Not Built in a Day

Years ago, I don't remember exactly when, I learned about redlining , disinvestment in America's cities, and how African American families were denied the opportunities given to white families to buy homes in new suburban neighborhoods throughout the early to mid 20th century.  But I thought these racist practices were pursued by individual banks and maybe local governments; I didn't think much about the widely-heard statement that de facto segregation (that is, individual or socially-enforced segregation, not government-enforced segregation) was the common practice during the Jim Crow era (1870s-1960s) .  But it turns out I was wrong, as historian Richard Rothstein persuasively argues in The Color of Law (2017), and it was actually de jure , government-sponsored and enforced, segregation that afflicted American cities across the country.  It was not just the racism of specific banks or bankers that created redlining and white flight, but government policies, at the ...

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York  by Robert Caro is a 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction/biographical account of  Robert Moses' career in New York City.  Many others have written better reviews of the book, the  writing of the book , and even  re-evaluations of the book , so I won't try to re-invent the wheel (or tire).  What I do want to try here is to express my reaction to the book, and pull out some choice excerpts that relate most strongly to my own interests in urbanism and architecture. I have a favorite saying:  Never blame on malice what you can blame on ignorance .  I had always blamed poor city planning and transit problems in New York City on ignorance.  Now, I know better.  Planners at the time of Moses knew his policies would be failures -- but they had no power to stop him, so he went ahead anyway.  You might be able to claim that Moses' excuse was ignorance, but it was willful ignora...

Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks  by Professor Annabel Jane Wharton* After reading Professor Wharton's most recent book,  Architectural Agents  ( my review is here ), I knew I needed to read her previous volume,  Selling Jerusalem (from 2006).  And I'm pleased that I finally did!  The book covered a wide swath of topics I find interesting: Israel/Palestine, Early Christianity, architecture (of course), theme parks, and art history.  Professor Wharton weaves a dual narrative of how Jerusalem has been "consumed" in the West by means of its images (in the form of relics, reproductions, panoramas, etc) at the same time that that consumption has changed together with changing economic systems (from gifting and barter, to monetary exchange, to late capitalism and globalization).  The brief "Conclusion" chapter gives an excellent and succinct recapitulation of the book's arguments:  "This text argues that the forms by which Je...

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles  (1990, updated Preface from 2006) by Mike Davis is a strange book.  Honestly, I still have no idea what the title is about.  As the back of the book notes, it's a work of "sociology/urban studies," meaning some of it is about urbanism, and some of it is a social history.  I also have to admit that several of the chapters, the social history ones, had little interest for me; they chronicled a specific moment in LA history that, as a non-resident, doesn't seem to have a lot of interest or general usefulness now.  But several of the chapters described a city wrestling with the effects of suburbanization and affluent NIMBYism that were the precursors to today's continued urban problems, and those in particular are worth a read. Davis is an academic and a Marxist, approaching his topics with a clear view as to questions of social and economic equality, which colors much of his commentary.  But his anal...

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) by Jane Jacobs is a classic of urban planning and urban design, and I really have no excuse for getting around to reading it so late in the game.  I knew about it for ages, knew everyone quoted Jacobs whenever possible, and yet it took me until I was about to teach an introductory class on architecture & urbanism to get a copy for myself.  I finally finished it and definitely recommend it.  It's fascinating both for her foresight to what was coming in city planning, and her recognition early on of the factors and problems that we've taken decades to face in the academy.  Her understanding of cities was deep, built on personal experience, research, and speaking with planners, city officials, and academics.  Without formal academic training in urban design, which at the time was focused on then-radical theories of superblocks, towers-in-the-park, and "urban renewal" (neighborhood-scale building demoliti...

Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings  (2015) by my undergraduate architectural history professor, Annabel Jane Wharton, is an imagining of what it means when we say that buildings "act" or "do things" in the world.  Architects and architectural historians like to think that buildings are active -- taking roles in the built environment, shaping human action -- but if pressed, we might not be able to say exactly what we mean by that.  Of course buildings don't move or act in a traditional sense, we'll say.  But they can enable, or conversely, proscribe limits to, human action.   In her introduction, Professor Wharton goes further, exploring the agency of buildings as grounded in their unique, embodied, historical characteristics, which allow them to have distinct social and political effects.  Wharton writes, "Now, as in the past, buildings may be immobile, but they are by no means passive.  [...]  [M]ost bu...

A Country of Cities is the book I think we should all send our parents, to help them understand what it is we are facing as a generation when it comes to climate change, land use, changing lifestyles, urbanism, sustainability, etc.  Vishaan Chakrabarti, partner at SHoP Architects in New York and a GSAPP professor of real estate development , has put together a fully-researched and attractively illustrated book that breaks down urbanism into simple illustrations explaining how the US came to be a nation of "highways, hedges, and houses," and how he thinks we should instead work toward a country of cities, of "trains, trees, and towers," to use his phrase.  The book is a polemic, an unabashed argument for greater density in our cities, fewer cars, and, most importantly, fewer subsidies for the suburbs, which he argues is the one of the biggest reasons we Americans are as sprawling, land-wasting, and unsustainable as we are. The first part of the book lays o...

I know I'm a little late to the Games here, but after watching Catching Fire  I finally got around to reading the trilogy .  And what surprised me the most wasn't the first-person present narration of the books (although that was both surprising and annoying) but the persistent focus on hunger .  Having only seen the movies, I had no sense that food, hunger, and poverty played such an important role in the novels; that part of the story isn't easily translated to the screen, so in the films it gets passed over in favor of the flashy action sequences.  But hunger is a thread woven throughout The Hunger Games , from Katniss's hunting expeditions, to the stark poverty of the District, to the lavish fare of the Capitol, to the search for food and water in the arena.  Katniss and Peeta's relationship is defined by his gift of bread when they are children, