughout history have always been, to put it crudely, mercenaries of the powerful- from carrying out the will of kings, popes and aristocrats to concretizing social control on behalf of a modern technocratic state (Le Corbusier, Albert Speer, et al.)

The political agenda of the socio-economic elite and architects who depend on them continues to converge in the contemporary issue of environmentalism. As a philosophy, environmentalism offers a system of morals, values, an appealing sense of unity with the world for all people of secular persuasion. As a set of policies, however, environmentalism leads to inequitable outcomes that favor governments and their bureaucracies and encourage corporatist big businesses to use regulation hinder competition. Other winners are wealthy people who lament the upward mobility of the social classes beneath them. It is no coincidence that environmentalism emerged to the forefront of social consciousness as soon as a certain level of social wealth had been attained. This is firmly linked to people's natural concerns about quality once the material abundance brought about by prosperity reveals the shallowness of seeking satisfaction by sheer quantity.

To value the quality of things, to consider important yet immaterial matters- they are therefore luxuries. Before industrialization dramatically raised individual productivity and resulting in a broader distribution of wealth, land and political kinship were practically the only way to enjoy the luxury of contemplating about beauty, philosophy, science and mathematics. This traditional elite, the artistocrats or plutocrats, have been the lifeblood of cultural and intellectual development for most of human history. Although not necessarily the greatest minds themselves, they were benevolent patrons of the most influential artists, musicians, poets and philosophers. One thinks of King Philip of Macedonia and Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci at Amboise Castle, or of the lively salons taking place at a nobleman's (or noblewoman's) house. What are universities or non-profit organizations other than institutionalized salons where people can write, research, or create art and music on the dime of someone else's private trust (a modern legal form of aristocratic patronage) or taxpayer funds? These sorts of modern 'salons' are privileged settings where people can focus on qualitative matters that are given relatively short shrift in the world outside governed by economic rules, even if they rarely produce works of quality.

So it was with reading this post by Brendan O'Neill, a British journalist, about Prince Charles' latest hippocritical crusade, that I was reminded of a scene filled with finely clothed men in long white wigs longing on plush chaises longues listening to the latest epic from their favorite young poet. The future King of England, inheritor of a tremendous family fortune and one of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayers' largesse, has dabbled in a number of public issues throughout his non-productive career. One of his main pursuits included architecture, in which he founded a school to promote the revival of traditional design. In recent years he has moved on to champion environmental causes and the virtues of growing organic food all while burning mind-blowing amounts of fuel on his private jet. As O'Neill reminds us, far from demonstrating the courage of conviction, Prince Charles is merely keeping up with his fellow English aristocrats who have played a larger than assumed role in raising environmental awareness. Reading the passage below undermines the idea that the environmental movement is a purely grassroots effort:

...Many of the major players in British environmentalism are posh, rich, and hectoring. One of Charles’s top advisers is Jonathon Porritt, a former director of Friends of the Earth and a patron of the creepy Malthusian outfit, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). Porritt is a graduate of Eton, Britain’s school of choice for the rich and well-connected, and is the son of Lord Porritt, the 11th Governor General of New Zealand. The increasingly influential OPT also counts Sir Crispin Tickell (who is as posh as his name suggests) and Lady Kulukundis, the wife of a Greek shipping magnate, among its patrons.The head of the organic-promoting Soil Association, Peter Melchett, is also known as the Fourth Baron Melchett: that’s because he is the Eton-educated son of the Baron and Sir, Julian Mond — former chairman of the British Steel Corporation — and is heir to Sir Alfred Mond’s extraordinary ICI fortune...

...Zac Goldsmith, editor of the greens’ monthly bible The Ecologist, is the son of a billionaire (Sir James Goldsmith) and an aristocrat (Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the daughter of the eighth Marquess of Londonderry.) And if you thought it was grating to be lectured to by the mansion-owning, electricity-zapping Al Gore during his Live Earth bonanza two years ago, then spare a thought for us Brits: during Live Earth, we were given the Gore-approved “Global Warming Survival Handbook,” written by one David de Rothschild. Yes, David is a member of the mind-blowingly wealthy Rothschild banking family and is an heir to its enormous fortune.

Couple the above British "who's who" with their American counterparts, namely the Hollywood elite (like Al Gore's friends Laurie David and Leonardo Dicaprio) and it becomes clear that such consistent support from people at the top should make those of us below a bit suspicious. If one's convictions are influenced by one's social status, then it make sense to look into why this artistocratic class is so involved in environmental causes. An overriding sense of guilt due to their great fortunate is an obvious explanation, similar to my fellow architects' feeling of culpability in destroying natural resources and adding to the energy burden with every building they design. Tied to this is a belief that possesssing a public profile demands protraying oneself as a model citizen. Just as we had chivalry for medieval knights, and social expectations for aristocrats to exemplify virtures of loyalty, respect and a reverence for tradition and intellectualism, today's elite project an embrace of virtues that are judged preferable for public consumption. Being green is good, and no celebrity or European aristocrat could maintain a good reputation by openly shunning it.

Take away environmentalism's emotional and social dimensions, and we are left with its political and economic dimensions. Suddenly the moral standing of the aristocratic eco-warriors crumbles. To begin with, if politics is the study of who gets what, how and why, then it becomes apparent that the aristocrats have the least to lose from environmental policy. Isolated by their wealth from having to struggle daily to make a living, they don't tend to be aware of the vastly different priorities of people below them. Depending on what social status one belongs, priorities will range from the mostly material and monetary for those at the bottom, to ones that cherish qualitative, spiritual and intellectual at the top. Power enables one's priorities to be enacted over another. In an aristocratic arrangement, a small landed elite has power over everyone else and thus enforce their priorities at everyone elses expense. If something is favored by an aristocrat, it is prudent to question the political motives of these self-appointed leaders.

If economics is the study of how goods and services are produced, distributed and consumed, then who would be the least familiar with all this than these very people who don't produce anything but consume a lot? Environmental policies presents serious ramifications to economies worldwide, whether through regulations that that limit production or through subsidies that distort market signals and tax policy. While aiming to clean the environment and reduce carbon emissions, these policies tend to have the unintended (or intended) effect causing economic hardship to many and dragging down national economies through the wasteful use of capital and low productivity. From many contemporary architects' perspective, policies that would force urban density, mass transit and less automobile use would result in a better built environment The aristocrat would tend to agree, but for a potentially different reason: these policies would limit the personal and economic freedoms of the middle classes beneath them and would lower their standard of living relative to their own. It would keep the masses in crammed into cities, which tends to discourage property and home ownership, thus returning more power and influence to an oligarchy led by the governing elite and well-connected families.

Are these the kind of political bedfellows architects want? As a long-time admirer of the many fruits of traditional aristocratic culture, I understand the importance of the finer things that enrich life at an extremely deep level. It drives the passion of many designers and artists, and fulfills us more than an avaricious pursuit of profit. Greek and Roman patricians along with most European aristocrats had a high disdain for merchants, traders and self-made men for precisely this reason. But in this age of republican democracy, shouldn't architects respond to the ordinary needs of everyday people? Thus far many of us have been guilty of declaring that we are designing for the people, while in reality it was done from an elitist point of view. We claim to build and plan for the masses, only refer to them so abstractly that we come up with solutions that encumber personal freedom and economic mobility.

By embracing elitist points of view and political causes, architects are logically perceived as part of the world of elite, and not of the common man. Our services are considered by most people as a luxury, even if architecture has a useful role in enriching the simplest and cheapest of construction. It's ironic that although the building of shelter or the shaping of functional space are among the most primordial needs of man, the professional most dedicated to such endeavors, the architect, is considered largely unnecessary. If this is to change, it may require a revolution in the way we practice, but it has the promise of enabling architects to become independent advocates of design in the community rather than remote agents of the rich and powerful.

Fight Club in the White House

Watching a recent documentary about The Pixies reuniting was a sobering moment. As a fan of The Pixies (just "Pixies" is more accurate, but awkward), I was interested to see what the group was like after 15 years apart. Somehow, this dysfunctional group managed to rock out like they hadn't spent the last decade estranged, when they either lost themselves to addictions or in their own solo music projects. That was onstage. Offstage, there wasn't a whole lot going on. Reports of what the previous years had been like were nothing short of depressing, and it seemed that all the members couldn't wait to get back together, but mainly for the paycheck that would come from filling music halls across the country. (The lead singer, Frank Black, did manage some wonderful music in the intervening years.)

Something else struck me about the group. I was reminded of the violence in their music, which was always oddly combined with a clean-cut look, an attractive (at least in the late 80s) bassist, and a calm demeanor between songs. This was a stark contrast to the overly rebellious music groups of decades past, whose violent music was always paired with a violent image. (Think Dee Snyder eating an oversized thigh bone, an iconic image at the time we would ridicule today.) Now, violence is an acceptable trait of the quiet man, the thinker, the amateur philosopher, the college student. What had once been public displays of pain turned into a controlled rage, a rage that was recognized, contemplated, and accepted. Who was it that bought tickets to see the Pixies on their reunion tour? 40-year-olds that listened to them in their heyday? No, from the looks of things it was 20-year-olds who still heard in the Pixies a freshness, and saw in them role models of their own controlled rage.

A few years after the Pixies broke up, a film was made that was seemingly adored by every one 30 years old and younger: Fight Club. Here again was a portrait of controlled rage, harbored by a seemingly secure, educated professional. But behind his superficial success was a disillusionment about the very institutions that had given rise to his way of life. He wasn't an individual, as he felt was his birthright; he was a robot, a number, an automaton, devoting his empty life to a corrupt system that was anti-human and soul-crushing. His response? A psychotic break and the birth of an underground fight club that would grow into an anarchist legion. By the end of the film, the group is responsible for destroying skyscrapers that house all records of debt for the American consumer, destroying capitalism in one fell swoop. The background music as the buildings crumble to the ground? The Pixies'Where is my Mind?

Was this just a cool film? Or a snapshot of how an entire generation now views/viewed institutions? Maybe both. It certainly wasn't the Magna Carta of Generation X, but a justification (albeit insane justification) for destroying capitalism and altering society had been portrayed and appreciated by millions, many without giving it a second thought. Destroy debt? Sounds good to me! Live my life on my terms, not dictated by some evil bureaucratic company? Awesome! As long as that attitude was the daydream of a few college students who would one day shed that naivete with their own mortgage, small business and car note, the film didn't bother me. But the sentiment at the core of the Pixies controlled rage and Fight Club is now on full display in the highest branches of our society.

Before there was Fight Club, there was a guy who had authored a treatise on how to bring about social change. As it turns out, he worked in Woodlawn and Hyde Park, Chicago, where I went to school and were our current president lives when away from D.C. Saul Alinskyadmitted that his aim to bring about revolution by working within the system, harnessing a controlled rage by agitating institutions, especially financial institutions. (The picture below includes corporations, banks and utilities, but nothing is off limits.) He taught his followers how to create appetites for "change", how to get folks on board with legislating against one negative concept (like pollution) and expanding it to virtually anything else. Unlike Fight Club, blowing up buildings wasn't his preferred method of bringing about social change. But like Fight Club, Saul Alinsky worked in small groups in neighborhoods across the country, and the goal was to take down large institutions, one piece at a time.

And like Fight Club, there is a very real hostility against the very institutions that have created our comfortable way of life. Capitalism? It's surely imperfect, as all of humanity is, but the once fringe academic sense that capitalism was inherently evil is not so fringe anymore. In fact, I would argue it is incredibly likely that our president was highly trained in the sentiment that American capitalism was the moral problem, not the solution. His response as soon as he came into office? Virtually no element of our economy has gone untouched. Banking? Practically owned by the government. Automobile? Owned, at the risk of the rule of law, by the government. Credit cards? They're next, waiting for a takeover. Health care? By the end of the year, the government may have remade American healthcare in the image of England's failed model. The currency? Our own Treasury Secretary seems okay with the dollar no longer being the world's standard. The bailouts weren't a government loan to keep capitalism afloat. It turns out it was forced money that empowered the federal government to dictate changes in policy, without recourse. This article is a fascinating summary of just how unstable our economy is, and how much doublespeak is at the heart of it all.

In Fight Club, controlled rage is celebrated, indeed its needed, because the American system is immoral, corrupt and anti-human. This use to be a fringe idea, echoed only in the halls of colleges and by community organizing menaces like Saul Alinsky. Judged by his actions alone, a reasonable person can conclude that destroying America's fundamentally immoral foundations are at the heart of an Obama presidency. In the film, people didn't fight because they disagreed or were offended; they fight because they enjoy it. And at the core of the conflict, there is the desire to shed the institutions of the past, to literally destroy the goose that lays the golden eggs. The film simply animated the mainstream views of the American professoriate. Now, that view is in real power for the first time. Let the fight begin.

UPDATE: Obama says he's ready.

Podcast 7

Relieveddebtor and Corbusier take on green architecture and the changing institutional landscape in their most recent podcast. Enjoy!

As Institutions Crumble, What Will Take Their Place?

Life is always changing. But sometimes, change happens so quickly that we consciously stop and take notice. This is one of those times. With great expectations, we hoped the rust from the Bush years would fleck off. Instead, there seems to be a sense that more rust, a lasting rust, is forming. While Bush had his strengths (not least of which was his surety), he didn’t inspire confidence, especially when it was clear he had run out of ideas and support. For better or worse, Americans still need able leadership, even though we are remarkably independent in nature and history, and we were indeed ready for a change. And the results aren’t uplifting. At least, not yet.

This isn’t a screed against the current president. Rather, it’s a recognition that we were naïve at worse and overly optimistic at best to think that one person could fundamentally change the suspicions that had been growing within us for some time: suspicions that something wasn’t quite right, suspicions that the numbers weren’t adding up, and suspicions that a growing detachment from reality was here to stay. All of these suspicions were put on hold while we put our hopes in one man to make them go away. But he, because he is only a man, couldn’t possibly quell all such suspicions, and the basic detachments we’ve long sensed are now becoming realities. These are the detachments that we are no longer able to ignore, and they are motivating us to take real stock of where things are, and where they’re going. But what are the fundamental detachments from reality that have given us pause?

On a philosophical level, the first and most basic detachment is from the truth. The assumption that truth is relative is a devastating philosophical point-of-view, one that seems to promise freedom, but ends in enslavement. If truth is relative, then what exactly does one hang his hat on? And what protects your version of the truth, if another’s version is more popular, armed, or powerful than yours? Truth, detached from central, traditional, historic mores is not truth at all, just one man’s opinion. And if that one man has a following, an army, or a judicial system in his favor, what about your precious truth? Who will defend it, and on what philosophical grounds? I won’t be so naïve to say truth is an easy discernment. But are we even attempting anymore, or have we given up, using the excuse that it’s not real anyway, so why bother?

Postmodern relativism is simply an untenable philosophical framework, and it has led to a confusion in reality. It is certainly helpful for polite society, as it is a quick way to end an argument (“Well, you can think what you want and I will think what I want, and we can agree to disagree”). But if nothing is true, then nothing is real. If nothing is true, nothing can be trusted. If nothing is true, there is no legitimate need for respecting, much less loving, those around us. The only possible result is increased alienation, meaninglessness and rampant secularism, no recipe for social harmony to be sure.

Leadership that adopts a relativistic framework is bound to decrease confidence and increase anxiety, and this leads to our second unsettling detachment, detachment from our government. Does anyone have a hand on this thing anymore? President Bush acting against his own principles to save his principles is still a startling example of a lack of clear thinking that resulted in a panicked market. Our current president also has a tell-them-what-they-want-to-hear habit that leads to confusion, if not outright disgust.

Even worse than personal shortcomings in our government leaders is the sense that its size is starting to get away from us. In reality, it already has; we’ve officially become detached when our staggering debt load is more than we’re even worth as a nation. We’re officially detached when the interest on our debt is our fourth largest expenditure as a nation, following Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Those four expenditures don’t even take into account our annual federal budget! So while our government encourages us to save and be frugal, it is living on the domestic equivalent of credit cards with no prospect of income to justify the current purchases. When political promises are completely detached from what is fiscally possible (unless we charge more of China’s credit cards), we sense that governmental detachment is real, and worrisome.

This leads of course to our growing detachment from economic matters. If only 53% of Americans prefer capitalism to socialism, we must have a serious lack of understanding. Worse, we must have a lack of trust in the market, and hence, each other. As massive companies engage in billion dollar boondoggles, only to get trillion dollar bailouts, we lose any sense of connection to the market, and let these failed experiment define the market for us. The market has become those rich guys stealing my taxes instead of the diverse, brave and industrious system that it is. The market, according to 47% of Americans, has become the source of our problems, be they environmental problems, healthcare problems, unemployment problems, or inequality problems. For too many of us, the market is not the solution, and we are simply feeling detached. 

(Other institutions are suffering as well, especially the Church. This article is an insightful essay on the dissolution of the American Mainline Protestant Church. This article outlines the future downfall of the evangelical movement.)

So amid all of that hopelessness, is there any hope? Of course. There is always hope. But it will be found in places we deem “authentic.” We see it in our food preferences as celebrity chefs are always on the quest for authentic food (eyeballs and testicles are always great fare for television). As our trust of massive systems and persons beyond our control depletes, we’ll rely on what we see in front of us. Local churches, local government, even neighborhoods may all experience revivals of sorts, if not in numbers, in intentionality. My guess is that we will seek ways to withdraw from the systems we do not understand, much less trust, and that instead of getting irate about the federal goings-on, we’ll be forced to ignore them. We’ll give credence to those on the ground floor, to those “in the know”, to those with experience, who have lived and gained experience. When institutions fail and demagogic promises don’t come to pass, authority will pass to those who are authentic from those who failed to deliver. At least, I hope so.

 

From a spiritual point-of-view, the little things of religion stand a powerful opportunity to become absolutely vital again, the exact opposite of rote. Communion, liturgy, the Bible, small groups…all of these things could again become “mainstream” sources of hope and meaning. After all, haven’t these things always stood, through the decline of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, Communism, and world wars? These little things have always proven to be authentic and lasting. I suspect they will continue to be seen in such a light, even as the big things around us become detached.

 

(Sometimes, it’s odd how articles with similar themes are born at the same time. I thought this said some of the same things I was thinking, in some ways better than I could.)

It's Not Easy Being Green- is it just about building performance or is there something else?

For those who have read my previous essays on green architecture, it is evident that I share some doubts about some of its major assumptions, even as I support it many of its goals. Thus my response to most articles and lectures advocating green design begins with the phrase "...yeah, but..." when impractical ideas turn up and concludes with multiple eye-rolls when the tone becomes alarmist. So it was with actual relief when I sat though a seminar on green design at an architects' conference where the main lesson was practical and modest about our understanding about the issue. No less surprising was that it was given by Peter Pfeiffer of the Autin architecture firm Barley+Pfeiffer, who are regarded as pioneers of a sort in popularizing green design in Texas decades ago (and who also happened to be the first visiting critic when I was a mere naive beginner student). What appealed to me in Pfeiffer's presentation was its emphasis on maximizing performance with sensible detailing of the building envelope and using of age-old devices for shading, ventilation, and moisture protection. The priority should be on minimizing a building's energy load before adding fancy devices that tend to add tremendous inital costs and may operate with compromised efficiency.

Despite the technological advances that constitute much of green design, there is nothing exceptionally high-tech about Barley + Pfeiffer's architecture. If anything there is much that is traditional. Much of Mr. Pfeiffer's presentation cited pictures of other people's buildings that were featured in lifestyle magazines like Dwell that exhibited common 'green' techniques but failed to perform the most basic function of keeping water out and properly shading the building. It reminds me of what a good architect friend once told me: "to say that I can design a green building is really saying that I can design a structure that won't fall." Much of what is considered responsible design is already green and has been so for the last 3,000 years. Siting the building to maximize natural daylighting and breezes while reliably sheltering occupants from the elements was fundamental since not doing so would make life indoors extremely unbearable and a threat to health. Stale air, excessive heat, mold, water-borne diseases, and smoke inhalation from cooking fires were the consequences of from a failure to design according to traditional 'green' principles.

If designing green is nothing new, how come is it seen as the next big thing? First, beyond being a marketing gimick that endows a building with virtue, it's important to understand what buildings were expected to do before and after the machine age. Before the 19th century, the performance goals for buildings were limited by scarce resources that were readily available and the brute energy available from human and animal labor. Given this reality, it was important to concentrate the energy expended in a home to sensible and durable construction that required low maintenance and wielding natural forces for a minimal level of human comfort. The result was an extremely sustainable model of architecture by today's standards, yet driven by necessity rather than choice (the late Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy worked in this mode, with interesting results). The value of ornamentation in pre-machine era design was a testament to the triumph of the human spirit of frivolity and waste over a daily life that was mostly "...nasty, brutish and short." The act building was tremendous human endeavor, requiring enourmous amounts of manpower with the crudest means and most inefficient methods. But once a building was finished it used little to no energy, was passively cooled, and was made of non-toxic materials. Still, the buildings remained too dark more than half the time and still too cold (or too hot, depending one one's latitude).

Machines changed everything. They completely altered our expectation of what buildings could do in previously unimaginable ways. In addition to providing shelter from the elements, a building with the help of machines was capable of much more: providing a precise level of comfort, adequate lighting regardless of the time of day, clean our laundry, wash our dishes, rid waste, cook our food automatically and even irrigate the surrounding landscape. Thanks to advances in steam and electric power, fewer people were required in construction even as building size and interior expanded infinitely. The functions inside the home demanded less time and labor from members of the household and suddenly home had the additional task of providing spaces for private leisure. In contrast to a rough life of subsistence farming and huddling together with the family in a sparsely furnished hall, one could, thanks to machines and powered transport, pursue any occupation anywhere and eat food grown by others while lounging in compartmentalized rooms stuffed with affordable furniture.

As the building could now do more, more functions were naturally placed on it. Its value would be measured less by how well it kept the rain out or harnessed nature and more by how it performed other more specialized functions. The central question in much of the twentieth century was how could buildings accomodate the machine? After some experimentation during the 19th century, mechanical and electrical systems were to be integrated in the building once and for all, substituting the facts of nature within a sheltered space. HVAC systems could substitute the use of wind currents, fireplaces, and the sun to achieve unparalleled comfort. Modern plumbing systems, beyond eliminating the back-breaking and time-consuming labor of fetching water from the well, were a boon to overall public health and increased human longevity. Electric lighting conquered the night and the perpetually shaded recesses of our structures while ensuring much lower risks from destructive fires. By delivering energy remotely through wires, it also made all buildings capable of work. Before electric delivery, a space designed for the manufacture of goods required power to be available on site, whether sby relying on a wind or water mill, or by using animal strength. With electricity, the production of power is removed and therefore frees spaces to flexibly accomodate a countless number of functions, from industrial to clerical and domestic use.

All of a sudden, a building's performance was measured by how much work it could do within its envelope. More than just keeping the elements out or employing rules of composition and proportion, we now expect it to do things quite alien to Vitruvius and Palladio: it had to cool and heat mechanically, provide adequate power for artificial light and automated appliances, and pressurized fresh water for all washing and cleaning. All these modern functions would never have come about were it not for abundant and cheap energy. And this would not have been possible without a cheap and abundant energy source like fossil fuels. This abundance did not reward wastefulness as much as it encouraged innovation for the increase of production to create more human wealth. To produce more and make more money, it is essential to improve efficiency. Since the dawn of the industrial age, machines have progressively become more efficient at the same time that they could produce even more, which had the effect of consuming even more energy. This in turn increased the demand which then increased the supply of the most affordable and easiest to distribute sources of energy-coal, oil, natural gas, and later, uranium.

With the recently growing realization that these energy sources are inherently finite, there has been a rising call to maximize efficiency while consuming less. However, if the object is not to produce more to create greater wealth and value, there will be little incentive other than the high price of energy to become more efficient. Hence, the use of regulation to either artificially inflate the price of traditional energy sources or or the use of subsidies to deflate the natural high cost of renewable power. These methods of distorting the real physical value of resources (the pricing mechanism) are based on imaginary values derived from people's ideals and assumptions. Saving the environment is valuable in the realm of human morals and metaphysical understanding. It has yet to prove profitable or scalable in a free market, where it fills a niche and not mass market. What economic value remains for the environmental industry is chielfy dependent on government regulation and subsidy.

Does innovation on efficiency thus follow from regulation and subsidy? To a degree, they can, but at a much slower pace and at tremendous cost to lots of people (taxes, higher utility prices, etc.). Part of the reason for this is the fickle nature of discovery and innovation. They arise mostly from the muck of wasteful experiments and inventions, risk-taking, chance, and scientific accident. This is counter to massive government-led scientific research campaigns that tend to pursue narrow solutions. In a highly regulated and subsidized economic environment, the government-enforced high cost of energy and resulting reduction in productivity limits the conditions in which the 'muck' can thrive and from which most of our innovations come from. It is not a coincidence that most modern inventions and innovations since World War II (when all of Europe opted for democratic-socialism) have come from the U.S.-where entrepreneurial risk-taking and a desire to make things for which people willingly pay have fostered amazing technological advances at lower cost.

The current green movement is right to emphasize the maximizing of performance of our buildings in all various functions they assume nowadays. It conforms with the overarching trend of dramatic leaps of efficiency in our buildings taking place during the last two centuries. It is also good to learn from pre-machine-era buildings in how they made use of the climate at a time when energy was scarce and productivity was low. Especially when it comes shedding water and in shading from the sun, modern architects naively thought steel and concrete could 'reinvent the wheel'. The great modern masters' buildings were well known to leak which helped undermine the appeal of their work in the popular mind. Mr. Pfeiffer joked that there are only two kinds of flat roofs-ones that leak and ones that are about to. And although an unshaded curtain wall glazing facing south may look cool and sleek in Dallas, it doesn't excuse running a dozen A/C units hidden in the bushes (like this famous house). These shortcomings cost real money, and by properly addressing them with a tight leak-proof envelope (or a breathable one in some cases), sensible daylighting and shading, real long term savings are achieveable, especially in the long term.

That is, if the cost of energy stays relatively cheap. If the supply of energy stays the same and the demand for it declines because of conscious design, the price will decline. In this case, designing a green buidings is a matter of individual choice, where the inital extra cost of installing high-performance materials is weighed against long-term savings in energy consumption. Since going green isn't a self-evident economic choice on its own (as the need for tax incentives, credits and rebates makes clear), it remains a luxury made accessible to those who can afford and who adopt cultural values that endorse this choice. As I've described elsewhere, demand for environmentally-friendly products and services have grown in correlation to rising incomes.

But for many green enthusiasts, that is precisely the problem- as long as green design is a luxury of choice, it will be prevented from becoming the mainstream method of building. From their perspective, policies of government-led compulsion are the only way to make sustainable design widespread. That means government does what it can to penalize people who do not follow green practices, from artificially rationing energy or taxing it heavily, to radically raising the required performance criteria of targeted industries, to giving all sorts tax rebates or subsidies to green projects. Instead of thriving by selling goods for which there is a real market demand, the much ballyhooed 'green' economy can only be sustained by taking wealth from private enterprise and taxpayer income while willfully distorting pricing signals (eg. cap & trade). As an excercise, try to name one company or product that has been hugely profitable because of its sustainable features and not because of government help (The first thing that comes to mind is the Toyota Prius, but looking further one realizes that each unit is sold at a loss, its sales recently have been sinking faster than any other car due to lower gas prices and would be even worse were it not for generous tax credits.)

Since there is hardly a more regulated human endeavor than building, encouraging (or forcing) the implementation sustainable design has been easier than in other industries. In the interest of saving money on maintaining utilities and managing resources, municipalities and state governments push for better building performance. For one thing, it is relatively easy to hide the extra-cost of going green by means of codes, tax incentives and ordinances. This has the effect of raising real estate values, and attracts the well-off to move in and partake in the desirability of living the green lifestyle. Despite many people's faith in the virtue of green design, it almost never goes downmarket to benefit people of lower income. Unless a massive transfer of wealth is involved, the problem remains that environmentally-friendly policies usually have adverse affects on the poor. It is they who are more sensitive to the initial costs of things, and are rarely in the position of absorbing the sticker shock of the rich and planning out their finances based on life-cycle estimates.

That is why I favor simple moves to make a house perform more efficiently without raising the initial cost. It's no coincidence why learning and applying building knowledge of the pre-industrial past makes sense in the design of structures for the less well-to-do- it's about a return to an architecture made by people with lesser means. Because of all the thing a building is expected nowadays, this kind of building will not completely cut off energy consumption, but it could reduce it by a hefty margin. It is my believe that in the long run, this helps out more people, lessening costs without the burden of maintaining an expensive and unproductive solar roof panel or windmill (they often fail to provide more than 10% of a building's energy needs). The priority for the poor is not, in my opinion, to live more sustainably. By most measures, they already do live sustainably by virtue of the fact that they are poor (as were our pre-industrial ancestors). What today's poor have that their ancestors did not was cheap and abundant energy.

It is for this reason that aggressively employing renewable energy like wind and solar is misguided. These are very expensive sources of energy, despite the belief that the the sun and air are free. They require lots of input for relatively little output and receive 20-40 times more subsidies from the government per kilowatt produced. Increasing output from wind and solar can be improved in small increments, but their inherent physical properties prevent them from producing even close to enough. Compared to the high level of energy density per unit of oil, or even the astronomical level found in uranium, wind and solar-by their diffuse nature-are an infinitesimal fraction. Since those two clean-energy alternatives make little financial sense without massive government assistance, the only other credible argument to employ them now is the fact they do not burn carbon. Unlike a several decades ago when burning carbon meant harmful paticulates in our air, our technological success in nearly eliminating that problem has now given way to suspicions that it adversely affects our climate. I call this a suspicion and not a fact since much of the credibility of anthopogenic global warming relies on observations that the global climate is changing (higher surface temps, icebergs melting, rising sea levels) and associating this to rising carbon dioxide emissions without undeniable proof. If the paradigm of man-made climate change collapses under the weight of contrary evidence, which is quite possible, then the rationale for designing according to carbon footprint collapses as well.

The fundamental question remains: how must a structure perform? What standards should be used to measure a structure's performance-does it shelter well or does it permit functional flexibility and convenience to maintain a modern standard of living? If it's the former, then durable construction and time-tested techniques in dealing with the local environment is paramount. If it's the latter, then designing to minimize consumption of water and electricity is sensible, as long as the cost savings are not exclusive to the building's occupants but to the all people who have a stake (i.e. taxpayers) Anything beyond these tasks, such as minimizing the building's carbon footprint should be paid for by the owner's discretion, since current solutions tend to inequitably place the cost on others and promotes unproductive state-dependent enterprise.

Everyone should go green in their own capacity, but no one should foot the bill in promoting green enterprises of questionable benefit. Extra money in one's pocket due to efficient design and construction is a tangible benefit. At this point in time, lowering the Earth's global temperature by a 1/2 degree in one hundred years based on estimates from historically flawed computer models is still an imaginary and unverifiable benefit.

What Does it Mean to be Cool, Anyway?

What does it mean to be cool? I confess it’s a schoolyard question, but apparently, it’s one that matters politically. A lot. I remember thinking to myself “So what?” every time a political commentator mentioned how cool then-candidate Barack Obama was during the presidential debates. “It’s his ideas that matter,” I kept thinking, but no one seemed to agree. Not that McCain had great ideas (he never was able to mount himself as a viable option, as one appearing to have better ideas or a better economic philosophy), but Obama was scarce on details and a proponent of populist drivel when he did divulge. It wasn’t about ideas at all, I guess. Maybe it never has been. Maybe the schoolyard goal of “being cool” has smoothly transitioned into the most important issues and places of our time, to the point where actually debating an issue at length is no longer worthwhile. I find that alarming. Does anyone else?

Of course, being cool under pressure is an absolute necessity for any leader, especially the President. The pressures must be unbelievable, at least for a serious thinker, which I’m not convinced Obama is. Everyone aims for the top, and you have to balance hundreds of relationships and the finicky public. Being cool can help to get an agenda passed, ease tensions with rival nations, and calm the nation if and when the government turns a crisis into a catastrophe. My fear is that we have mistaken aloofness for coolness and arrogance and laziness for confidence. From a moral point-of-view, this article speaks to this perfectly. From a political point-of-view, read this.

But in the midst of lackluster performance and falling approval numbers, is this the right time to start re-evaluating the value of being cool? Are there other values that equally matter, maybe even matter much more? To my recollection, the cool kids were never particularly impressive. (Admittedly, I wasn’t the cool kid. Far from a brainiac, I was reserved, lanky and more focused on theatre and music. I was an average athlete and socially insecure. So perhaps I write from a place of envy.) But in an effort to be intellectually honest, can we agree that while everyone liked the cool kids, it was rarely for their achievements? It was for their persona, even if they couldn’t manage to actually accomplish anything significant or unique. Only later do we appreciate the deeper thinkers, the quiet and the awkward, especially as they build businesses, employ others and consume our products. We end up reading their books, watching their movies and being inspired by the visions they often kept to themselves.

In the short run, what is cool is often what’s rebellious, what’s confident, and what’s independent. Cool art pokes fun at the establishment. It’s violent and edgy, often in form as well as substance. It is at times vociferously anti-religion and anti-American. In many circles, if art isn’t rebelling against the perceived “status quo,” it’s not worth creating. To follow up on corbusier’s previous post, perhaps this is why conservative artists have a difficulty conveying their values and making it interesting, and why too much Christian art has become boring.

But here’s the irony: the conservative persona often defends the most artistically viable ideas. Oh, they may not be controversial and hence, they may not be as cool, but isn’t liberty the ultimate artistic value? Aren’t honor and perseverance and the quest for the truth all perfect subjects for art? Does no one sense the irony that since the 1960s, popular art, from Warhol to the Sex Pistols and everyone in-between, railed against centralized power, yet cheer it on when it grows right in front of their face? Meanwhile, the very values they should applaud – intellectual diversity, freedom and being true to oneself – are scoffed at every time talk radio becomes the subject of debate. Art galleries, recording studios and movie sets are full of the very people who thrive in a free society and the virtues that make it work, yet crave this version of “coolness” even though it will ultimately imprison the minds and property of many.

On occasion, some conservative art gets through. I am always struck by the deep themes of honor, faithfulness and republicanism that drive Gladiator. Maximus isn’t cool because he knows it all; he’s cool because he’s strong, yet humble. Gran Torino also thrives on deeply conservative themes. Service to nation, economic and urban diversity, personal responsibility and sacrifice all play critical roles to the film. Both films are art that don’t require gratuitous sex or anti-establishment sentiment to be cool. Where are the artists, the politicians, and the thinkers that are every bit as cool as the current president? Or does he have the monopoly?

I accept the reality that in 8th grade we like the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Do we do the same as voters? I’m continually struck by the incongruence between the values of Obama’s voters, and his own values. How many would claim to support such reckless spending on credit, to the tune of trillions of dollars? How many would encourage him to increase the taxes of their employers and to discourage private charity? How many appreciate the copious examples of double-speak, with plenty of examples to be found here. Is he so cool to transcend all of that? I guess so…for now. But in the long run, isn't it better that the most liberating and proven ideas win the day, not the coolest candidate?

Corbusier comments: For a good dose of 'liberating and proven ideas' that win the day, I suggest taking the time to read a superb lecture given by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute. Murray's pioneering sociological research on education, the welfare state and human accomplishment offers insights that are quite disturbing to many of those consumed by leftist assumptions even as it describes society far more realistically. While his speech is generally directed at America's elites needing to rediscover the roots of American exceptionalism, he points to our contemporary elite class being more preoccupied in seeming cool and posing as Europeans rather than reexaming fundamental ideas that we inherit from a long and rich historical tradition. The socialist political experiments of the twentieth century seem to inspire many of our elites, since they entertain notions of remaking humanity and recalibrating natural social inequalities. Yet it's a fundamentally adolescent conceit as Murray remarks:

The twentieth century was a very strange century, riddled from beginning to end with toxic political movements and nutty ideas. For some years a metaphor has been stuck in my mind: the twentieth century was the adolescence of Homo sapiens. Nineteenth-century science, from Darwin to Freud, offered a series of body blows to ways of thinking about human beings and human lives that had prevailed since the dawn of civilization. Humans, just like adolescents, were deprived of some of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. And twentieth-century intellectuals reacted precisely the way that adolescents react when they think they have discovered Mom and Dad are hopelessly out of date. They think that the grown-ups are wrong about everything. In the case of twentieth-century intellectuals, it was as if they thought that if Darwin was right about evolution, then Aquinas is no longer worth reading; that if Freud was right about the unconscious mind, the Nicomachean Ethics had nothing to teach us.

The nice thing about adolescence is that it is temporary, and, when it passes, people discover that their parents were smarter than they thought. I think that may be happening with the advent of the new century, as postmodernist answers to solemn questions about human existence start to wear thin--we're growing out of adolescence. The kinds of scientific advances in understanding human nature are going to accelerate that process. All of us who deal in social policy will be thinking less like adolescents, entranced with the most titillating new idea, and thinking more like grown-ups.

As Relieveddebtor has written above, part of being cool is to reject the status quo and being completely confident in rejecting the wisdom of the past. Speaking as an architect, it's safe to say that the appeal of modern architecture is that it looks 'cool' compared to the 'stodgy' traditional styles. The problem with being cool is staying cool, since it is such an ephemeral thing. It is supremely difficult to achieve timelessness in the modern idiom, but relatively simple when following traditional design rules. Despite this temporary luster that supposedly 'cool' modern architecture brings, it exacts tremendous permanent costs by ruining our cityscapes and impoverishing urban life. There is a huge price to pay for adolescent experiments and the refusal to govern as a grown-up.

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan hints at these themes here. 

Further Reading: On nostalgia, value and artistic virtue

The following post is made up of three essays inspired by articles well worth reading. The first deals with nostalgia and how it influences our understanding of socio-economic (as well as architectural) problems. This is followed by a discussion on economic value and Walmart. Finally, I examine one of the central insights from the film Amadeus about the role of virtue in making art.

• Nostalgia is a powerful factor in the development of new ideas and policies. As long as people have memories, nostalgia is a perfectly natural response to an environment that's gradually become uncomfortable, even hostile. It provides us an escape from reality just as much as it presents an attractive vision for redeeming the future by ushering a return to a more virtuous time and place. Since we tend to remember things in fragments, there is a deliberate selectivity in what we want recall, which makes nostalgia an exercise in incomplete image-making. Even if the details of what we remember have never been forgotten, it doesn't ensure that we understand very well what really happened at the time.
  

When someone claims to be all-knowing about an event by saying "I was there", I remind them that doesn't make it any likelier that you had a complete understanding of that event, since so much of the surrounding context and other related events were not considered to help explain it all. Our perceptions make the events we witness 'feel' more real, but they often blind us from acknowledging a larger, more comprehensive reality (much like Plato's allegory of the cave). This is demonstrated by the notion that hindsight is 20/20, in that we would have acted differently if we had understood the context more competely at the time.

History is a discipline that applies the idea of hindsight and of making sense out of the interrelatedness of events. Nostalgia is a retreat from hindsight, a conjuring of irrational sentimentality of the past, detached from a complicated reality that it was. Policy-making, an endeavour that demands a considerable amount of rational analysis and exhaustive research past policies their effects, should therefore not resort to irrational nostalgic view of the past. The viability of socio-economic policy (or architectural theory, for that matter) cannot be tested in a laboratory, itself a space created to remove as much context as possible. Instead, context is everything when measuring the effectiveness of a policy or theory that will affect the countless people's lives and all the unmeasurable and unpredictable factors that influence their behavior.

Such thoughts came to my mind when reading Brink Lindsey's article on economic inequality since the Second World War. In a lengthy essay (30+ pages) Lindsey writes about 'nostalgianomics', the tendency of some economists to idealize a past era in order to serve as a model in making policies for the present. Using an isolated set of data showing a relatively low level of inequality from top to the lowest quintile the three decades following the war, left-wing economists like Paul Krugman proceed to call for a restoration of policies friendly to labor unions, punitive to corporate CEO's and high levels of government intervention in the economy. Since life was swell during Krugman's childhood in the 1950's, this should serve as a starting point in assessing what is missing now and what should be done to address it. This mode of thinking seems prevalent among those who have an unshakeable John Kenneth Galbraith-like faith in the prudent role of government in guiding the market economy towards stable prosperity and eventual social harmony.

Lindsey argues that this nostalgic view of the post-war period is misguided, as it fails to take into account social and geo-political context unique to that time. While economic inequality was less dramatic, the unequal treatment between blacks and whites, men and women, union and non-union, corporate cartels and entrepreneurs helped make it so. Cultural and social changes since the late 1960's have made it impossible to return the supposed glory days of the 1940's and 1950's. In addition, a world war that destroyed the industrial competitiveness of Europe and the eventual rise industrial competitiveness around the globe ensured that the good ol' days of highly-paid manufacturing jobs and a growing middle class were to due to expire from the start. Lindsey explains that the economic policies pursued in the 1970s and 1980s were not part of a plan to destroy the post-war era of prosperity and social harmony, but as a response to its inevitable exhaustion due to a changing reality beyond any one actor's control.

Beyond providing a broader perspective about the overall issue of inequality, Lindsey's article is valuable as a quick primer on the economic history of the last half-century. It illustrates the connection between cultural values and economic phenomena, and that the success of a policy is only as good as its reflection of the culture that surrounds it. As values change over time, it is only prudent that goals will have to be reassessed as well. Likewise, what was once considered a problem in the past might be an advantage today, so it is reasonable to pose new questions for new times rather than applying the same old questions for a different set of circumstances. Inequality today means something quite different in the world fifty years ago, especially when seen in the context of absolute wealth and standards of living. Pursuing an abstract social goal like equality risks ignoring more tangible needs of the day-to-day life of average people.

Although Lindsey's article considers the short-sightedness of nostalgia in economics, there is a correlation with recent architectural discourse (but of course!). For anyone who has followed architectural trends in the last 40 years, it is obvious that nostalgia for an idyllic past has been a major influence on building design. Whether it is in the historicist strand within architectural postmodernism or in much of the work of the New Urbanist movement, there is an overt desire to restore the look and feel of a distant time and place. This is usually done in complete detachment to the reality of the current context, as portrayed by the juxtaposition of highway with speeding cars next to a lifestyle center designed in a style that originated from a time when streets were designed for pedestrian traffic and horse-driven wagons.

Just as nostalgia is memory based unrelated fragments, much of the historicist design is only skin-deep--elaborate facades made of thin veneers of foam insulated stucco or masonry veneer supported by a modern framework of steel and concrete. Instead of being connected to larger contemporary notions of space, time and transparency, the historicist project tries to recreate a fragmented reality all to itself, as an escape from an overarching reality that is beyond anyone's control. Just as we are bound to choose memories that recall pleasant feelings, erecting pseudo-European renaissance villages in modern-day suburbia is our way of choosing a happy reality that is completely of our own imagining. It's not as if there's any public will to bring back monarchies, guilds, philosophical humanism and a triumphant church hierarchy and other major influences on our beloved architecture.

Or maybe that's the point. After all, nostalgia is manifest in post-modern or post-structuralist reaction. When language, symbols, images or meanings aren't what the seem to be, when truth is relative depending on one's perspective and power, when context is what you make of it, maybe the superficial application of historic styles is the most 'honest' way expressing the reality of our times.

• Another article that I came across interested me less about its subject- Walmart - than the valuable nugget of insight into a major problem that affects American society today. Charles Platt, a former editor at Wired magazine, went undercover to see what it was like to work at the world's largest retailer. Beyond his observations about the efficiency of the way Walmart operates, and the highly autonomous decision-making on the salesfloor, which are both well-known, I was more taken by his restating of an obvious fact that is often ignored when debating the pros and cons of Walmart (a personal note: I don't like to go to Walmart- the dull decor and mediocre selection turn me off ). Writing on the relative low wages paid to workers (which are still better than many other retail outfits), Platt briefly summarizes the concept of value in the determination of wages:
  

I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.

In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand...

Platt further explains how trying to go around this fact by means of legislating for a mandatory higher wage or by unionizing does not solve the problem of adding value to low-skill workers. Such methods are treating the symptom of low wages at the bottom strata of society fail to treat the actual illness- the low economic value of laborers. Platt reaches an uncomforting (but vitally important) conclusion:

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn't pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

As a product of decaying school districts and having family members that have spent much time and talent teaching in these districts, the answer to the question of how so many people have so little economic value becomes more clear. Unlike Platt, I don't think it matters whether the public school is free or not, but whether students learn anything of real economic value. Instead of learning math, science and writing, more and more the priority in the school curriculum has been placed on learning the right socio-political lessons (eg: drugs are bad, safe sex is good, intolerance is evil, saving the environment is everyone's duty, we are stronger through diversity, etc.). While such lessons can have value in public education in promoting civic-mindedness and social harmony, there is no reason that they should absorb so much time and drain so many resources from teaching skills that will manifest themselves in real economic value.

One fallacy that is often assumed when discussing ways to teach students marketable skills is the notion that it is more useful to emphasize specific skills and knowledge that have direct economic value than to stress basic skills and abstract knowledge. Skills are marketable in so far that there is a market for them at that point in time. In the past when technology and accompanying techniques were simpler, teaching skills towards a specific job made sense, especially in jobs where the way of doing things were not ever expected to change. Nowadays, the teaching of job skills becomes futile in the face of rapid technological change. Although there are certain timeless aspects to every profession, more and more jobs require an ability to learn new techniques quickly and to multi-task. Often these techniques are unforeseen a few years before. I personally find myself having to learn completely new software every year to design and render buildings, things never instructed to me in architecture school. I don't fault them for failing to give me marketable skills (which the knowledge of software indeed is, especially at the entry-level of the architecture job market) since I got from them something more abstract but even more important- how to think and the ability to learn quickly.

In the work world of today, it is evident to me that what is most important is to be trainable. This takes persistent effort on the part of teachers and parents in instilling in children basic skills in reading, writing, arithmetic and the ability to closely listen and communicate clearly. Most minimum wage workers I've interacted with seem to be able to barely accomplish the given task at hand and seem to have little aptitude or desire to take more responsibility. It is not because they lack the drive, but rather because they haven't been made trainable. In a world of specialization where one's worth depends on his or her level of specialization (and the large amounts of training required), those that are not trainable are at a major disadvantage. When one's worth is not butressed by union muscle or a legilated lack of price competition, what's left? Either one comes to terms that one must build worth by learning marketable skills quickly (through his acquired trainability) or that he is entitled to that worth by virtue of simply breathing.

It seems that for Platt, Walmart offers those with little economic value a chance to acquire marketable skills (managing a sales floor, tracking inventory, etc.). It isn't surprising, then, that pro-union interest groups who are invested in determining worth by entitlement are opposed to Walmart. There are too many unskilled people, whose problems are only compounded by lower-paid unskilled immigrant labor and a modern economy that demands high worker productivity. How free markets determines the economic value of workers won't be going away anytime soon. As long as work is perceived as an entitlement, I'm afraid our public schools will fail continue to deliver trainable workers. This can only make us all poorer.

• Finally, there was a short piece referring to one of my favorite films- Amadeus. Even though it first came out in 1984, this masterpiece by director Milos Foreman never tires from the dozens of times I've watched it, primarily because it offers one of the most compelling views into the mind of an artist. Especially near the end, when Mozart dictates his Requiem Mass to Salieri while on his deathbed, it is fascinating to watch the composer (brilliantly played by Tom Hulce) describe the piece's underlying musical structure while completely overwhelming his rival's comprehension. "Give me time..." yells Salieri, begging Mozart to slow down so that he can catch up in inscribing the notation, not realizing that this musical genius' life on earth was already running out of time. That's the nature of the creative mind, which has no respect for time and which tumultuously works through ideas and details on its own before ever putting them to paper.

The creative mind doesn't care if you got the right beliefs or practice good virtues either. Doug Tennapel argues that the film Amadeus shows that the most creative people are not necessarily the most virtuous, and that believing the contrary hobbles artistic accomplishment. He writes:

There are good ideas rolling around in Amadeus but none more central than the idea that being a good artist has nothing to do with virtue. Hitler appreciated the arts, Maxfield Parrish screwed his models, and the best writers are drunk, emotional narcissists. I hope I didn’t miss anyone. Anyways, being correct on any position does jack for one’s artistic ability.

Tennapel brings to our attention a common cliche when judging the merits of an artist-that whatever the strengths of the work, it is nullified by the artist's lack of character and his sociopathic tendencies. Similar to using ad-hominem attacks on someone with whom we don't agree politically, it seems that if we don't like someone's work, we justify it by reminding everyone that this person was a real creep or jerk. It avoids constructive debate and prevents us from the healthy practive of reevaluating our own assumptions. I see this quite a bit in architectural discourse, in which someone tries to discredit an entire architectural movement based on the leaders' personal flaws, whether they were too inebriated or too obsessive compulsive or just plain arrogant.

The reverse of is just as true-a work of art isn't necessarily good just because it comes from a good person. Having the right ideas doesn't prevent mediocre films, music or art pieces from being made. And one's political ideology doesn't guarantee works of beauty and inspiration. Believing otherwise seems to arise out of an innate desire for fairness, that the good is manifest in all that one considers worthy. Unfortunately, creative genius is not about what is just, as it often arises in moral vaccuums (eg. Facsist art & architecture, Soviet musical composers, etc.) By transcending moral rules that derive from cultural norms of the day and the imperfect men that make them, good art has the power to reveal a higher truth more abstract than right or wrong.

As soon as the making art becomes a moral exercise, artistic quality tends to suffer. Art fails to communicate convincingly the greater truth. Bad art makes it more difficult for us understand and receive this truth, which is why I get upset when some churches eschew art in general since it gets in the way of imparting 'the message'. I can particularly relate to Tennapel's opinion of contemporary Christian-inspired art:

While we have a rich history of fine Christian content in the past, it’s the exception today. The rule is for Christian art to be mediocre. We have a high opinion of our correct position but place form a little too far down the ladder from function. There is beauty and truth to be found in a story well told and a position well argued.

Sacred music is one art that has suffered in churches in reaction to a concerted movement to purify ritual and permit the clergy to provide more of their own interpretation with more talking. By dumbing down the quality of the music and putting up dull works of architecture devoid of art, it is hoped that spiritual revelation will be more accessible to the people. In my mind, spiritual revelation will be more narrowly understood, its power diminished by the lack of examples of how God is manifested in artisitic works of timeless beauty. I recommend the book Why Catholics Can't Sing by Thomas Day, which explores and criticizes the triumph of bad taste in contemporary Catholic worship.

As an individual who admires genuine creativity and the power of art, I think it is foolish for any institution to be so confident about itself that it chooses to denigrate art. Substance matters, but style plays the important role of making it palatable. A sophisticated aesthetic goes a long way into getting the point across as art has a way of communicating that arouses the senses as well as the deepest reaches of the mind. No amount of talking or writing can come close to such an effect.

It would also be wise to separate art from its agreement to accepted ideas. A moving statement can often be achieved by working outside the realm of institutional assumptions. Le Corbusier, an atheist (and evil incarnate to many others), was regardless a brilliant artist who gave the Catholic church one of its most inspired architectural legacies in the past century (Ronchamp chapel, La Tourette monastery). Many of his greatest built works emerged from the departure of his own copious doctrines. He allowed himself to reexamine his beliefs, to look for new directions and renew his works with added richness. It is a discipline from which all institutions who care about the strength of their message could benefit.

UPDATE-MORE FURTHER READING: The other night I was able to catch a C-Span interview with Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard. He discussed his recent article The Age of Irresponsibility, which describes the socio-cultural trends of the last few decades and how they have infected our current body politic with fiscal recklessness, corruption and and a lack of healthy bourgeois restraint. The article is not for the faint-of-heart, but Mr. Continetti skillfully describes the zeitgeist and what it portends for the future. The epic scope of the article belies the author's youth (he's only 27 years old), but his solid writing and his comfortable television presence foreshadows the emergence of an important public intellectual in the near future.

Econ 101: It’s the Allocation, Stupid

For those that are gracious enough to visit this site, you may have noticed that we try to combine a variety of disciplines: economics, architecture, religion, politics. Though it is true that we, like most bloggers, are better schooled in some areas than others (and consequently go into more depth in those areas), we do not neglect common sense when offering commentary on how it is we thing society is best ordered. I would like to offer such common sense as it seems (at best) a healthy minority of friends and colleagues refuse to investigate the realities of our current economic mess.

As I understand it, economics goes something like this: there’s a scarce amount of goods and services in the world, and we have to figure out how to allocate them. There are a number of ways of doing this, but two in particular have been tried most frequently, and one is in the process of being implemented in America as I write. The first way is to, as a society, do nothing. It’s often called the “free market” or “free enterprise.” It allows people, in a lawfully agreed-upon manner, to freely engage in trade. People are allowed to use their gifts, talents and skill to make products, offer services, transport goods, invent things, pretty much do anything that others place a value on. The market then acts not only as a place where goods are exchanged, but even more importantly, where information is exchanged. In trillions of daily voluntary exchanges, information on prices, demand, supply, production and everything related to the free exchange of goods is shared.

There are setbacks to this economic model. Good theology tells us people are sinful and imperfect, and in a free society, people’s innate sinfulness will spring up from time to time and cause harm. Most of the time, this sin, via the simple fact that sin will distort the free market and will thus corrupt the inherent value of goods and services, is localized and prosecuted, if it isn’t fixed within the market system itself. Greed is allowed to flourish in this system, as it does in all systems, and appropriate legislation and the rule of law are required to ensure the free market stays as free of corruption as possible. But greed, because it is spread so disparately across millions of producers and consumers, is rarely concentrated in a way that is finally detrimental.

The second model is one of centralized redistribution. The model is quite simple in theory and far older than the free market approach, but surprisingly complex in practice. The thinking says that we can morally take the property of individuals for the good of the collective, or use the excess of the wealthy to “balance” the poverty of the poor. In essence, through forced taxation (much like the medieval feudal system), citizens hand over their property to a central planner, who then “provides” for the needs of all. Various severities of this idea has been tried through the centuries. We seem, through the nationalization of several industries and by acquiring more debt than our GDP, to be slowly (or perhaps rapidly) adopting this point-of-view. Instead of feudal lords, the federal government is taking more and more of our property and centrally planning the economy.

There are setbacks to this model as well. History tells us that it is virtually impossible to administer this model because of its complexity, and because the voluntary information that flows so freely in a free economy is now choked off at several bottlenecks along the way. Information instead lies in the hands of a relative few people, people who cannot possibly have the adequate information to make informed decisions about the inherent value of goods and services. In other words, the proper allocation of resources becomes impossible, as an organic pricing system is replaced by an artificial pricing system. One small example might be the overabundance of size 12 shoes in the former Soviet Union, shoes that went unused. So where there wasn’t enough bread, there were far too many shoes that weren’t used. Information wasn’t able to be conveyed. There were simply too few ears for all the speakers.

There are serious moral ramifications of this collective model as well, too many to account for here. Suffice to say individual liberty and property are compromised. When allocation of resources is placed in the hands of a select group of people, rationing is the only possible result, as history tells us. So what inevitably happens is that the “class structure”, which are supposed to be eliminated through collectivization, is strictly enforced, as some get the scarce goods and some don’t, always for the good of the cause.

The difficulty with the free market is that it is that there is very little that is intuitive. It is not concrete. It really is the invisible hand. But we don’t like invisible hands. We like big concrete, centralized hands. We want someone else to produce X,Y, and Z, and we don’t want to leave that production to chance. What if someone doesn’t make it? What if they charge too much? What if I don’t like it when they do make it? Instead, we’d prefer to let a central planner tell us they’ll make it instead of leaving it to an unseen producer.

But with all its problems, one would have to be willing to live in ignorance not to be appreciative for all the free market does for us every day. It has solved, without anyone guiding it or directing it, the great problem of allocation. We have progressed as workers and are free to pursue those things we love to do precisely because we have allocated someone else to do the things we don’t want to do: grow food, ship food, build homes, build furniture, etc.. It wasn’t long ago that most folks spent vast amounts of their time in the drudgery of procuring food and shelter. Why don’t we anymore? We have let the free market decide how to allocate resources. At least we used to. Adopting the collective model will invariably lead to less efficient allocation of resources, bottlenecks, red tape and a terrible flow of information. At least, it always has.

Ideologues are Lazy

The Presidential Debate proved to be chock full of ominous warnings. I’ve written earlier about how I was bothered that a distinction of what is and isn’t a human/civil right with regards to healthcare wasn’t clearly articulated by either candidate. I was also bothered when Jim Lehrer asked: “Are you -- are you willing to acknowledge both of you that this financial crisis is going to affect the way you rule the country…” Hmmm, last time I checked, Presidents don’t rule…at least not under our constitution. At most, they govern, they lead, they act as a figurehead at times, and they are the Commander-in-Chief. But they simply don’t rule, especially on the domestic front. This idea of lords and kings ruling over us was what we revolted against in the first place. We instead chose a far messier process: democracy. (Or as purists prefer, a constitutional republic.)

So this question would have been the perfect time for either candidate to inform Mr. Lehrer and the American audience that, in fact, Presidents don’t rule and it wasn’t their intention to rule. Mr. Obama might have won me over if he had said, “Well, I appreciate the thought, Mr. Lehrer, but it’s not my intention to dictate by fiat my ideology on 300 million people. It’s rather my agenda to sign legislation that the houses of Congress write that is in line with my vision for this great nation.” Of course, neither candidate said any such thing. Maybe its because they were quietly hoping they wouldn’t have to do all the hard work of governing, compromising and getting dirty with details of actually running a mammoth and complex government. With Mr. Obama, I’m getting the sneaky suspicion that he is more and more happy to rule, and less inclined to govern.

In his first 3 weeks we have seen him arrogantly throw the gauntlet on the so-called “stimulus” bill, threatening that if it isn’t passed there will be hell to pay. And one executive order after another has imposed a decree on corporate executives pay, among other things. Then there’s the “Rule as I say, not as I do” precedent where President Obama has ignored his own promises to refrain from hiring D.C. insiders and carrying about with business-as-usual pork spending. I’m not in the least surprised that Mr. Obama has carried on with a very typically liberal agenda, even as he promised change, even change from other liberals, like Hilary Clinton. (A great breakdown of this can be found here.)

And I’m not surprised for one reason: I always assumed that folks as ideologically driven as Mr. Obama were not tolerant of dissent, which to my mind, is a form of intellectual laziness. It’s not to say ideologies in and of themselves are bad. But Mr. Obama’s ideology is a simple one and a lazy one. His ideology is at best Keynes’ rejected idea of government spending, and at worst, a strong move towards socialism. According to the theory, government spending alone will stimulate an economy. Not only do I find this attitude foolhardy, I find it to be first-class daydreaming. Whereas markets take risk, this ideology hides behind false certainty, which is just another way of cutting off debate and refusing to engage in a diversity of ideas.

I have found few ideologues that can appreciate the inherent risk of the marketplace. Rather, they are intellectually lazy and push problems and solutions off on others. They often refuse to consider the unintended consequences of what might come, how government programs create terrible incentives, or that an honest solution might take more time and hard work than the phony solution of printing worthless paper. The solution to hand it over to someone else, especially a large seemingly beneficent government is far easier, even if fraught with peril in the long run.

And now that he’s not getting his way, he’s displaying signs of anger. That anger, that impatience that things aren’t getting done fast enough, that his nominations aren’t sailing through, that the pressures from foreign enemies are mounting hourly, are signs of his arrogance and his intellectual laziness. There is no evidence he has ever done the hard work of an intellectual. He has pontificated from time to time, but for the most part he has excelled at checkers. Presidential decisions are far more akin to chess. But ideologues don’t like chess. It’s too much work, too much scheming, too much preparation. It’s far easier to simply say “King me” and to rule. I have no doubt that’s exactly what he was expecting.

I remember a fascinating documentary about the rise of Nazism. One of the more striking details it revealed was the laziness of Hitler. You might think that a man as possessed as he was would have been a workaholic. But in fact, he often slept in until noon, watched movies, went for long walks with his dog, and routinely asked not to be bothered with work. Of course, there is no comparison to any American president with the evils of Hitler. My comparison is not one of morality, but one of temperament. An ideologue has no incentive to think critically, and that is precisely the problem with Mr. Obama. His mind is already made up, and that leads to pronounced intellectual weakness. For all of Bush’s faults (and he had many), a critic cannot honestly say Bush did not sacrifice his own ideology for the perceived good of the country. I humbly ask Mr. Obama to consider Mr. Bush's example.

Podcast #6

In Podcast #6, relieveddebtor and corbusier discuss what impact the stimulus bill will have on architecture, an appreciate of contextualization in architecture, the beauty of Thorncrown Chapel, and how some Bible verses can be used to glorify ourselves instead of God.

O'Neil Ford: The Search for an Authentic Modern Response

When my older brother was going to college in San Antonio, he would mention to me a particular architect that had designed much of the campus. During my visits, I found each of the buildings to be of distinctive modern design and the spaces between them intimate in scale and responsive to the steep site. My brother praised the quality of the architecture by this apparently celebrated designer, O'Neil Ford, and continues to insist to this day that it was one of the most beautiful environments he had ever lived in. I had never heard of this architect, and I would soon forget about him until a couple of years later, he had me visit a house that belonged to a family whose son he was tutoring. There was a particular crispness to the exterior sillhouette, fine detailing and an original palette of materials and finishes. Inside, the rooms were layed out along a hallway gallery, which functioned as an strong axial spine permitting uninterrupted views of a beautiful large garden beyond. Sure enough, this handsome home was an O'Neil Ford design, which thus piqued my curiosity about the man and his buildings that would endear to my continuing interest in how local and and global influences could interact in a meaningful way.

Other than from admiring references mentioned by the older professors at school, it would be only until recently that I decided to become more deeply acquainted with the Texas master's work. Up to that point it was well known that he was among the most influential architects in Texas, responsible for establishing an emerging local Modernist tradition. His own firm survives under the name Ford, Powell & Carson, which still has a strong reputation in the state, even as it has relinquished trend-setting status long ago. Beyond being exponents of modern design, I became familiar with the firm's work in historic preservation upon working with their exquisite working drawings in trying to reconstruct details for a 19th-century courthouse in East Texas. At the time I had considered this as just another project specialty that countless other large firms had taken up as the market for architectural preservation was expanding. It did not occur to me that preservation was of special significance to the founder O'Neil Ford himself in his attempts in creating an authentically Texan modern architecture.

One of the most glaring realizations upon trying to get to know the state's most cherished architect was how little was written about him. If it were not for a valuable retrospect written by David Dillon, a widely read local architecture critic and scholar, even less would be known about Ford. He designed hundreds of projects throughout the state from the 1920s all the way to the 1970s, with a client roster that would include Texas' most iconic corporate pioneers in its trademark industries of oil, retail and microchips. He would lecture and teach at the most celebrated architecture schools, and would even serve on arts commissions under president Lyndon Johnson. San Antonio's skyline would be indistiguishable without its 750 foot tall Tower of the Americas, which Ford designed as part of the 1968 World's Fair. Great swaths of historic building fabric that help make San Antonio the most picturesque city in the state were preserved by Ford's important advocacy. He introduced innovative structural systems to buildings, exploring the possibilities of thin-shell concrete and paraboloid roofs for industrial and civic buildings, including some of the most elegant laboratories for Texas Instruments.

Beyond these notable accomplishments is the extent of Ford's influence on younger designers that would later shape the contemporary architectural landscape unique to Texas. The names of the interns that came and went at Ford's San Antonio studio serves as veritable "Who's who" of founders of major firms, deans at the major achitecture schools and signature local architects who would make their mark designing exquisite home for the moneyed local elite. Despite never having gone to architecture school, much less to college, he cultivated deep links with art and design professors at universities throughout the state and felt quite at home in a cultural salon setting with his artist friends. The almost bohemian way in which young designers would show up at his doorstep and agree to work for little to no wage in exchange for a small room near the studio eerily parallels the cult-like encampment at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin compound in Arizona. Like Wright, Ford championed the importance of incorporating traditional crafts in his spaces, especially in the houses he designed, enlisting his brother, a master carver and sculptor, to create custom doors, screens, and louvered grates. Just as Wright expounded at length on the nature of materials and proper ways to use them, Ford demonstrated similar sensitivity, taking into account the climate, local availability and vernacular tradition. He detested the superficial treatment of the wall, joking that most brick veneer walls were "brick venereal." He would eventually develop his own vocabulary of materials that would later come to exemplify Modernism in Central Texas: massive masonry walls, either of stone or of pink brick, metal standing seam roofs with severely thin edges at the eave, floor to ceiling-glass, deep porches and simplified volumes that echo the pioneer sheds of the first settlements in the region.

Even as Ford helped usher a modern architectural idiom for Texas, he was a deeply involved in the preservation of its heritage. One of his earliest major undertakings was in the revitalization of the historic neighborhood of La Villita in downtown San Antonio during a time when the practice of historic preservation was unheard of. This ecclectic agglomeration of blocks built by Mexican and European settlers in throughout the 19th century just along the south bank of the San Antonio river was re-adapted into an arts and crafts colony and complements the rustic charm of the city's main tourist attraction, the Riverwalk. In contrast to other preservation projects at the time (late 1930s) that tended to make living museums out of entire districts by isolating them from the surround contemporary economic and cultural life (eg. Williamsburg), La Villita was to be integrated into San Antonio's cutlural life and produce artifacts that would help define the city's identity. There was little desire to recreate the look and feel of a place a specific point in time. Instead, the district would serve as an architectural panorama of the passing of time, emphasizing the evolving spirit of the diverse inhabitants and their affect on the built fabric. Ford's guiding reason for the district's redevelopment was "not archaeological-but rather attempt to preserve the spirit of architecture that is Texan".

The lesson to be drawn from Ford's achievements is in the value of acknowledging tradition as we try to create new forms for our own time. In undermining the widely accepted narrative of the Modernist movement's categoric rejection of historical reference and vernacular tradition, Ford, along with other contemporary 'critical regionalists' ( such as Alvar Aalto of Finland, one of Ford's personal favorites) used these influences as the foundation on which to design a new tradition. They did not romantically regard themselves as rebels breaking with tradition but rather as conservators who also innovated to fit the contemporary need of their times. A 'softening' of the hard straight lines and stark materials that exemplified the International Style was often the result from designers like O'Neil Ford, which endowed their works with humanity, warmth and a certain spirit that harmonizes with the surrounding landscape and the accumulation of the local culture upon it.

In surveying the buildings of O'Neil Ford, there is an emphatic response to question of who and where the inhabitants of a structure are and how they are different from everyone else. One can call this 'a sense of place' or 'authenticity', but this quality about his buildings only magnifies one of the central failings of much of Modernist movement: the ignoral of the environment in all of its cultural dimensions, the diversity in the particularities of people, its failure to belong to a place. When such links to place are missing, a Modernist building's answers to who is 'anyone' and where is 'anywhere'. This lends a certain self-centeredness to a building and often becomes regarded by a community as an offense to a harmonious environment it desires. Instead of embodying a genuine contemporary identity to a place, many Modern buildings appear to impose a threatening bland universality and reductionism. The same criticism applies to the ubiquitous practice of constructing in the mode of contrived historicism, which is just as guilty in imposing a cultural identity that is just as foreign and dishonest about the spirit of a place as any Modernist counterpart. Literally imitating another place and time (like many a New Urbanist suburban development) has the uneasy effect of answering the question of who (somebody else) and where (somewhere else).

In either the modernist or historicist mode, there seems to be an unfortunately tragic sense of cultural confidence. We are either anybody or we are somebody else, anywhere or and somewhere else, but never are we confident enough to reflect who we really are. An architecture that celebrates place and demonstrates a connection to its passage of time is therefore an affirmative act that will ensure the survival of a people's identity in the future. O'Neil Ford, along with his other global contemporaries trying to define a regional response to Moderism, serves as a model towards generating authentic solutions to modern problems that effectively preserves an authentic identity and spirit in the face of changing times. The practice of historic preservation and adaptive reuse is also signicant in achieving a cultural confidence through time, since one should never forget who they are and where they have been. Far from being a reactionary and defensive response to progressive calls for 'change' the appreciation of tradition as it has evolved in time encourages originality, spirituality and an overall depth that is sorely lacking in much our modern world.

Self-Help Christianity: Why Philippians 4:13 is So Popular

In many ways, religion exists in America as marketplace. We have the freedom to pick and choose what we like about it, and what we don't, and we shop and buy accordingly. Its moralism is, one might argue, deeply stained into the fabric, the culture of America, and this is most apparent by what a "religious" country America is. America is far from morally perfect, but it can be a convincing argument that much of America is a morally positive place with a strong religious component. But, without borrowing from pietist or legalist strains, and without trying to ride too proudly on my high horse, I wonder how deeply that religion runs. It often just feels like a superficial clothing to an otherwise secular body, a moral garment to a wordly wardrobe.

One of the quickest ways to know which religious currents are making waves is to tally the most popular Bible verses. A few years ago, it was likely the prayer of Jabez, the promise that God answers prayer, especially materially-driven prayers. Perhaps the most popular today, and by popular I mean in a true "pop" sense, is Philippians 4:13: "I can do all things in him who strengthens me." "Him" refers to Christ and is often translated that way, even though Paul doesn't mention Christ by name in the verse. I don't know where I hear or see this verse, it just seems to be everywhere. And even if someone doesn't volunteer it as a favorite, I'm quite confident if I quoted it, many would nod and say, "Oh yes, I like that one." I mean who wouldn't like it? We all want to think we can do anything, even if most of the time we do next to nothing.

I was particularly struck by the popularity of this verse when I noticed it in bold white letters across the black backdrop of glare reducing strip as seen on the face of Florida Gator quarterback Tim Tebow. The guy has been roundly praised by the media and I have no sour grapes over his success. He's a public Christian, even if perhaps a different strain from me, and he deserves all the recognition he gets. But there it was, in several high profile games: "Phil. 4:13". (He used John 3:16 for the National Championship game.) Either he has a friend named Phil whose April 13th birth or death he was commemorating, or he was telling the world of his Samson-like source of strength. No doubt his faith, and this verse, was an inspiration for him, a reminder that he is never alone, that Christ does truly empower us in our daily lives to overcome challenges and press on towards the goal, in the words of Paul.

But there is something that irks me about this verse being so popular. It's starting to feel a whole lot like inspirational, feel good, lollypop, band-aid Christianity. It's so attractive because it's so self-empowering. We've even managed to make our favorite Bible verses ultimately about us, and about achieving. Has our need for success and material validation gotten to the point where we just select those verses that give us the power to carry on in our weary suburban lives? Where is the cross? Where is the sacrifice? And what is it we're supposed to be achieving, anyway? I have no problem with achieving excellence in life and being inspired by faith. I do think that, perfectionism aside, God calls us to excel, to maximize our talents, weather on the football field, in the marketplace, or as a parent. "Chariots of Fire" demonstrates this better than I can say it. But I also want to be honest to scripture, and I can't say that our use of Philippians 4:13 as self-help empowerment is exactly what Paul had in mind.

Paul was writing to a church in conflict, as many of them were. He was encouraging the Philippians to be of one mind, which in itself is an act of sacrifice. Jesus clearly told his disciples to carry their own cross, not exactly what we would call self-help. Indeed, the common refrain of biblical repentance, of changing direction, of living a life of service worthy of God, speaks not of self-aggradizement, but of self-sacrifice, so that one's true call might be revealed. I'm not trying to be preachy. I am trying to say that Christians, if we are to have relevance in an already narcissistic age, would do well to model how we find meaning in service, in losing ourselves to some degree rather than empowerment. "I can do all things"? Great. Just don't forget "all things" includes visiting the dying in isolation as well as running the 40 in under 5 seconds.

I suppose I can't complain that millions of people are exposed to what is a wonderful verse of scripture. And I shouldn't complain that many thousands may have been curious enough to actually dust off their Bible to see what Phil 4:13 had to say, even if they hadn't been to church in years. And, again, I won't fault Tim Tebow for being public with his faith. But I think it's worth asking if faith is really worth much if all it is a motivation to succeed. It's great if we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us if we really intend to do anything and everything, from winning a football game to speaking the truth to risking humiliation if and when the time comes. But if all things really only means material success, it is making Philippians 4:13 a terrible idol, and an unwilling companion to our sin.

Architects in a Downturn- Is it time to make buildings that matter?

If it is not obvious to most people already, there is no doubt: the current economic recession has had devastating consequences to the building trades, in particular architects. As any of my colleagues can tell you, our profession is very sensitive to economic cycles, and a feeling of vulnerability accompanies us throughout our careers. Being laid off multiple times is not unusual (sometimes it's seen as a right of passage) and is one of the reasons people leave the practice of architecture in droves in favor of something more economically immune and higher-paying. Once an economic recovery is underway, firms suddenly realize that the pool of employable talent is remarkably thin, as the previous downturn harvested some of the best and brightest towards other more productive endeavours. In a perverse way, part of one's advancement in the profession is therefore to simply stick it out by working one's way up the ladder as vacancies are left unfilled.

The mood in firms right now is predictably quite different from just a couple of years ago. Back then, workers at all levels would suddenly dissappear out of the blue as a result of taking job offers at rival firms that offered a considerable pay raise. There would be new hires starting at the office each week, and new cubicles were being built into every nook and cranny to accomodate them. It felt cramped, a bit noisy and the hours were long. Now many desks are empty, it's much quieter and the hours are much shorter (or it could simply be the winter). Older architects will reminisce about their experience in previous downturns, often making it seem that it was a lot harder back then. Jobs would be so scarce that workers would migrate from one firm to the next as soon as word spread that a firm landed a major project.

There's no telling whether the current recession will be as bad, but times like these encourage some of us to be a bit more reflective about what it is we are trying to do. Without all the backlog of work to consume our schedule and sometimes our judgment, there is time to reassess priorities and restore quality in the work that luckily remains. Most typical businesses respond in this way, but overall, a good year is simply when revenues are high, while a bad year is the opposite. For many architects this quantitative view pales to their concern for quality. Success is seen differently by many of us, who would rather be proud of a beautiful project done during a time of scarcity than collecting year-end bonuses for voluminous yet mediocre work delivered during times of plenty.

Staying true to one's convictions in the face of financial hardship is a perennial romantic ideal among 'serious' architects, even as it is a major cause of why the practice of architecture is comparitively unprofitable (Rand's The Fountainhead, anyone?). The more designer-type architect is often a less than rational economic entity, who perversely revels in expending valuable talent, productivity and time in exchange for the slimmer than slimmest chance of being noticed. It is during economic downturns that firms participate in architectural competitions, since they are a means of keeping busy and honing one's skill once the seemingly endless project stream runs dry. While they promise to launch the career and reputation of the lucky winning firm, for everybody else it is large monetary loss despite the small consolation of having attractive glossy renderings handy for a variety of marketing materials.

As with any person caught in bleak situations, some architects have taken it upon themselves to make lemonade out of lemons. They console themselves to the belief that architectural output improves in quality in inverse relation to the decline in the overall economic climate. When times are going well and private money is flowing, the thinking goes, there is a temptation to substitute decadence and showy effects for thoughtfulness and social responsibility. Once the money becomes scarce and government funded projects are the only game in town, there is an assumption that the resulting buildings will be endowed with more noble virtues, since governments only build for those in most need that were otherwise not in the interest of the 'greedy' private sector.

What follows is a widely embraced conceit that designing for noble or charitable ends will more likely result in a higher level of design. Such is the overall tone of a few articles I've come across recently in architecture websites and professional newsletters. Nicolai Ouroussoff, an architecture critic at the New York Times, basically starts and concludes his piece with the assumption I just described:

...But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich, like private jets and spa treatments...

Still, if the recession doesn’t kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That’s my dream anyway.

It is implied that high-budget private commissions unleash the baser instincts from high profile architects, while injections of government policy and its attendant largesse will naturally bring out our more noble, and thus better, selves. Government is seen in this context to be the great arbiter of what 'matters', since private investors with the free-market system puts too low a price tag (which translates into mattering little) on things that are highly valuable (in a cultural and political sense) to the community at large. Government involvement in the construction businesses is lauded by many architects, since it allows for an ideal harmony between one's professional duty and his desire to insert himself in helping solve the supposed social or environmental problems.

Not enough of this was happening in during the recent global real-estate bubble, apperently. At at time when architecture firms around the world were swimming in private cash flows and freer than any prior time to push the envelope, the profession's leading lights failed to deliver. Or so it would seem from a blog post's comment about the quality of architecture of the first decade of the 21st century:

Take this article from New York Magazine on the architecture of the last building boom. None of it is great. I don't think any of it is good. Most of it is mediocre. A lot of it is awful. Architects not only got drunk on the methylated spirits of the last building boom, they went blind as a result. As a historian I seem virtually nothing of worth in this decade. Recently I had to give a lecture on the architecture of network society and I found plenty of it by OMA, MVRDV, Herzog and de de Meuron, FOA, and others. Unfortunately all of it was from the last century. Am I getting old? I ask my younger friends and they can't identify anything good new either. CCTV? That is a sad joke, an example of a once great architect doing a lousy imitation of Peter Eisenman for an evil client. I can't take it seriously. Good thing Corb never worked for Mussolini. You can only imagine what he would have done. Overexposed and uninteresting, I predict CCTV will sink like a rock. Gehry hasn't made a single good building since Bilbao, although he has built some unbelievably awful structures at MIT and on the West Side Highway. Herzog and de Meuron are boring beyond belief. I guess whatever talent worked for them in the 1990s went its own way. It's bad out there.

While I will admit that I have become over time more and more bored by the current architectural output that graces the magazines, I don't think it's fair to judge their merit until time and critical distance have had a chance to inflate (or deflate) their significance. The author does seem to suggest that the past decade's building boom seems to have clouded the judgment of these highly-regarded designers. Almost all of the architects mentioned above experienced tremendous growth in the number of staff, the variety of building types and services offered in the last ten years. Once they had won praise for a singular project (often realized during times of financial struggle within the firm) that would eternally cement their worldwide reputation for the rest of their career, these top designers aggressively tried to grow their practice to enable them to tackle even more opportunities that were previously closed to them. Their studio-like practice soon became a business, catering to an endless train of foreign and institutional clients that would require sustaining large teams of designers and builders. This development, however, often risked diluting what made the firm distinctive in the first place.

Had the leaders of such reputable firms refused to grow in this manner and instead focused exclusively on government or institutional projects, which are often awarded by competitions, they would no doubt be much smaller. Fewer architects would be employed by them and with it fewer young minds being offered the opportunity to learn from masters and participate in sophisticated design practices. Granted, firms shouldn't exist simply to provide jobs to those who want one. Rather they exist as a manifestation of the designer's core values. It's just that often this admirable loyalty to core values makes pursuing architecture career much less accessible for many people. It is not a coincidence that countries in which the state is a major client coupled with a comparatively weak private sector (eg. France, Spain, Germany, Japan, Finland, etc.) are home to some of the world's most celebrated firms, which not known for their volume of work but for their discipline in taking the time to do quality work. They are also places where many bright young people who prepared themselves for an architecture career face very limited opportunities. The few who are fortunate to practice do so with the likelihood of meager financial gain and fragile job stability. The rest go to the U.S or the U.K. to work for corporate firms that will sponsor their visas.

With private commissions drying up and in the spirit of times we live in, many architects are looking forward to a sort of government bailout for themselves. As part of his strategy to stimulate a weak economy, the incoming President Obama proposes massive infrastructure spending, which includes increasing efficiencies in government buildings by making them greener and in promoting alternative energy sources. By way of either massive deficit spending or by printing more money (inflation), many architects are elated that federal money will be headed their way not only to stabilize their shrinking practices, butalso to put their talents to more virtuous uses. They recall fondly of the Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, in particular make-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and how it yielded elegant federal buildings, stunning infrastructure projects (Grand Coulee Dam and TVA) and beloved monuments. While the New Deal policies of the Great Depresssion did help foster memborable works of architecture, the historical record shows that it failed in reducing permanent unemployment and had a negative effect on economic growth. The more recent example of Japan during its "Lost Decade" of the 1990s is evidence that a massive program of public works projects throughout the decade delayed its economic recovery for more than ten years. Sure such Japanese luminaries like Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban and Arata Isozaki were able to benefit and create some spectacular institutional buildings with all the government largesse available to them, but at great cost to the overall dynamism of the Japanese economy.

The main reason major public works campaigns fail to generate a meaningful stimulative effect is that they fail to allocate resources and capital efficiently. By taking capital away from the more efficient and accountable private sector (tax collections) and transfering to the most inefficient and unaccountable player in our economy (the government), productivity declines and with it economic growth. The free market is the most efficient way to choose winners and losers, between those that fulfill real needs and others that don't, in spite of other important, yet uneconomic, values. A market interfered heavily by the government yields the opposite result, since government, blinded by political gain and philosophical idealism, chooses winners that should often be the losers (Big Three auto bailout, anyone?). Thus our national competitiveness is futher compromised and growth languishes from the declining productivity of enterprises that would not survive without the state propping them up.

But who said that architects behave as homo economicus? For many among us, the quality of the built environment is of paramount importance and is always in need of an enlightened architectural response. It transcends concerns about monetary policy, pricing mechanisms, market values, interest rates--things that, though difficult to understand, tend to make the world go round. There is an admirable moralism that drives the agenda of many architects which unfortunately isolates them from a healthy curiosity in the inner workings of systems that govern how money moves around and how goods and services are exchanged. It's the reason why many of the prescriptions we give to solve urban problems tend to fail, favoring the directness of inefficient subsidies over the indirect yet more bountiful result of long-term profitability. It is also the reason why many architects tend to favor top-down solutions, that, while enabling the construction of what they would prefer, has the effect of making the practice a studio (which are economically difficult to sustain) instead of a business (which are structured to be economically viable-or at least try to be).

Just as the political winds maybe shifting in the midst this deep recession, leaders in the architectural profession will have to decide what policies they want and how to structure their firms accordingly. Should we continue to make the practice of architecture profitable and viable way for many people to have fulfilling careers and answering to real economic needs, or should we emulate the studio model that relies on government patronage, closed to only the most elitely talented and self-sacrificing individuals who often deliver delightful buildings no economic value? Architecture salaries grew at the fastest rate in the last decade due to the real-estate bubble. Is this trend worth abandoning so that we can make buildings for the "greater good" even as it impoverishes us?

UPDATE: Further reinforcing my argument that economic downturns encourage designers, rather than the opposite, take a look at this article in the New York Times.

Freedom, The French Revolution, and Christmas

There are times when all one can do is remark at the rareness of freedom. For so long I have taken it for granted. But the more history I read, the more impressed I am with the American experiment, its founders, and most of all, its success. Freedom actually worked here, even while it has failed so often amid power grabs, ego and corruption. The basic statements worded so well by Jefferson, that men have certain inalienable rights, should never be assumed, as long as there is any chance someone can gain at someone else's expense. I feel quite fortunate that I have been able to take such freedom for granted, and freely experience, as much as I've been willing to venture, the fullness humanity has to offer.

But, like many others, I pause with concern about the future. Is the experiment coming to an end, slowly but surely? Or is that just the thought of your average paranoid conservative, worried what the next four years might bring? A few simple facts can no longer be ignored: our government is committed to spending more money than the nation is even worth, a staggering, astounding figure measured with twelve or thirteen zeros. There seems to be no stopping the idea that healthcare and education are "rights", and therefore moral entitlements to all Americans, a stark reality for any believer in limited government. Even those who are supposed to defend limited government have completely caught bailout fever, an embarrassment to say the least.

This is how it happens, I suppose. Freedom is lost, a little at a time. I guess it beats the alternative. I have only recently begun to study the French Revolution, a revolution I ignorantly always assumed to be similar revolution to America's, just having gone a little astray. While I've studied the Revolution in the past, I wasn't clear at how brutal, and absolutely Stalinist-like it really was. In the name of liberty 200,000 were imprisoned, about 40,000 were guillotined, the Church was basically destroyed for years, and an innocent aristocracy was gutted and murdered for having wealth. Atheism or agnosticism ruled in the intellectual classes and journals competed as to who could call for the more radical measures against royalty and the bourgeoisie.

Like Stalinism, many of the leaders of the Revolution favored a drastic redistribution of wealth as a means to solving inequality. The rich were seen to be the root cause of poverty and misery, and doing away with the rich was the only real solution offered to end such inequality. It is true that most Americans would think hereditary monarchies as untenable, but we would surely find mass murder in the name of liberty even more appalling.

In the long run, The French Revolution was a commitment to the material life as much as anything else. The Church was seen as the greatest intellectual and moral threat to the Revolution, and the vast majority of priests refused to go along with the tenets of the Revolution. They rightly saw that the attempt to create a materially equal society with an empty humanist morality was not only impossible, but also immoral. As the Revolution came to a pitiful end, it should have been apparent for all to see how little the material life offered, and indeed, how it ultimately always leads to envy, jealousy, and a society mitigated by skewed property valuations. When property is all there is in this world, it becomes a very prized commodity.

As I grow and acquire, I see more clearly that the material life has little to recommend it. That's not to say the acquiring of property is in and of itself a bad thing. That is how we provide for ourselves and families. But the material world is in a constant state of disrepair and disintegration. It takes time and labor just t keep up with the curve, to keep up with ever-changing styles, to fix what breaks, to solve persistent problems. Worse, it is a distraction, like a mistress that is never satisfied, that always needs more attention. Even our bodies are on a collision course with disease and death, health being a gift for a prescribed amount of time. I'm not convinced that a life seeking material gain only, either in governing philosophy or in personal accumulation, is paved with anything but trouble.

That brings me to Christmas, the most materialistic time of year for too many, myself included. Amid the failures of the material life come this most bizarre of promises, that a completely humble child born in the lowest possible circumstances offers us real hope. Not only do we get a vision of a life that is at peace despite our material bondage, we get a vision of joy that stems from a commitment to that child. There comes a point when the material world has failed us for the last time, and we ask what it is that we really want, where our hope really lies, and whether our future is as bright as it once looked. I can only speak for myself when I say that I am relieved to have an alternative vision for what life can be, permission to not be discouraged when the material life fails. It's not to say there aren't plenty of things to be perturbed about. Only that this little baby born so long ago offers us a different vision, and it's really a vision that offers the only legitimate freedom we'll find in this material world.

KRob 08- The changing landscape of architectural drawing

In the last few years, I've tried to bring forth timely topics that currently affect the architectural profession. From writing about sustainability and urbanism, to technological and market trends changing the practice, it is apparent that there is a cornucopia of issues young designers can engage in. Certain issues have a particular appeal to young professionals because they offer a mission worth pursuing--making the world a better place by pushing more environmentally-friendly construction, or helping to making cities more healthy and enjoyable and improving society as a result. Other issues with a more technical emphasis, such as experimenting with computers and other technologies, appeal to those who want to expand the definition of what it is to be an architect the twenty-first century. There are countless organizations that address all these interests and that offer ways for like-minded professionals to share ideas with each other as well as to coordinate with communities from the local to federal levels.

With all these choices and all of the activities that can take an architect's meager amount of extra time, it is all too easy to forget an essential component that should inform what architects do over any other building-related profession: visceral beauty. Certainly beauty is always on our minds when we work, but rarely do we think about it on its own, detached from function, technical logic, budgets or what the client has specifically requested. Remove an object from the context that helped make it, and what meaning or significance is left? Does the object express intangible qualities that are unique to the individual that created it?

These are important questions we should always consider, even if they are too abstract for people who would rather make a 'real' difference. That is why I have been fortunate to be involved during the last few years in the longest running architectural drawing competition-the KRob. The Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition poses precisely these questions and stimulates a rich discussion on why a drawing moves us, and the infinite number of thoughtful and beautiful ways we communicate ideas graphically. Many of us who have gone through schools are indeed mindful of this, but it always was seen as supporting larger architectural idea, not as a thing of value in and of itself. The irony is made clear when the invited jurors every year try to remind themselves what the basis of the judging will be, as it is quite different from the typical architecture competition in which winners are judged by how well they respond to a given program and not to the beauty of the drawings (though it helps).

The 320 entries submitted this year really brought into focus more clearly than ever how the definition of the architectural drawing has expanded and changed. The winners of the hand-drawn categories recall the original and most intuitive method of delineation, while those of the digital-hybrid media categories demonstrate how the computer has allowed drawings to transcend the two-dimensional plane and incorporate multiple layers of information and detail. Although technique was vital in judging entries, what put some over others was in what it had to say (...or what it was trying have us guess what it way trying to say). Although it may not surprise those who did go to architecture school, the submissions from students was overall a bit stronger than the professionals. Given the amount of time and the encouragement by their teachers to experiment and explore, their work often outshined the professionals who are pressed for time and pressured by commercial obligations to please clients.

This was the first year that KRob accepted international entries. Jungsoo Kim of South Korea won the ignaugural International prize with his series of renderings depicting an enormous fissure breaking open the ground plane to reveal an oversized man-made canyon. Some of the perspectives inside the fissure remind me of the parting of the red sea in the film "The Ten Commandments" only with more haze and and softer light. If you look at the top left corner of the drawing there is a temple complex at the end of the fissure's axis, indicating the space's function as a part of a spiritual procession. The earth is rendered powerfully here, and reminds us of our inevitable becoming a part of it upon our deaths. Glowing lights beaming out of from the surface add a magical quality to the drawing's overall expression.

In the hand-drawing category, the jurors were impressed by the winning professional entry by Scott Tulay which interprets the phenomena of light, shade and structure. The blue, black and grey charcoal palette helped emphasize the contrast light and mass, while the composition of intersecting beams and framing elements abstracted the reality of the interior of a barn or warehouse into a rich yet haunting spatial pattern. Tulay's drawing does recall in my mind the Cubist paintings of the early twentieth century, which attempted to reveal a more abstract and universal reality.

This was quite different from the winner of the hand-drawing student category. Matthew Sander's axonometric drawing of a mechanical tower along with an illustration of a shed in successive phases of construction (and a dog house!) won over the jury partly due to its mystery. The drawing selectively cuts sections of various elements, revealing the inner workings of the tower, the depth of the ground below and repeats one building over and over to give the drawing a sense of time in space. The smeared graphite sprinkled over the page (likely the result of dirty parallel bar wheels) is evidence of Mr. Sander's patient yet positively 'fussy' attempt put seemingly disparate elements into a whole. What the relationship was between the sheds and the tower (and that dog!) spurred lengthy debate , and made the drawing and example of how the story or its ambiguous meanings gave it special meaning beyond its common technique.

The strength in which a drawing tells a story also characterizes the winner of the digital-hybrid prize in the professional category. While the technical mastery of the drawing is evident, Aleksander Novak-Zemplinski's depiction of Los Angeles in a distant and greener future demonstrates the power a drawing has in transporting us into another believable reality. There is a multiplicity of scales, a high level of detail and a dramatic use of color and atmosphere. The futuristic blimps, the hive-like vegetated hillsides of densely packed dwellings and the buzzing human activity at the landing strips are just a few of many different elements that encourages the viewer to immerse themselves in another reality. Influences from science-fiction movies are obvious, and it turns out that the drawing is part of a visulization for a film project. It reminds us that one of the major objectives of an architectural rendering is not necessarily to depict a future building as realistically as possible in its given context, but rather to offer a glimpse of a more inspiring reality once the building is fully realized.

And yet, the winner of the best digital-hybrid drawing in the student category departs from visualisations of alternate realities to something altogether more abstract. Brandon Shigeta's winning entry is a handsome concept diagram that describes the transformation of an existing pattern of urban blocks. A greyscale aerial view of a portion of a city is overlayed with colors and graphic elements to communicate the idea of a park space that serves as buffer between two areas of the city. The drawing's composition of fading pixels, arrows and chaotic curvilinear lines gives it an aspect of motion and highlights the notion that the design cities are guided by many unseen though evident forces. They culminate at the green space, which in turn explodes outward in a perpendicular direction. Very little traditional drawing or figurative illustration is present. Instead, Mr. Shigeta likely used software that allows unlimited modulation of layers and vector-based linework. Such modern techniques that are becoming ever more commonplace, and the drawing represented to the juror's a striking example of the changing definition of the art of the architectural delineation. Concepts can be communicated with new tools that allow for an ever expanded range of meanings. Initially, Mr. Shigeta's entry was noticed for its elegant composition. But it was upon closer inspection that the jurors uncovered and were impressed by the drawing's complexity of information. With the manyfold effects of this drawing revealing itself with each glance, and from the breadth of discussion it stimulated among the jurors, Mr. Shigeta's urban diagram was awarded the KRob's Best of Show.

The result did not necessarily mean that the jurors decided to embrace the new. Each of the three jurors could choose a personal citation of a work that they felt strongly about. Two of the jurors selected works especially for their deference to traditional delineation. Dawn Carlson's watercolor of a Gothic church harkens back to the refined compositional drawings of the Beaux-Arts curriculum that were prevalent in all architecture schools before the onset of Modernism. The flat, non-perspectival picture of a city by J. Arthur Liu emulates the Oriental artistic tradition of depicting cities from above, which functioned as a sort of map of the area, and were featured in books, murals, and tapestries. For its incorporation of a technology unrelated to architectural drawing, Richie Gelles' entry showing a series of X-Ray slides describing his concept for a hospital won the admiration of the jury.

Overall, the winners of this year's competition were a diverse group. The jury was often split on many of the selected finalists, and often the debates about why they chose one over another were passionate. The value of these debates can not be overstated, and it is the desire of the organizers of the competition to create a more accessible forum for all to participate in the dialogue regarding the changes affecting architectural drawing. The success of the Ken Roberts Competition is critical to the continuation of this dialogue, and it invites all students and professionals to contribute.

I'm a Winner! Bobos, Millennials, and Obama: Why Conservatism is So Un-Cool

This past election put two different personalities and two different generations on a stage for all to see. On the one hand was the old-school John McCain, the grumpy maverick who seemed glaringly inflexible and at times repetitive. On the other was the "coolest" politician since JFK, someone who appealed to young voters and monopolize the issue of change. Barrack Obama epitomizes, and personifies, so many of the values that have come to define almost two generations: flexibility, open-minded, post-racial, post-partisan, maybe even post-American. Scores of Americans are over the past, over history, or at least over a sense of history. Since American history is mostly negative, they might say, it's time to move on to bigger and brighter things. In that regard, McCain never had a chance. Even though he has been a rare individual among the groupthink in D.C., he was a product of a bygone generation that most young Americans would prefer stay that way: gone.

In the media age, image matters, maybe even more so than policies or governmental philosophy. (At least for now. A return to history could change all of that, and that return could be hurried along by an aggressive Russia or Iran, or a seriously damaged economy.) Obama had a glow, and that image was especially attractive to two groups in particular: Bobos and Millennials. Bobos are the Bourgeois Bohemians so appropriately detailed by David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise. Millennials are the Gen Y-ers, the grandchildren of the boomers, gifted with multi-tasking, love of community, and a profound sense of entitlement. Both of these groups, in ways both positive and negative, seek a break with the past.

The Bobos retreated from the elitism of the 1950s, the Donna Reed image where status was king. They desired a society where achievement dominated and trumped past values that championed last names, connections, and diplomas. What they created was a society built on several paradoxes: their achievement mindset led them to overcome the elites, but never be able to rest, lest they lose their prominent positions. They became a generation of reconcilers, who brought together two groups that had historically been at war, bohemians and the bourgeois. They sacrificed the virtues of the past, lest they interfere with the present, and they created a “nice” and “decent” society that stood for very little. They regarded wholesomeness as a newfound value, particular evident in a love affair of nature and all things organic, but rarely created time to actually enjoy such wholesomeness. Obama projects niceness, decentness, wholesomeness, and achievement. Like Bobos, he has earned the future.
 
The Millennials are the Bobos’ kids, but it doesn’t seem that they’re quite as much into achievement. (I found this 60 Minutes video worth watching.) They are rebelling against the achievement doctrine; after all, they never spent time with mom and dad because mom and dad were busy at the office. Moreover, achievement doesn't mean much to a generation who never grew up losing at anything, from T-ball on up to grade grades in college in part due to calls from helicopter parents. Millennials value friendships, openness and themselves above all other things, and bring a stark sense of entitlement into the workplace and relationships. They will sacrifice achievement for quality of life, and they seem to take the Bobos lack of respect for the past to a whole new level: Millennials are the future and they know it. For a generation used to being coddled, told "You can do it!" and who sincerely believes the future is also theirs (not because they've earned it, but because, well, it just is), the "Yes we can" message must have been familiar and encouraging, even if ridiculously empty.

Lost in all of this is a deeper discussion of principle. “As a matter of practical politics, contemporary liberalism amounts to a coalitional ideology, while conservatism remains an ideological coalition,” writes Jonah Goldberg. If conservatism is about principle, and if it is an ideological coalition, what chance does it have among a majority of Bobos and Millennials? Not much. These are two groups that are among the most narcissistic and self-assured generations in American history, who have never been challenged or rallied to a national cause. Indeed, they were probably laughing at McCain’s motto: “Country first.” I wonder how many Millennials were mortified at such an idea. Country First? Yeah, right after me, my dog, Facebook, and my iPhone.
 
Maybe I’m being too hard on these generations. Millennials certainly have their gifts, and in many ways they’re a breath of fresh air compared to grungy Gen X. From a religious point-of-view, I hope they will reject the Bobo’s “Flexidoxy” and come to embrace truth as found in the historical Church. But from a political point-of-view, as a conservative, I wonder if this isn’t a lost generation. Peggy Noonan points out that “many of the indices for the GOP are dreadful, especially that they lost the vote of two-thirds of those aged 18 to 29. They lost a generation! If that continues in coming years, it will be a rolling wave of doom.” Time will tell. For now, I’m already quite sure Obama will have serious challenges, and we’ll see how long the Millennial naiveté lasts.
 
Also, I know making generalizations about generations is a dangerous task. For a differing point-of-view, check this post out. There are great points here. But the voting numbers don’t lie. And it strikes me that there is something about conservatism this generation can’t tolerate. At least, not a majority of them.

An Impossible Statement: “Healthcare Should Be a Right”

As a simple intellectual exercise, I’d like to quibble about semantics. Just in case your ears didn’t perk when Barrack Obama said the above statement in a previous presidential debate, I wanted to draw attention to a fundamental understanding of what a “right” is. No matter where we stand on the political side of things, I think this is a question worth asking and answering, from a philosophical viewpoint. When asked if healthcare was a right, Obama responded, “Well, I think it should be a right for every American.” So the question for me is, “Should healthcare be a right?” Or, “Is it already a right?” The questions are entirely different. If he had said “Healthcare is a right” instead of “Healthcare should be a right,” I might disagree in the end, but wouldn’t be as perturbed.

The problem is the word, “should.” For a politician to use this word in this context is alarming, as it suggests rights are granted by those very politicians, not by a higher authority. The word “should” implies something needs to change, a sentiment which shouldn’t surprise anyone following these campaigns. For example, if a father says, “Son, you should clean your room,” this implies that the room isn’t clean now, and that needs to change. Furthermore, it implies someone has the power to change it, presumably the son, but the father if worse comes to worse.

If I were to apply this to Obama’s quote, “Healthcare should be a right,” that implies that healthcare is currently not a right, but in the future, well, it should be. So are rights fluid, and can our understanding of them change? I’m not so sure. Isn’t this is a misreading of what rights even are? A right either is, or isn’t. Rights are an existential question, not a political one. Rights are, and must be, understood to be granted by a higher authority than man, usually God, but perhaps Natural Law or the “common good” can be substituted. If rights don’t come from a higher authority, then they lose the one thing that makes them truly a right: protection from man, the ability to claim it over and above someone else’s competing claim.

If anything, government interferes with man’s inalienable rights more often than not. (Hence the Bill of Rights, restrictions on what government does to protect human rights.) Government didn’t end slavery by extending the right to freedom; government perpetuated slavery for centuries by legalizing it. Government didn’t give women the right to vote; government withheld that right for centuries, only later recognizing its error and changing course. Rights either “are” or they “are not”. But they never “should be”.

The truly stunning decades of the late 1700s found man discovering that rights were inherent to the dignity of man himself, that they were not granted by a monarch or even a parliament, no matter how popular. If rights were conveyed by government, they could just as easily be taken away by that same government. Historically, the rights to press, religion and free speech, were not thought of as inalienable. But that thinking was changed; certain rights came to be seen as inalienable, as true to humanity as the air we breathe. This was a remarkable achievement for mankind, one thousands of years in the making.

So back to the quote and why it is an impossible statement, a paradox of language: if healthcare should be a right, then something needs to change and someone needs to change it. Someone needs to assign this right, and as soon as possible. But if someone can do that, it’s not really a right, but a privilege in every sense of the word. If Obama had said that healthcare is a right, he would have every moral imperative (even if I and others heartily disagreed with his logic) to fundamentally altar the way our healthcare system is run.

But the fact that he said it “should” be a right is quite alarming, and I think a gift, an insight into the way that he understand, or doesn’t understand, the role of government. Rights simply “are” or “are not”, because true rights are absolute claims that any human can make against any other. If rights are granted by those in power, they are not absolute, but instead are negligible, and by definition, are no longer a right, but a privilege. If a right “should be” now, it’s only a matter of time before someone decides it “shouldn’t be”.

An Architectural Delicacy: Thorncrown Chapel from a Religious Point-of-View

I have the good fortune of being married to someone who spent several years of her life growing up in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. This is good for a number of reasons, but mainly it was a good excuse to vacation in the beautiful mountains of Arkansas and to see the famous Thorncrown Chapel designed by E. Fay Jones. Sharing a blog with an architect, and stumbling across pictures of Thorncrown via the Internet made seeing the chapel top priority.

I had several thoughts upon leaving Thorncrown. The first was, why do chapels get all the great buildings? I suspect there are several reasons that chapels (as opposed to sanctuaries built by congregations) generate the best ideas and employ the best architects. For starters, congregations rarely have the funds to be avant garde. They usually can muster up just enough cash to fund a standard, if not boring A-frame sanctuary, with predictable stability, efficiency and minimal religious symbolism. In the case of Thorncrown and other chapels, it was the wealth (thanks in part to answered prayers)and land of one person that provided the carte blanche necessary for architectural risk and reward.

Occasionally, wealthy members of congregations will pony up substantial funds for a church sanctuary, enough funds to bring on an architect with bold ideas and vision. But other considerations must be dealt with in a church that a stand-alone chapel rarely deals with. Mostly, it's a question of stewardship. "Should we, as a church," they'll say, "spend that kind of money on a building when we can build a bigger one for half the cost and give the rest of the money to the poor?" Certain, a fair question. Also, a building committee will rarely agree on a bold design, but instead, will almost always opt for a safe, comfortable, familiar design, even if it is unexceptional and may mimic their over-carpeted living room, or the church most of them "grew up in."

But once I was done mourning the reality that I would never serve in a space as beautiful, I asked myself what makes Thorncrown stand out? What makes it work so well? There were a few features that struck me, especially from a religious point-of-view. For starters, it is a vulnerable structure. Unlike the great cathedrals (I acknowledge they have size considerations as city parishes), Thorncrown embodies fragility and delicacy. It looks as though a strong wind would leave it splintered...yet it holds, bracing itself with interlocking beams.

The fragility is especially appealing as religion itself is as a fragile enterprise. Religion is dependent in very real ways on the duel saintly and sinful natures of its participants and leaders. History displays serious religious scars, and ultimately what holds the Church together is the fragile faith and hope of a people who believe in a god as yet unseen. Thorncrown seems to welcome this fragility. In a culture where Christians can be zealous, proud and arrogant, Thorncrown ignores that hubris and admits that believers walk by a fragile, but steady faith. The architecture of the self-assured is bulky, dated, and gaudy. It projects certainty, not vulnerability. Thorncrown is, as faith often is, hard to nail down, and hard to know where to begin. It's just there, and even though a whisper of doubt could knock it all down, it holds in spite of looking weak from the outside.

One also cannot mention Thorncrown without commenting on the way it blends in to its natural surrounding. Architecturally, it strikes me that this is the way a good designer will be at the mercy of what is presented. In this case, the client was not Jim Reed as much as it was the Ozark Mountains. I recognize that most religious buildings are not built in the mountains. But every religious structure is built somewhere, and that place is a place of ministry. The place of ministry, in fact. I remember my seminary's chapel, nestled amid a thoroughly modernist building in Chicago. The front and back walls were entirely glass, with one wall looking out towards 55th street. Buses, students, joggers, and the homeless all were the backdrop to worship. This was an urban school, and the chapel did not shield the urbanism beyond its walls with sheetrock and religious art. Instead, there was an intentional effort to embrace it.

But too many churches act as cloisters. Forget stained glass windows...many of them have given up on windows altogether. (I guess the natural light makes spotlights less effective. We wouldn't want there to be any doubt about who the main attraction is, after all.) When worshippers enter the space, they might as well be entering another zip code. They can get their worship over with in this enclosed space, and then never really worry about what goes on outside those walls. Thorncrown makes that cloister mentality impossible. To be in that space is in itself to focus on what happens outside those walls. Suburban churches appealing to the nominally religious would do well to learn from Thorncrown's openness. It has genuine theological value.

Much more could be written about Thorncrown...it's attention to detail, its lasting importance, its wonderful combination of humility and awe. I could maybe even stretch my interpretation to observe the dependent and interlocking nature of the beams as a reflection of the Christian community itself. I'll just say that what I found particularly impressive was its openness, openness to the outside world, and seemingly, whatever may come its way. There is a place for strong, dramatic and safe religious architecture to convey the strength, certainty and finality of the god we worship. But Thorncrown acts as a reminder that there is also a place for delicacy and fragility, feelings the faithful know all-too-well over the course of a religious life.

Dos and Don’ts of Community Organizing

Agitate. That’s the key word to understanding what I’ll call classical community organizing. “Community Organizing” is a relatively generic term and can mean a plethora of different things to different people. It’s also a term that has bounced around quite a bit in the past few months, now that Barrack Obama’s history as a community organizer has come to light and become evidence of his leadership experience. But while the term is relatively generic, Obama comes from a peculiar school of community organizing, one I’ve been somewhat exposed to firsthand.

By now, the Saul Alinsky method of community organizing has come to the surface, and his book, “Rules for Radicals” has been re-explored. I was unfortunate enough to be educated in this method for a short time as a continuing education class. (Yes, my denomination is so liberal that it has adopted communist community organizing skills as worthwhile techniques for pastors to learn.) Hey it worked on the South side of Chicago, it could work here too! But what are the techniques exactly?

First, the basic philosophy is one based in contrasting the ideal world with the real world. You’ve heard Michelle and Barack Obama reference it: whenever they've talked about the way the world is versus the way the world should be, this is straight from Alinsky. The goal of community organizing is to meet people where they are and transition the community, one person at a time, into the world as it should be: a world that demands fairness, equality, justice, and peace. Never mind that all of these terms are subjective to the communist mind, and virtually impossible to pin down. What’s fair to one person or just for one person is often not fair or just to another when a central planner decides. (It is true that perfect fairness and justice is not to be found in a free society, either, but then, a free society doesn’t promise fairness or even define it, just the right to attain it as a basic human right.)

The technique itself is simple: build a cadre of support through one-on-one contacts, then exploit that cadre when the masses are needed. These contacts can and should be anyone and everyone. From the person who bags your groceries, serves you coffee, lives next door or runs your city, anyone is fair game for these one-on-one conversations. And these conversations are not to be small talk, but a rather in-depth and personal conversation about what drives the person, what motivates them, what they’re upset about in their community. To talk about the weather would be a waste of time. These conversations with relative strangers are all about making contacts that can be used in future rabble-rousing demonstrations.

So when the time comes, when the grocery baggers wages are deemed too low, when racism is deemed to be plaguing public schools, or when the factory smokestack’s pollution level is deemed to high, the community organizer acts. The cadre he has worked to build is called into action and the agitation begins. Pickets, marches, phone calls, letter campaigns…whatever it takes. But the goal is absolutely not to try to persuade the powers that be: the goal is to agitate them.

Certainly, there is a time and place for agitating the powers-that-be. Power is almost always the enemy of those who espouse a love for limited government and liberty. However, it is absolutely worth asking whether the community organizer is actually a friend of the poor or not. Driving corporations away and inviting more government regulation has always led to an increase in poverty, not the other way around.

James Taranto has a wonderful summary of Obama’s experience as a community organizer here. I've also pasted some below:

"These efforts at economic development having failed, Obama "began to focus on providing social services for Altgeld Gardens," a government-owned and -operated apartment

complex.

"'We didn't yet have the power to change state welfare policy, or create local jobs, or bring substantially more money into the schools,' [Obama] wrote. 'But what we could do was begin to improve basic services at Altgeld--get the toilets fixed, the heaters working, the windows repaired.' Obama helped the residents wage a successful campaign to get the Chicago Housing Authority to promise to remove asbestos from the units; but, after an initial burst of activity, the city failed to keep its promise. (As of last year, some residences still had not been cleared of asbestos.)

"It is both funny and scary that one of America's major political parties would offer this record of sheer futility as its nominee's chief qualification to be president of the United States. Even more striking, though, is how alien the world in which Obama operated was by comparison with the world in which normal Americans live.

"Reader, when your toilet breaks, do you wait around for some Ivy League hotshot to show up and organize a meeting so that you can use your collective strength to wring concessions from the powers that be?

"Or do you call a plumber?"

Let me offer a model for community organizing I have found rather beneficial to all involved, be it citizens, corporations, or cities. If you’ve never heard of the Barnett Shale, it’s a massive natural gas reservoir that will bring billions of dollars into the Dallas/Fort Worth area. When “land men” began cruising the area to get land for cheap, they offered as low as hundreds or even $1,000/mineral acre. But the neighborhoods were pretty sure their mineral rites were worth more than that. So community organizers, working for the good of the environment, the community, and the pocketbooks of homeowners, negotiated as neighborhoods and have gotten as much as $27,500/mineral acre and substantial royalties once the oil companies begin to make a profit.

No central figure demanded this organization. Volunteers (as opposed to paid community organizers) rounded up the community with church meetings, front yard signs, and homespun websites. Instead of working against the corporations, the community worked with them. It was not the government that enabled these enormous paydays; rather, it was often local governments that worked to slow down the oil companies.

So here’s an idea for all the communist-leaning community organizers: instead of agitating, how about offering a message of progress and embracing companies that produce jobs? How about speaking against the very government that has failed you so many times instead of stubbornly relying on its grant money to fix deeper problems? And communities, instead of anointing agitators from the Ivy League to lead you, how about you work with those who actually live in your neighborhood, and have for some time? Community organizers are all-too-often class warfare experts stoking the flames. But they can do enormous good when they defend the right to free enterprise and profit.

Podcast #5

Four months in the making, Podcast #5 is here.

Do Ideas Matter in an Age of Personality?

The fact that “reality television” has taken over primetime airwaves isn’t a comment on how much television has changed, but a reflection on our growing interest in personalities. We no longer need to gossip about others in our neighborhood or church to get our nosy fix. Cable television has given us permission to be as nosy as we want, all from the comfort and safety of our living room. We can look as deeply as we like into a vast array of personalities. And not just a bunch of Everyman or Everywoman’s on an island anymore, either. Now we can delve into the personalities of glue sniffers, adulterers, the rich and aloof in Orange County, bounty hunters, former WWF stars (pretty much anything from the 80s is cool again), and of course, your average working stiffs like me who manage to get on television for about 10 of their 15 minutes before executives realize how boring we are.

This form of entertainment is so popular networks struggle to keep up with personality inflation. In an effort to keep the fragile attention of its viewers, new and bright and unique personalities are always sought after, probably more now than highly trained actors or writers skilled in the art of subtlety. Or the seedy side of “real life” is sought out, and tattoo artists, drug addicts, and porn stars fill our TV screens. My empirical evidence for this is that cameras actually follow around the Kardashian family…a family whose claim to fame is a lawyer patriarch and some Playboy spreads.

All of this is to say we are fascinated by personalities and we seem to befriend these people in a way that we never did with fictional characters. Fictional characters are the portrait of types, of ideas. They are the vehicle that a writer uses to express his point-of-view, ideas about conflict and resolution, and commentary on the issues of the day. A show like ER is often weighed down by commentary on the Iraq war, available healthcare and the way our society neglects the homeless. These are ideas, where problems are presented and solutions are offered, spoken by characters. Reality television offers us few, if any ideas, anything to chew on, any complexity.

The tie-in to matters of substance is, of course, the political races of our day. Much has already been made of the fact that this is the TV age, and the old adage that Nixon won his debate with Kennedy on radio but lost it on TV is a perfect example of this. But it’s beyond just appearances now. Now, we demand personality and energy to fill the screen. We seem to have less patience for ideas, for problems and solutions, much less complexity. For all of Barack Obama’s faults, he has a personality made for television and an “Aw shucks” persona so spot on it should be trademarked. Even more amazing, it’s his personality that is being demanded in a pinch: as political times get tighter, he must rely on his natural grace under pressure and motivating enthusiasm to resell his image as a personality worth trusting even if his ideas are rarely articulated and certainly nothing new. A hodgepodge of left-leaning ideas won’t bring about any bump in the polls. But a fiery speech just might.

On the other side is also a personality, a stubborn, loyal, and temperamental personality. But, while McCain won’t be confused with the head of a think tank any time soon, he is the product of a generation of ideas. Barry Goldwater and William Buckley built their careers around ideas, not charisma, and important, complex books were regularly offered by publishers. Now, Internet articles and blogs have replaced these books, and most political books are often short-sighted, politically expedient, and geared towards discrediting the person more than their ideas. With the notable exception of George Will, a lot of the op-ed articles I read are comprised of “paragraphs” that are one or two sentences in length. Can you really get to the nugget of ideas with so little depth?

At the same time, I am confident that ideas tend to win the day. Personalities are fickle, and most consumers tire of flash with no substance. It’s nice to eat at a 4-star restaurant for your anniversary once a year, but most of the time you want prime rib and mashed potatoes, not art deco on a plate. And as is usually the case throughout history, people pay the most attention when their pocketbooks are in the crosshairs. Complex issues like energy development, taxation and the role of government will likely rule the day this year more than race, gender, or charisma, because its simply where most Americans are feeling the pinch.

It is certainly a shame that much of the national discourse has been reduced to jabs, sound bites, and media spin. It is a shame that the truly breathtaking task before the founding fathers and the foundational questions they had to answer are now rolled up into campaign slogans and accusations. It is a shame that as Americans we don’t grapple with complex problems and prefer to talk about candidates as celebrities and not the harbingers of ideals. But it’s not impossible to imagine when all is said and done, ideas will win out, no matter the media. Books with complex ideas will continue to influence, if not sell millions of copies. And at the top of our institutions, businesses and governments, there will be more leaders who are average speakers with good ideas than great speakers with bad ideas.

Update: More thoughts on this here.

The Lives of the Other Germans: beauty in the former German Democratic Republic

After countless months of delay, I got around to watching the recent German award-winning film, The Lives of Others. Relievedebtor had already seen it long ago and wrote a post examining the psychological aspects of Communist totalitarianism portrayed in the film. I was more interested in its depiction of life in East Germany, having lived there for a year not long after the country's reunification. I had already watched a more nostalgic treatment of the subject in Goodbye Lenin!, a somewhat humorous German film in which a young man tries to recreate the look and feel of living in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) so that her mother, who was a radically dedicated citizen to the Communist regime before falling into a coma during fall of the Berlin Wall, would not suffer a fatal nervous breakdown. It was overall an endearing movie which provided a gentle introduction to life in that era for those living outside of it. It did not attempt to examine deeply the long list of injustices that occured at the time, but was rather a sympathetic portrayal of the mundane lifestyle that East German citizens adjusted themselves to.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, the screenwriter and director of The Lives of Others chose to expose the more sinister side of that lifestyle while managing to make it an enjoyable viewing experience. As a sort of film-noir thriller, the story follows an attempt by the government-run secret police to spy on a nationally celebrated playwrite in order to convict him of treason. As the multiple levels of suspicion and betrayal takes a deep toll on the playwrite's close friends, the antagonist working for the secret police experiences a change in outlook in response to the hypocrisy of a political system to which he was deeply committed. Like a good suspense film, the plot quickens as it progresses and concludes tragically, followed by personal redemption as the passage of time helps heal the wounds. The acting was superb in that the actors endowed the characters with considerable credibility and emotion, while also emphasizing the mysterious reality of an individuals real intentions.

As a person who deals daily (with much futility) in tying together disparate elements into a moving whole, I am prone to pay special attention to a film's music, writing and especially its art direction. Gabriel Yared's musical score complemented the film's mood of clandestine insecurity, while the screenplay's references to great poets and the theatre gave the film a broader forum to examine the role of the human spirit under totalitarianism that transcends the more pedestrian political message that could have prevailed. As for the sets and the visual effects, there was a welcome stylized treatment of what could have easily been a typically dreary depiction of life behind the Iron Curtain. In the additional features on the DVD, Von Donnersmark reveals that the colors, textures, and objects used in the film were very carefully designed even while trying to achieve a high level of realism to East Berlin during the mid-1980s. Had he he been purely focused on portraying the urban environment as it actually was back those days, the result would be hard to watch for an extended period of time. Everything was gray, drab, decayed, and barren--in other words, lifeless. Try watching the Polish director Kristof Kieslowksi's film series Dekalog, where many of the stories take place in a typical social housing tower complex that are ubiquitous throughout the former Soviet Block during the 1980s. While the dialogue and visuals in the Dekalog films are thematically profound, the rich colors and tones of Kieslowski's subsequent post-Cold War films such as Blue, White and Red reinforce the cold and dull palette with which he was forced to work with in then communist Poland. As anybody who has traveled to cities under Soviet conrol will attest, cheerful urban environments are extremely rare, where one usually had to go the pre-communist parts of town to find some life and charm.

If there is one common criticism against The Lives of Others, it is that it doesn't go far enough in describing the former East German regime's extensiveness and brutality on its own citizens. The secret police, the Stasi, kept files on more than million people, and employed undercover informants that were often close friends of the suspects. It was a meticulous enterprise that controlled all lines of communication, whether by opening all mail contents to wiretapping most phone lines (phones were extremely rare back then, to the point that the house I lived in had no phone a few years after reunification and I was forced to use the lone phone booth next to the post office.) My host parents could hear someone else while calling a government bureaucrat for the simple request of getting a permit to build their house.

Today, one can now go to the Stasi archives and freely look up their file, but it is reported that only ten percent of those documented bothered to make an inquiry. One reason that has been suggested is that people don't want to find out who was betraying them. This may go far in explaining why the The Lives of Others was received with grudging discomfort as much as with critical enthusiasm. Germans have a hard enough time revisiting World War 2, and they are not near to genuinely coming to terms with what really went on in the German Democratic Republic. Social trust back then was almost close to non-existent, and opening up old wounds today could damage what little faith people have in their associations for the future. The temptation to airbrush such pervasive acts of suspicion, betrayal and coercion is quite great, and it is telling that no serious film account of the former East Germany was made until sixteen years after its end, and no less by an outsider to the German film industry. Von Donnersmark recounts how it was nearly impossible to find German-based funding and distribution for a 2 million dollar film that would become one of the most successful German films of all time.

The intent of the film was to demonstrate less the power of potitics than it was to portray the power of aesthetic beauty. It was a piece of music and the reading of classic poetry--not a political essay or speech-- that brought about a change in perspective in the protagonist. Experiencing art offers a reawakening of the soul, an affirmation of life in the midst of the most soul-crushing and lifeless of contexts that was the GDR. In my own personal experience, it worked the other way: the shabby and bleak towns and cities I had lived in and visited during my year abroad awakened in me an appreciation for the importance of beauty. It was precisely the overbearing ugliness of the concrete towers dotting the East German landscape that influenced me to seriously consider architecture as a career. The towers served as a reminder of the architectural vocation's crucial responsibility in endowing life and spirit to a place that transcends the local forces of economics and politics.

It was evident to me that much of the buildings built during the GDR era were an expression of political will and an obsession with quantities that would fulfill the promises of socialism. Vast swaths of cities and "new towns" had the look of being executed too quickly, without thoughtful examination about its impact on the landscape. It seemed that the building bureaucracy was more focused on providing guaranteed housing to all who wanted one, and planned urban spaces and amenities to ensure equal access to them, but overlooked the more significant aspect of quality. In particular to the neighborhoods comprised of "Neubau" (new built) apartment towers that became the standard issue urban planning solution throughout all of East Germany since late 50's, there was an overwhelming use of prefabrication and repetitive modules. Building from mass-produced concrete wall plates, or "plattenbau", would become the construction method of choice as it allowed for greater speed and standardization. The natural tradeoff was a decline in quality in all of its meanings, evidenced by shoddy materials, crude details and the lack of scale and proportion. Since material equality was the goal, it mattered less to design an environment that fostered opportunity and dynamicism than it was to deliver a mass produced commodity (eg. housing) that guaranteed the people's dependence on the state. Building one's own detached house was very difficult, since one was limited to about half-dozen floor plans approved by the state, and private contractor were very difficult to come by. It was not an environment that encouraged choice or an integrated mix of uses. Uniformity, sameness and the extinguishing of individuality was the rule.

For justifiable reasons, The Lives of Others did not go far enough in exposing the GDR's extinguishing of beauty in favor of politics. Von Donnersmark explains that it was very difficult to actually find a credible spot in all of Berlin that remained unchanged since the reunification. The film crew actually had to work hard to making the chosen locations look like it did back then, to the extent of painting over graffitti that would accumulate on a nightly basis. Even the protagonist's apartment was too stylish and clean compared to the ones I frequently visited. It's almost as if there was an inherent desire to spiff places up to make them comfortable to the audience.

This was no different from what I observed was going on in towns all throughout the neuen Bundeslander (the new federal states, as the former East Germany is now called) a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. House facades were being stripped and re-stuccoed, roofs were eplaced with more durable tiles, the brightest colors replacing the old gray palette on the outside, while old orangy and green wall papers were removed to brighten up the dank interiors. With meager resources, average people went about to restore life and pleasure into their homes and streets. They were making statements about their individuality once again, exercising (albeit with some reticence) their free choice.

Despite all the equality they were supposed to have enjoyed a few years before, the rush to bring color and freshness to their lives suggests that they weren't necessarily at ease back then. Inserting beauty in our surrounding seems to be a universal thing we humans do to make things feel whole again, and to expand our purpose in life beyond political ideology. To deny this fundamental need to people speaks of totalitarian socialism's inhumanity.

Note: You can read more about the architecture featured in The Lives of Others here.

Shallow Wonders: Architecture and the Global Drive to Greatness

In this current period of global economic unease, the ever enduring undercurrent of American declinism rears its ugly head. Decade after decade there are new books predicting the end of American hegemony, the emergence of a multi-polar world and the rise of rival economic powers. In describing the latter phenomenon, one finds the time-honored journalistic practice of producing articles that report an ambitious and massive building campaign that reflects a city's or a country's ascendance to the elite group of power players. There is an implication of admiration and awe by the dozens of construction cranes dotting the skyline; massive armies of construction workers coming together to realize something unthinkable in more modest wealthy countries that are tied down by democratic processes and small-scale entrepreneurially-based developments. The amazement at such towering construction efforts is nothing new, since it has been going on since the beginning of urban centers thousands of years ago.

What is interesting, in my view, is how the absence of oversized construction projects is now seen as a problem. A recent book by Fareed Zakaria that revives the recurring discourse on American declinism cites the fact that the tallest building in the world no longer resides in the U.S. as proof that it is somehow a less important country. I believe this evaluation to be a bit misplaced, since beyond these materialistic monuments lies completely different social and cultural realities the U.S. would be better off not to emulate. Building big is an inherently exciting human enterprise, but the process in which it is done in a world run by global capitalism makes it seem more diminutive in significance, casting doubt on genuine 'greatness'.

I say this as one who has spent most of his career working for American firms that have had a deep hand in rebranding the architectural image of many countries around the world. One influential experience was in being part of the large team of American architects and engineers that designed what will soon be the tallest building in the world in Dubai. The client, EMAAR, is a huge real estate company largely managed by the ruling family of Dubai, who hired us along with consultants from throughout Europe and contractors from South Korea to give form to an icon of national identity to a land, though flush with lots of financial capital, has relatively scarce human capital (i.e. educated and productive native citizens). Adrian Smith, the principal designer of the tower, to his credit generated a scheme inspired from a natural flower motif indigenous to the Persian Gulf that guards the tower's cultural integrity. That is something that can rarely be said of many of the other ambitious designs and structures going up in the U.A.E., that either opt for Arab kitsch or styles (and artificially terraformed landscapes) alien to the area, whether Mediterranean or overscaled high-tech.

The UAE building boom kind of resembles a teenager who purchases lots of fashionable clothes to figure an identity in which they seek to be defined. There is no authentic Emirati identity asserted in these new towers, but rather the hope that Western designers can give them one they like and will proudly wear. Views of the Dubai skyline remind me of a rich person's closet: racks of expensive and fashionable suits and dresses, with most of the outfits rarely ever worn but instead serve to show off a person's accumulated wealth. Like unworn designer outfits, the new landmarks may be testaments to art and craft of those who make them (and the imported South Asian serf population that builds much of them), as well as those who finance them, but we will never know how its users, the local Emirati community, will fit into them. Such is the paradox in a world increasingly driven by consumer-driven capitalism and free-flowing capital: the creation of artifacts that express the uniqueness of a culture are abandoned in favor of buying artifacts that express a dissolution into an all-embracing yet shallow global culture. Dubai may indeed bill itself as a new symbol of the trans-global culture (after all, they are highly dependent on foreigners to make this spectacle happen), one that is in its very nature thin and unable to regenerate itself over time. Is this the kind of 'greatness' we seek to restore to our own shores?

Deep in the heart of Texas, I now help realize commercial amenities that address the needs and wants of the millions of beneficiaries of the globalism - the new middle classes and nouveau riche that have recently sprouted in all continents. The expansion of market capitalism throughout the world has been a boon for Western architects, from the almost unlimited commercial opportunities for sector-specific oriented American firms to the hundreds of wannabe cultural capitals who desperately seek the golden touch of studio-oriented, often European, "starchitecture" firms. Foreign construction projects in developing countries tend to be large and complex, the clients frequently desiring an architectural style that projects a new and progressive image for their cities. This contrasts with projects in local American (or European) building markets, in which one has to deal with the headache of various layers of building departments, code enforcement, legal liability, individual property rights and precarious financing from small banks or government-issued bonds that depend on skittish voters.

Sites in developing countries often start from a blank-slate approach, which naturally attracts many designer-types encouraged to exercise their creative freedom. Many of the developers in these countries have little interest for contextuality or in defining an intelligible sense of community. Rather the project must communicate the simple message that a place has 'arrived' in the new global game, that it is modern and progressive and ready to jettison the old. Many of the architects I work with will try, in either an imaginative or awkward way, to insert a layer of authenticity to the project, whether by using traditional motifs, adapting to the local climate, or introducing materials found in the local vernacular. Other architects could care less and continue to proceed in delivering a self-referential icon to the locale. In both cases, the designer type revels in these foreign projects, since design services tends to focus on the "front end" of the design process; that is, the conceptual and schematic phases, where models, renderings and loose technical documents are produced. Actual construction documents are usually produced by a local architect in the country in which the project is situated, who will be responsible in dealing with the headaches of following local codes, permitting processes, and local liabilities. Add to that the generous construction budgets made possible by oligarchic real-estate environments, opaque lending institutions and government connections and cheap labor and you get the best of all worlds (from the designer type's point of view). From my perspective foreign projects are indeed fun even if quite demanding and are of great benefit to all sides, but one should acknowledge that they carry some of ethical baggage that does not tend to exist in the West.

The new global architectural marketplace has naturally benefited architectural firms with a fundamentally commercial character, the large majority of which are to be found in the U.S, the UK and Australia. Technical expertise on various building types is a highly-sought comodity, and the Western economies that have fostered a sophisticated service sector (especially in the 'Anglosphere') with a high degree of specialization have produced a broad array of firms in the position to generate icons and images for a new cultural identity with which developing countries desperately seek to rebrand themselves. This is a part of the story that is rarely focused on when the media marvels at the large-scale pace of construction and engineering feats: there have always been since the dawn of time steady stream awe-inspiring works that have amazed observers, but what makes today's accomplishments different is the scale to which cultural production has been overlayed from one foreign culture over another, namely from the West on to the Orient.

Just as movies made in Hollywood have become the main staple for popular entertainment in many countries throughout the developing world during the last century, building sleek glassy towers and megablocks in a style that was developed in western architectural capitals of London, New York and Rotterdam has become the preferred means by which people in developing countries express a sort of cultural and economic ascendance for the rest of developed world to notice, or in other words, 'greatness'. Where movies with action-packed story lines, special effects, larger-than-life characters and English dialogue have come to diminish the importance of local theatrical traditions and folk performance, an architectural vocabulary of glass curtain wall, smooth concrete, stainless steel or aluminum panels and high-tech steel structural supports (and increasingly LED lighting) has supplanted the local built vernacular - the most open and direct way a community or a society expresses its most unique qualities apart from the rest of the world.

Borrowing foreign building styles and suiting them to local conditions is not new, as the colonial architecture of many British Commonwealth member states demonstrate, nor is the embrace of modern industrial materials and methods in favor of more traditional modes in these places specific to contemporary times, as the ubiquitous 'International Style' that emerged in middle of the 20th century can attest. What was different in the past was that a synthesis binding outside influences to the local cultural reality occured, often initiated by the local artists and designers. For all the intentions toward universality and essentialism that characterized the International Style, architects throughout developing world adapted the style to native sensibilities and values that would later be characterized as 'critical regionalism'. The current wave of international projects have not reached this point, nor does there seem much interest doing so beyond what the designer in London/NewYork/Amsterdam/Dallas tries to conjure up in his office.

When I was first given the opportunity to work on the world's tallest building in Dubai, even if it was on a relatively small part of such a huge project, I was reminding myself that I was helping build the pyramids of our own time. In terms of the imaginative and intellectual endeavor, the testing of physical limits a man-made structure can endure, there was a bit in common with the pyramids at Gizeh. And yet it was easy to forget this idea, since most of the people I worked with treated this as a typical international project no different from countless others that they had worked on. There seemed to be little spiritual resonance about the project, but instead became an unusually large headache in providing a commodified service to a distant client and land we cared little about. Somehow the project seemed shallow in significance (the firm can lay claim to having designed many of the world's tallest buildings for decades) due to the fact there was zero cultural attachment to what we were doing, that it didn't speak much about who we were as Americans nor did it say much about Dubai except that it had lots of money and a ruling family with an outsized ego. At least the pyramids at Gizeh revealed lots about the ancient Egyptians, from their religion and social structures to their technical advances. What both Dubai and Ancient Egypt may have in common would be their deplorable treatment of manual labor, which doesn't say much for the formers current assendance in international 'greatness'.

If there is any genuine greatness to be found in the contemporary world of economic globalism and computer assisted engineering innovations, one could argue that it's the creators of cultural icons and man-made environments. The artists, graphic designers, branding specialists and architects of North America, Western Europe and Japan have been able to project a look and feel to distant places at a rate and breadth never before witnessed. Romans may have had the whole Mediterranean (and Britain) to render a uniform style to the look and feel to the cities under their control, but this Western-based army of environmental designers have all habitable continents to take advantage of, with millions of acres waiting to be transformed overnight. One could question whether all of this is indeed a good thing, as much of this new building lacks originality and fails to convey a genuine expression of a locale. Still, such an abundance of opportunities has been aggressively pursued by this design corps, to the extent that there are numerous design firms who work almost exclusively on international projects. They opt to bypass opportunities in local markets that seem stifling in favor of foreign markets that embrace innovative and trend-setting solutions.

This internationalist orientation to design has been of particular benefit to that elite cadre Western-based 'starchitects'. Since their reputations for bold, self-referential designs express more about the designer than about the place a projected is situated, they find it often difficult to realize their vision in their more democratic and extensively regulated home countries. The boutique starchitecture firm is not much of a profitable enterprise within a regional or national market of designing exclusively state-funded cultural projects such as museums and libraries. Superstars of today such as Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, Daniel Liebeskind and Zaha Hadid experienced prolongued periods of financial uncertainty even with a few signature projects behind them. The game would change once their work was perceived as a reproducible brand identity that could lend a heaping dose of sophistication to any place that wanted it. Called "the Bilbao Effect", where municipalities depend on a singular architectural tour-de-force to regenerate the image and ensuing redevelopment (as was supposedly the case with Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain), the value of starchitects as a result has risen as cities compete with each other at a global level for foreign investment and real estate-based riches. It is now no longer the domain of select Western capitals, but has now become the desired silver-bullet strategy towards respectability in cities as distant as Tashkent, Uzbekhistan and Baku, Azerbaijan. Not too long ago one often had to go to a post-industrial country in the West to observe ground-breaking and daring projects that were often the concrete fruits of inquisitive and free exchange of ideas promoted in those countries. Now one travels to the far corners of the earth to semi-agrarian/industrial countries whose more traditional social structures repress experimentation and liberal cultural life. Such a disparity between a regressive local cultural reality and dramatic cutting-edge works highlights how current attempts at greatness in the developing world are an inorganic phenomenon which strips a valuable layer of meaning and tends to relegate these new structures as relatively shallow symbols. It reminds me of those glossy architetural renderings I frequently see that portray a futuristic space populated by figures in Arab Bedouin costume.

With the disembodiment of local cultural expression comes the Starchitect's ego that tries to imbue in these concrete, glass and steel carcasses a richness of meaning. That is what I interpret from statements like Steven Holl's, saying "In America, I could never do the work I do here. We've become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look new." The architect justifies what he is doing as part of his commitment to his principles on what places need and his obsession for newness. Since there is no significant critical element that stimulates vigorous cultural debate so fundamental to the success of western culture, Mr. Holl uses the apparently Chinese consensus for the new as a carte blanche for realizing his personal design ambitions. This argument applies to other similar situations such as Norman Foster's grandiose schemes in Russia and Zaha Hadid's projects for Azerbaijan, which reveals certain ethical dilemmas regarding projects situated in countries known for their restriction of political freedom and accompanying static cultural development. The irony comes into focus, as these elite architects seek the most unencumbering environment in precisely those places known to discourage free expression for everyone else. It sure seems to reek of the practice of officially privileging the chosen few at the expense of everyone else on the outside, a proud tradition of one-party authoritarian regimes and monarchies.

From what I've seen so far, the new starchitecture going up throughout the developing world has been disappointing. Much of it is hideously overscaled, lacking in proportion and detrimental to the surrounding urban context. There is something to be said for designing not to overpower a place, but rather to mediate with it, to interact with its particularities. In my opinion, many of the starchitects' best work occured within the confines of their culturally free yet democratically regulated home countries, as their innate bold visions were forced to compromise with the mature urban fabric and highly mobilized citizens' associations and individual critics. The tension works and lends a place additional layers of desirable complexity. When that healthy tension is lost, the temptation towards an oppressive and uninspired architecture becomes much greater. It seems to be happening in much of the ballihooed projects going up in China, which is wasting the opportunity by furiously constructing a modern identity that is, to my mind, ugly and unhuman in its scale and detail. One can brag about the billions of tons of concrete, the millions more of new apartments, offices, and the tallest, most high-tech buildings anywhere in the world, but the overall quality is not of greatness in its original implication. It's undoubtedly impressive, but it's far from being great architecture, much less a symbol of true greatness.

Update: I've come across some recent articles that address the topics discussed above. The phenomena of designer cities is described in detail in the Wall Street Journal, in which foreign clients invite starchitects an unlimited hand in shaping entire city districts as a means of marketing these places as good real estate investments. Another article highlights how the Chinese government uses architecture to conceal abuses elsewhere, especially in the run-up to the Olympics in Beijing. For a revealing portrait of how a starchitect evaluates the ethical challenges of working for a dictatorship, check out this interview with Jacques Herzog of Herzog + deMeuron in Der Spiegel.

Whatever Happened to Transcendence?

There was a time when people aspired to higher things: ways of thinking, manners, and even food. If this podcast is to be believed, those who lived in Italy during the Renaissance preferred to eat fowl, as they were the food found closest to the heavens. So while we partake in earthbound animals like cows, pigs and chickens, those eating in the 1400s enjoyed more lofty fare, as one more way to be closer to the angels. Undoubtedly, this was a luxury more commonly found among the elite, and perhaps the same is true today as not everyone can afford land leases, shotguns and duck blinds.

But it wasn’t only the food of course, but all of the arts aimed to lift the souls of men upward. Listening to motets of the day, one can very easily imagine that this is the music of the angels. And even if it isn’t, it’s certainly what the best composers imagined being sung in more transcendent places. The painted and sculpted masterpieces of the era reflect tedious, time-consuming and advanced art that sought to offer a glimpse of what heaven might be like, a hope for something beyond our hard labor, plague and sin.

In other words, transcendence was valued. It’s not to say a majority of those in the past lived saintly lives and didn’t enjoy a dirty joke from time to time. Nor is it to say that transcendent thoughts pre-occupied the lives of everyone. But at least in the art that has survived from past eras, there was a deliberate attempt on the part of the Church and on the part of artists to move men beyond the gutter they often dwelled in. (The churches that have survived from these eras certainly concrete this hypothesis.) That’s no judgment; we might forget that most people did not enjoy cubicles, air conditioning and extra money. Most merely subsisted and enjoyed a precious few creature comforts. Perhaps that is the necessary context for our thoughts to be elevated upward. Maybe we’re high enough already, so we longer see the need for transcendence.

At least, that’s what I’m assuming. As I look at the prevailing trends in American church life, transcendence is either being embraced in more dramatic fashion or being left at the church doors, never to be glimpsed by those who worship. It is being embraced by those (like myself) who are returning to a more liturgical sensibility that seeks to offer a stark contrast to secular media and methods. It is being ignored by those who are seeking to come to God in the most ordinary and the most plain of languages, those who use luxury cars as props for a sermon or dress in $200 denim jeans, and those whose music is tragically reminiscent of the fare on American Idol. The idea here seems to be, “Let’s bring God down to the most ordinary of ideas, the most pedestrian terms. Let’s bring God down to our level.”

But this is the exact opposite of worship’s innate function. It doesn’t ask God to come down to us, but rather, that we strive to go up to him. That’s what worship is, a sacrifice of praise where we commit to transcending above our everyday worries, contexts, and sins. Yet, how can we talk about transcendence, about leaving the very worldly things that tie us down, when we use such worldly language as rock bands, designer clothes, and messages of inspiration loosely based on the Bible, if at all? And more to the point, did anyone ever think it might actually be spiritually dangerous to talk about God in such blatantly ordinary ways? Did any church every stop and think that taking God so casually might also be even worse than taking him for granted, and that he deserves more respect than that? Are these sanctuaries, er, auditoriums, filled with people ready to say “The emperor has no clothes,” or do they soak it all up, as though talking about a transcendent God in such pedantic terms should be no offense? I’m not saying we should wear sackcloth and ashes to church, but did it never occur to these hotshot pastors that there is something fundamentally hypocritical about preaching in a $500 outfit?

This is not to say that we cannot approach God through ordinary means. Indeed, a sacramental theology tells us we can do exactly that. The problematic ordinary way to approach God might be to use rock music and worldly styling to talk about a God who is really just one of the guys, one of our buddies, someone as approachable as a friendly dog. The problematic extraordinary way of approaching God would be to be surrounded by gilded aesthetics and to speak in dry, lofty language about a God who is so far above our understanding, we’re lucky to even be in this ornate sanctuary to hear his beloved gospel.

The beauty of the liturgy is that we are given ordinary things, and they are made extraordinary. We are given ordinary water, and when combined with the Word, we receive baptism and the promise of family and forgiveness. We are given ordinary bread and wine, and coupled with some of Jesus’ last words, are given Communion, the promise of reconciliation and presence. It’s not that God is too far away to approach, or that God is so near, any old worship will do. It’s as though the liturgy has appropriate boundaries, by holding God in an infinite light, but remembering that he came to us through an ordinary laborer.

Jesus offers us clues to transcendence, in that he lived a rather hard life, only to be resurrected. Why do our churches forget this value? Why have we chosen to speak of God in such ordinary ways, that we no longer offer those longing for meaning the very things that can produce it? I ask again, whatever happened to transcendence?

Archi-Types: The opposite personalities and cultures in the architectural workplace

In social situations there is often a tendency to tie the personality of individuals to their job. It is not uncommon to hear of someone being described as the lawyerly type, or the analytically scientific or engineering type. To label a person a good businessman is to endow that individual qualities of persuasiveness, risk-taking, salesmanship and above average pragmatic financial sense. Doctors are often characterized as having extraordinary intellectual and analytical skills that are then supplemented with human empathy. What are the social assumptions on personality type of a architects?

To answer the question is to remember what my assumptions were before I decided to commit to an architectural career. Sine there weren't any architects in my family, all I had to go on were things like television shows, architecture magazines and books. On the one hand, there was Mike Brady of the "Brady Bunch" who seemed to never be at work in the studio (a consistent trait among all TV and movie architects), but who seemed to be a credible everyman and decent father figure. On the other hand there were the somewhat flamboyant appearances of the cape-wearing Frank Lloyd Wright, the thick horn-rim glasses and big bowties of Le Corbusier, I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson. Then there is the most famous architect protagonist in literature, Howard Roark of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead who becomes the embodiment of a true philosophical hero, while also being kind of uncompromisingly stubborn and emotionally vacant.

By the time I began to take architecture courses in college, I started to notice visitors at the crits showing up in a sort of uniform that entailed black dress shirts or turtlenecks, black slacks and distinctive (and usually black) eyeglass frames. I was told that this look derived from Greenwich village in New York, but by the time I went to grad school it became apparent that some architects dedicated themselves to that look while others looked indistinguishable from your typical engineer or contractor. It was at that point that I realized there indeed were a variety of personality types in architecture, and, whether unfair or not, what they wore revealed quite a bit about their cultural and professional orientation, the level to which they valued how they were to be perceived by their peers.

There are those laymen who perceive an architect to be a sort of artistic-minded snob, at times pompous, idealistic while peppered and exhuding an aura of self-importance. Other laymen share the favorable, albeit naive, view of the TV and movie architect, a balanced individual who is grounded in the reality of construction but also elevated by his concern for beauty and the power of abstract ideas. This makes it convenient for the architect to be a protagonist in the story, since he isn't brought down by the negative cache of a slick businessman, a greasy lawyer, or a socially awkward engineer, nor does his work has any ability to drive the setting and story line like that of a doctor. Ever wonder why they never made a drama series about an architecture firm? There's nothing dramatic or sexy about drafting and model building like there is performing surgery, empathizing with patients or dating young medical residents at a hospital.

As most who have been around an architect should know, we are seldom quite like the way we are portrayed in showbusiness, nor are we quite like those guys who show up on Charlie Rose's late night talk show or that are being ridiculed in the local news when presenting an outlandish scheme for the city. To those who have known architecture students while in college, they are a relatively bright segment of the student population that tends to spend entire days and nights at the studio with little to no time to party and socialize. They often feel exhausted and embittered by the countless hours of work, and become even more so when they begin their professional career and notice their former classmates earning much higher pay in other jobs that demanded less time in school to prepare for. For those who don't know an architect personally, we are perceived as earning good money, since what else is one supposed to think of such sharp dressers? The truth is, for every sharp dresser there are just as many more who don't mind wearing plad shirts, kakis and even jeans and who prefer to drive a pick-up truck or korean sub-compact.

That is one of the good things about my profession: there is a lot of room for a wide variety of personalities. The very nature of the job dictates this, in which not only is it expected that we generate an idealized design concept for a building or a group of buildings, but also that we produce a highly detailed graphic manual for the construction of that concept. There is an obvious element of artistic thinking, rational problem solving, as well as modes of communicating that are both highly abstract and redundantly specific. It is quite rare to find one person good at all of those things, and the complex set of skills required to complete a project from start to finish encourages individuals to specialize, especially as a firm grows larger.

The more people specialize the more difficult it becomes for specialists to communicate to each other. When one person spends their day sketching on trace, modeling on a computer and rendering pretty perspectives, the last thing on their minds is the headache involved in how the mechanical louver servicing an electrical meter room will interface with the building envelope. Likewise, haggling with engineers, contractors and the client over unseen construction issues can isolate someone from the quality of the overarching architectural expression. Over time these opposite experiences reinforce a person's mature worldviews, with the artistic/conceptual oriented worker (designer type) dwelling on what is possible and what reality ought to be, while the detailed/construction-oriented worker (technical type) is reminded daily of the grinding reality on getting anything done right.

A deep, almost subconscious, antagonism takes root between these two personality types that, while mostly controlled under cordial relations, can boil over when an intractable problem occurs during a project's development. Often the designer type will argue in some degree to the idea that "this wasn't supposed to happen" while the technical type answers by stating "did you really know what was going to inevitably happen when you decided to design this?" In spite of the respect that each has for each other's knowledge and talents, they also share a little contempt for each other's weaknesses: the technical type's lack of concern on big ideas and beauty tends to annoy designer types, while the designer's lack of knowledge for how things tend to work and go together and the unpredictability of how things happen on site tends to frustrate the technical type. These contrasts of viewpoint lend to a caricaturization of the personality type: At one end, there is the flippant designer, a person who seems constantly aloof from reality, a real dilettante when it comes to construction and someone who resists giving specific answers to detailed questions, but would rather pour their energy and vast quantities overtime getting the fuzzy rendering to look just right. At the other end, there is the grouchy technician, whose stock answer to any design proposal seems to begin with "that ain't gonna work", and gets extremely irrate at last minute design changes since they would rather be out of the office by 5pm to go golfing/fishing, boating, etc.

Although the above is an exaggeration, it serves to clarify a frequent cultural rift in American architectural offices. The two sides will coexist, as they both rely on each other to provide services to the client, but to those working within the workplace, one's experience and professional goals will be deeply affected by the surrounding culture. And they are, in my view, subcultures to the extent that they possess consistent patterns of shared interests, outlook, and ways of relating to people. Over time I've observed where new recruits were coming from, their personality traits and what their roles in the firm became. New employees are usually selected according to their skills and aptitudes that may match what the firm may need at the time. If it's more technical heft that is required, they will choose someone who at school never bowled over the critics, who likely went to an architecture program that emphasized detailing and construction materials and methods. If it's more design prowess the firm wants, they tend to look for graduates who have stunning portfolios of school work, who have done internships at well-known (preferrably foreign) boutique firms, who went to schools that encouraged more concept-driven projects (or who were one of those rare design prodigies in an otherwise meat-and-potatoes architecture program). New recruits are then trained to assume greater responsibilities in the areas of the practice for which they have been chosen, surrounded by older employees that impress their values on them.

In spite of the desire to match needs and wants in a firm, many individuals find out sooner or later that their goals and interests have changed. The young technical type discovers he has a knack for highly creative conceptual design, while the designer type begins to find it difficult to tolerate his continued ignorance of construction detailing and technical coordination. In such instances, a firm may be flexible enough to accomodate to the changing preferences of their employees, choosing to hand such people assignments as a way of retaining them. Often, though, there is little choice but for the employee to leave the firm, hoping another firm will cater to his new-found goals. Since the architecture career can be characterized by lots of moving around from one firm to another, where an architect stays the longest says a lot about his values and cultural affinities. In the American architecture marketplace, firms often have proud reputations as either edgy design firms that cultivate young designers to become the next vanguard or technical firms that are known for their solid working drawings and capacity to execute in volume all sorts of functional building types. Ideally a firm should be both, but one seems to get the attention of the architecture journals, while the others are invited to teach technical workshops at conferences.

As the opposite patterns of culture emerge in the profession, it's difficult not to generalize the people who are part of either side. Designer types seem to have often grown up in established metropolitan areas, or if they are foreign, were part of upper-class families who were encouraged to follow a traditional and respectable profession. Their upbringing and education seems to have placed much attention to cultural history, philosophies and bourgeois sensibilities (there are, of course, numerous exceptions where the most brilliant designers come from the middle of nowhere, ie. Frank Lloyd Wright). If one didn't come from such an auspicious background, it is nevertheless necessary to go to places that promote an artistic community or contain a rich cultural and cosmopolitan character. The emerging designer-type must travel at some point, and as extensively as possible, and even better, find work in these culturally rich environments (Frank Lloyd Wright at Louis Sullivan's office in Chicago, for example). These experiences stimulate the young designer to explore further, and inscribes a pattern of thinking and problem solving that is global and receptive to new ideas (the drawback being that they tend to forget the tried and true.) Once a person is atuned to this way of thinking, it becomes quite difficult to go back and enjoy the more mundane (although just as important) responsibilities of architectural practice.

For those who excel and prefer the more mundane and fundamentally important responsibilities of architecture (and who form the core of billable services that makes architecture a viable and paying career), travel and exposure to more cosmopolitan sensibilities is not too high on their list of priorities. The technical types I have worked with in my career come from all over, most of them sharing middle class suburban and rural backgrounds, and were exposed early to construction-related hobbies. They see their profession not as a cultural undertaking but rather as a job that they happen to do, something they care to do well and accurately within the given time constraints of the workday. Executing a project as best as possible, in spite of all the obstacles that is the construction process, is what counts the most, since what is on the working drawings and specifications will be what is actually built, not what is on the colored rendering and cardboard models. They leave their work at the office and engage in hobbies and activities often unrelated to buildings. While they are quite knowledgeable in the techniques of construction, they often neglect the study of architectural history and contemporary design trends, while ignoring big ideas and big names in the field.

Such knowledge would require extra time away from the office, something designer types often make the time for. The most talented of designers seem to live and breath architecture, devouring publications, absorbing new published projects and revisiting historical references to mine old ideas to better understand current ones. A few will even enter unpaid architectural competitions, producing mountains of colored perspectives, models and other drawings, all done during afterhours at home. It is essentially working for free, and the odds of winning so unlikely that there is no evidently practical reason to do such a thing. What motivates a designer type isn't financial reward, but rather having the chance to create something dramatic and beautiful (with the added media attention being an additional bonus). Participating in competitions or extracurricular design charrettes more importantly engages the designer type with the major theoretical discourse that affects architecture and planning at that point in time. Lessons on how to make walkable cities, formulate sustainable planning strategies and understand contextual design responses are the result of these often laborious exercises. A designer type will also work hard to refine his (supposedly) unique stylistic signature, which is often influenced by their work experience at boutique high-design firms. It is not uncommon for the designer type to agree to work for little to no wage for a world-reknown architect, whether it be Peter Eisenman (who I've been told pays nothing) or UN Studio and countless European studios (who pay barely above minimum wage). From the point of view the designer, the calculus depends not on financial reward, but on architectural wisdom coming from a master. It also lends an added pedigree to a designer and further ensures future positions at the top of a firm's designer totem pole. To designer types, architecture is similar to a priesthood, foresaking worldly wealth in order to devote more of their energy towards the profound spirituality of building design.

The technical types view the above as nonsensical. Instead, the technical types are practical and economic types as well. They are atuned to the bottom line and structure their tasks around the project budget. They do not hesitate to be matter-of-fact about feasability in general. They are careful planners, and they see no practical benefit in spending a bohemian existence working as a virtual volunteer for a boutique experience. There is no time to waste in building a career and a modest lifestyle for their hobbies. Technical types are quite balanced and relate better to laypeople outside, who they are most likely to befriend (and be married to) and helps reinforce a very grounded sense of perspective. In contrast designer types, in my view, have a tendency towards skewed perspectives which has the potential drawback of supporting misguided policy prescriptions and design solutions. Unfortunately the inherent intellectual indifference of technical types give the designers the megaphone in representing the interests of the profession as a whole. The practicality, balance, and wiser understanding of realities on the ground that technical types possess in vast quantities could do much to temper the destructive side-effects that result from designers' blind loyalty to unexamined ideas.

Oh, and by the way, the designer type tends support the politics of the left, while the technical type is often a conservative. Knowing this and other aspects about the two personality poles that define the profession, you can get a slightly better idea of what is it about contemporary architecture you might not like.

Finally…Liberation Theology’s Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost

Hunkering down in mainline seminaries all over America is an invidious, but popular theology, a myopic view of Jesus’ teachings on “social justice”: liberation theology. This theological construct has grown from a Latin American fight for social equality in the 1960s to become a ubiquitous term applicable to any number of purported theologies that belong to minorities or the “oppressed.” In and of itself, it is hard to define, as so many disparate groups have clung on to its base principles to make their own unique theological claims. For the most part, this has been an academic exercise. But slowly these academic lessons found their way into pulpits across America, and became part of bigger social and political movements. The liberation theology movement is now on the precipice of its greatest triumph with Barack Obama: electing an American President well-schooled in liberation theology.

Alongside the somewhat improbable rise of Obama into the national spotlight have been his spiritual influences, notably Jeremiah Wright and Fr. Michael Phleger. Far from being the fringe, these two men are prime examples of liberation theology, as much as that genre can even be defined. To be intellectually honest, however, even the soundbytes now made famous do not do this theological framework justice, even if I am gladdened that millions of Americans are now exposed to what a lot of my seminary education was about. Liberation theology does indeed deserve criticism, but not for the outbursts seen on YouTube, but because of its problems in principle.

Liberation Theology is an assortment of theological views that purport to be from the “underside.” To put it in practical terms, it is not built on the theological assumptions of old, white, middle-class theologians, but rather from the poor, who are seen to have a “preferential option” in the gospels. This preferential option gives the poor an exalted status, and the freedom to ignore the theology of the “rich,” and promote a theology to their own circumstances. But while it is true that Jesus’ had a specific ministry to the poor (“Blessed are the poor” in Luke, for example), his ministry and crucifixion ultimately were for the whole world, which makes any theology principally bound to one economic group limited at best. A woman, for example, wasted expensive nard on his feet, instead of giving it to the poor as Judas suggested.

Many of liberation theology’s assumptions are fueled by rebutting European theological giants, as these giants made too many assumptions about God because of their wealth and their whiteness. Their experience of God, from a liberation theologian’s point-of-view, will in fact create God in the image of the white man, saying next to nothing about the experiences of those the white man abused and enslaved. This negative attitude towards the historically white, European, and academic theological teachings opened a Pandora’s Box to theological diversity.

I call this diversity a Pandora’s Box not because diversity in and of itself is a bad thing; it is clearly something to be cherished in creation. Rather, with this theological diversity came a fissure, a schism every bit as severe as the Reformation, maybe even worse. The basic driving assumption of liberation theology is this: my theology needs to speak to my situation. So if I am black, I need a theology that represents the experiences of black people.

But the list doesn’t end with black Americans, who do have legitimate complaints about the way their souls were ignored during times of enslavement. Feminists have their own brand of liberation theology, as do queers (this is the PC term), Hispanics, black women (Womanist Theology), Native Americans, South Koreans, and the list is virtually never-ending. At times, these divisions even clash with one another, as white feminists who supported Womanist theology were once accused of overreaching and extending an unwelcome hand: “We don’t need your help, thank you very much.”

I hope it’s clear that this theological “diversity” is ultimately untenable in the Church, a paradox of real, not esoteric consequences. If theology is truly “God talk”, and God and his actions are truly universal, how can a theology be tailor-made to ethnic, racial, gender and sexual preference groups? It can’t, and this is the fundamental intellectual failure of liberation theology. In trying to speak for dozens if not hundreds of different groups, each group has become as guilty as the white Europeans: they also made God in their own image.

Further, liberation theology has rightly been accused of having close ties to a Marxist philosophy, focusing not on the transcendent aspects of the Christian faith, but the faulty belief that we can create the kingdom of God on earth. Even Barack Obama, in a dramatic oversight, said as much here. And in this speech, given at least twice at two different college commencements, one very recently, he said this: “Because our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation. And because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential.” This is rather unabashed Marxism, tying personal salvation to the collective good. This is the core of what liberation theology has become, or perhaps has always been.

If Obama doesn’t win in November, the primary reason could be his ideology, which is deeply rooted in liberation theology. It wasn’t just the clout that attracted him to Trinity Church, it was the theology, which he found to be comfortable, especially given his political leanings.

Two Houses: the different modern yet traditional approaches between house and nature

In spite of the building type's relatively small size, the house is often the most challenging building type for even the most masterful of architects. In part it is because of the personal and complicated nature of the client relationship, but also it is due to the tension between a flexible yet individualized program and a freedom for the architect to demonstrate their concept of the meaning of home. Some of history's best architects built their reputations in a series of one-of-a-kind houses, while producing few large-scale institutional or commercial buildings. At the other end, world-reknowned designers known for their striking museums, academic buildings or stadiums often produce forgettable houses. Many of the latter will only choose commissions that allow them almost unbridled freedom, where they are expected to reimagine dwellings beyond our familiar notions. Such houses are not only unique due to the uniqueness of their client, they are also special in that they embody functions beyond simple domestic living.


This liberal adding of functions was evident in recent tours of a couple of homes designed by genuine "starchitects" in Dallas. In both instances, the houses contained traditional living spaces such as bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms, but were then supplemented by spacious exhibtion spaces for their private art collection. There were vast areas designed for entertaining, as these houses are known to hold frequent fundraisers, meetings and art shows. The first house I toured, the Rachofsky residence by Richard Meier, can be described as 10,000 square foot one bedroom/one bath home. The living spaces are tucked to the far corners of the house, with kitchen squeezed at the bottom floor, the small bedroom and bathrooms perched on the third floor, and the rest of the large volume given over to exhibition space for the owner's private (and frequently changing) contemporary art collection. The Rachofsky house is the very embodiment of the house as museum. Add to that the precision, whiteness and mild austerity that is Richard Meier's signature style, and it becomes clear that the architect (and client) were less interested in designing a modest home than in wedding his previous museum prototypes to the scale of and in minor deference to someone's private bachelor pad.


The second house, Antoine Predock's house at Turtle Creek, is different in that the residential functions are a bit more prominent and are actually lived in (the owner of the Rachofsky house no longer lives there, as it became to difficult to live within a museum, or in other words, too many art lovers wanted visit). The bedroom and master bath are larger, the kitchen is packed with food, and the formal dining room is celebrated by being perched on the upper level, connected by stairs, bridges and an elevator (which allows it to be serviced by the kitchen below). The living room is really an extension of the house's gallery, dotted with sculpture pieces that are so "contemporary" that it isn't hard to mistake some of them for everyday objects. But the gallery spaces are nothing compared to the sprawling roof terrace wich consists of gentle ramps and walkways spanning the entire length and breadth of the house, not to mention a small amphitheatre. However, the singular feature of the Rose house is its birdwatching bridge, which allows one to walk from upper level to a small steel platform nestled on top of the shady tree canopy. From the platform she not only can look at birds but also look down at the rocky creek that circumscribes the site. Unlike Meier's house, with its almost baroque relationship to the site in that it sits on an artificially flat site at the end of an axis facing a major street fronted by monumentally modern gate, Predock's house virtually hides itself, integrating itself to the sloped and shady site, with nary a true public facade but instead incorporates a series of massive planted terraces as its long front wall. The backyard is laced with footpaths leading to the creek and is framed by a large curtain wall, with one portion covered by a large curved surface of mirror-polished stainless steel, concealing the house even more by reflecting the thick tree canopies opposite to it.

From the two houses' contrasting relationships to the surroundings reveal contrasting heritages in the modern domestic design. The first of these is to have the building dominate the landscape, with all landscape features arranged to emphasize the house so as to make it monumental. This is in keeping with a tradition that date from at least the ancient classical era, and was a standard site planning practice since the Renaissance. It is intended to enhance the symbolic function of the building, drawing to either the building's owner or the institution that is represented by it. The second heritage is of merging the building to the original contours of the landscape, deliberately minimizing its monumental presence in favor of achieving harmony with the natural surroundings. This relates to the picturesque tendency in landscape design, The winding steets of medieval towns and the organic agglomerations of medieval monestaries. Harmonizing with the land explains the dramatic effects of works by Arts and Craft masters and the dazzling works of Frank Lloyd Wright.


Maintaining a more traditionally monumental heritage, Richard Meier's personal style can be described as a kind of "Corbusier revival". More specifically he adopts of the vocabulary of the old master's series of white villas during the 1920's. In both the opaque treatment of the front of the house and glassy and open terrace treatment on the back side, The Rachofsky house shares an almost literal resemblance to Le Corbusier's design for Gertrude Stein's villa outside Paris. Beyond their shared lack of color on the outside, both Meier and Le Corbusier separate the wall from structure, exploit the idea of the free facade with openings and reinforce the free plan with a continuation of volume in between floor levels. Meier expands Le Corbusier's concepts even further by overlaying an orthogonal grid on both the exterior treatment as well as in organizing the interior spaces. In an almost quintessentially baroque move, Meier expands this grid onto the surrounding landscape, creating in essence a "tabula rasa", a perfectly blank slate on which the house sits, so as to avoid having to confront the randomness of nature. Implementing this grid in so many dimensions requires a great deal of precision, which is exhibited in the quality of the architectural details. Whereas Le Corbusier has never been able to execute detail with much skill, Meier's buildings demonstrate a perfectionism of detailing to a point that they almost lose their human touch in favor of a kind machine-like quality that has always eluded the man who saw houses as "machines for living". There is, nonetheless, a genuine playfulness within the Rachofsky house's careful composition as Meier subdivides the cube to modulate transparency and opacity to reflect function, to carve outside terraces and emphasize stairways. And although the house subjugates the land around it, nature is brought inside as copious glazed surfaces frame detailed views of the outside. Natural light permeates almost all spaces within the house, and the intricate pattern of the window mullions reinforce an awareness of the passage of time when they project changing shadows onto the surfaces.




Predock's house engages with its natural surroundings in a more metaphorical way. The house introvertedly addresses the steet, with no windows facing out and built-in vegetation helping minimize its actual large size. The site itself is covered with trees and tall shrubs, offering less abundant natural light to the interior of the house. Add that to the massive concrete walls that run throughout the house, and there is an overall cavernous feel to the spaces. This is balanced by the positioning spaces to capture specific directional views to the outside, with curved walls bowing to the outside to maximize the panoramic views. When one studies the actual plan of the house, the bold geometry of the circle combined with the circle stands out, and instantly seems to reference Frank Lloyd Wright's habit of creatively incorporating sacred shapes. There is a linear axis that organizes the gallery spaces and the main stair and roof terrace, from which the circle and triangle extend outward from the axis. This is countered by a more diminutive axis that articulates a path directly to a light steel bridge outside that terminates at the birdwatching platform. The whole house seems to take the cue of the owner's fondness for birdwatching, in which the wide variety of floor levels and steps and its exansive roof garden under the tree canopies gives recalls a tree with branches at multiple heights, offering distinctive views depending on where one is perched.



Both houses reveal the different approaches and in how geometric devices organize form and generate particular effects. In spite of its appearance as a rigid rectangular prism, Meier's house is an ode to the grid and hidden regulating lines and its resultant flexibility and freedom (much like Le Corbusier had preached). Predock distills abstract geometic shapes derived from conditions of the site and then proceeds to fit the program within the strict spatial parameters of these shapes. Such bold geometric gestures (and a rich palette of materials) lend the visitor's attention instantly to the architecture and seems to minimize the presence of the outside. Wedge-shaped rooms and curved glass walls make each space unique yet all-consuming. In contrast, the minimal whiteness and strict orthogonal character of Meier's house allows the architecture inside to dissolve and accentuates the outside environment more intensely. There is however an inverse effect when seen from the outside: the very orthogonality and whiteness brings much more attention to the building than to its natural environment. The cool grays and beiges from Predock's use of concrete and stone has the opposite effect, and its axial and sharp geometries slightly mimick the contours of the land.


Which house more appropriately addresses the surrounding context? Both do, but they respond to different kinds of places. Meier's Rachofsky house is situated at Preston Hollow, an up-scale neighborhood defined by the relatively flat land and generous suburban tracts. Predock's Rose house is situated along Turtle Creek in a neighborhood that was landscaped by a master of the picturesque style made popular in the U.S. by Frederic Law Olmstead. Neither seem to cry out for attention even as their neighbors in the form of McMansions do by coming close to the street and assuming as tall a profile as possible. The Rachofsky house sits near the rear of the site, preceded by a giant front lawn and a minimalist wall with gate facing the street. The Rose house atually frames a private drive with its planter walls, but it almost appears as if it had been there for a long time like an ancient Mayan ruin. From any other side, the house becomes invisible, even from across the creek veiled by lush vegetation and minimal landscaping. The Rose house is indeed quite the private refuge, while the Rachofsky house is more of late 1990s chateaux which has become more institutional in function as it has embraced a role as a public art gallery of sorts.



And now for the more interesting question: which do I like better? Judging from my pen-name, it would appear that I would be partisan to Meier, as he carries the torch of Le Corbusier's stylistic innovations. Meier's work has had a subtle influence on my personal design style even if I would never impose such a limited palette of color and material as he does. Predock is a precocious form-maker that gives his buildings symbolic value, using materials that often harmonize well to the outside context. Yet his sense of scale and proportion are somewhat lacking judging from the few buildings of his I've actually visited. Predock's details, while clean, are a bit dull when observed more closely, something that often occurs with architects who pay too much attention to the shapes of building volumes. Meier's house doesn't seem to fall into the same trap as he exhibits graceful proportion and exquisite detailing. Nothing is left to arbitrariness and each of the most minor of elements are carefully considered. There are many little coves and hidden spaces to maintain a visitor's interest even within the simple cubic volume. Daylight strikes the surfaces and exposes a rich variety of forms, profiles and the play of shadows in the passage of time. Predock seems less concerned for the architecture to reveal itself than to dissolve itself as part of a natural setting. The birdwatching bridge and platform are symbolic of this, its thin and lightweight steel structure tries to remove attention to itself in favor the tree canopies, while the vast areas of the house devoted to the roof garden diminishes the importance of the interior spaces. Such a focus on the outdoor experience seems to be undercut by the lack of warm surface materials, with monotonous grey concrete (or stucco?), grey painted concrete roof deck and colorless conrete pavers on the grounds make for an unstimulating impression. Even Meier with his strict material and color palette manages to make his exterior spaces more alive with use of water from the reflecting pool than brings the blueness of the sky to the groundplane. The contemporary sculpture pieces also benefit from the austerity of the landscape, some of which punctuate one's view with bright and bold colors.


It is important to understand that what makes these houses such a treasure for any city to have is not in their practical quality. Neither of the houses are models of functionality or performance. Both houses are inefficiently planned, and both contain spaces that are much larger than most people would need, while others are a bit smaller or less easily accessible. Their value isn't determined by how well their systems work, whether it is necessarily wise that Meier's house has a huge West-facing glass wall that overheats the house, or whether there may be possible leaks from so large a roof terrace. Such points of criticism are all too common when arguing about what's wrong with a work of architecture, as they concentrate on issues have little to do with a design's overarching concepts.


As much as the practice of architecture entails the technical with the artistic, it must be remembered that it is the latter that is the privilege and the domain of the architect with regard to a building. They produce the main concept to which all elements are organized, to which the client must buy into and to which the contractor must realize in a finished state. Meier and Predock were chosen for their conceptual prowess and were expected to liberally wield their influence in all aspects of project. Under their care, a project's success is due to its capacity to express its concept in multiple dimensions and at various scales. The quality of expression in both houses is exceptional and a real pleasure for lovers of architecture, from the precision and subtle playfulness of Meier to the bold geometries and creative response to the site by Predock. The level of execution in both houses is extraordinary, but even more important is the degree to which they convey the mind of their designers in as personal a design vehicle as the house.

Beauty and Waste: More Thoughts on Space and Worship

While watching a television show the other day about bread, I learned of a simple, but beautiful custom of Jewish bread bakers. While preparing the traditional Jewish bread Chullah, the baker will tear off a portion and bake it by itself, or simply throw it away. Traditionally, this was for the temple priests, offered as a tithe. But the tradition continues today to act as a sort of sacrifice, a reminder that God provides all that is needed, and this portion of the bread can, in essence, be wasted. This expresses very well what is at the core worship…that a component of waste is helpful in understanding what it’s really about, that it’s not a business, and that indulgence is, in a tangible way, a wonderful reminder of all that we have been given.

But in a conservative and efficient culture, waste has come to be seen as an altogether negative concept. In a culture where the “bottom line” dictates our thinking and where energy is to be prized, to waste at all is almost a sign of weakness, or failure. Certainly no church with a “green” conscious would want to be wasteful. But I’m not talking about turning up the thermostat or using plastic plates instead of Styrofoam, but substantial choices about space and aesthetics. We see, for example, the elevation of the “big box church”, where, even when churches have money, thoughts of beauty and waste are rarely afforded the architect. Instead, any space, be it a movie theatre, basketball arena, or shopping mall, can be converted into a place of worship, even if terribly tacky and not suited very well to the task. I can hear the head pastor saying, “Hey, they offered a free six month’s rent and it’ll seat 3,500! Perfect!”

But how can you convince someone that it might be worth creating a space that’s less than efficient, and that might take years to complete, not months? I could certainly quote scripture, where Jesus defends a woman who cleans his feet with costly nard. Surely this text allows the Church to be “wasteful” when it comes to adoring Christ. And it’s hard to argue that beautiful spaces help us do such adoring. Yet, this idea is foreign to many Protestants, who give little regard to aesthetics in lieu of practicalities like financing, efficiency and multi-use space.

Instead of offering beauty and mystery to its congregants, it replaces those needs with an emotional experience and preaching that promises certainty. The spaces used is often more corporate and functional than beautiful. Indeed, one has to wonder looking at the stage lighting and drum set surrounded by Plexiglas if beauty ever entered their minds. In other words, the space need not communicate; we’ll do all the talking. And talk they do. And talk, and talk, and talk…

But true worship, and its space, I would argue, may best be understood from the paradigm of waste. Yes, waste, as in, a sacrifice. After all, we agree we’ll only be here for a short time. So let’s enjoy it, and let’s splurge on our place of worship. Let Wal-Mart keep costs down by erecting ugly buildings. Let’s tack on another 5 years of a mortgage for stained glass, stone, flexible spaces and flowing fonts. Let our buildings speak volumes about our faith, let them say something when our words cannot. Let our worship be influenced by natural, not artificial light, and let the space be good for one thing and one thing only: worship.

Of course, there is a dark side to this way of thinking, and as always, we must find a “happy medium.” I think of Soren Kierkegaard’s critique of opulent, but spiritually dead churches. I found this quote here:

“Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher-theologian, once described how he went into the great cathedral in Copenhagen and sat in a cushioned seat and watched as sunlight streamed through stained glass windows. He saw the pastor, dressed in a velvet robe, take his place behind the mahogany pulpit, open a gilded Bible, mark it with a silk marker and read, 'Jesus said, "If any man be my disciple he must deny himself, sell whatsoever he has, give to the poor and take up his cross and follow me."' Kierkegaard said, 'As I looked around the room I was amazed that nobody was laughing.’

Here, in very few words is the perfect critique of waste for all the wrong reasons. When visual beauty takes the place of serving one’s neighbor, the issue has gotten away from us.

But the other extreme offers us problems as well. I’m reminded of a college friend critiquing the church, saying it was wasteful to even build a church. God could be worshipped out in the fields just as well. Wasn’t God in nature? But what about all that wasted nard? This story tells me that if we waste our treasure correctly, then it’s okay to waste it.

Or in other words, there are ways in which we worship beyond our feelings and our words; prayers in stone matter, too. Indeed they stand apart from a world that is looking more and more monolithic, where big box churches, malls and retail stores blend together all too seamlessly. Funny that when the architecture blends together, so too does the music, theology, and driving motivations for even existing.

Podcast #4

Relievedebtor and corbusier discuss all things green as they relate to architecture, design and morality. Are green changes in design really good for the earth? What are the costs? And who can afford them? Check out Episode #4 here.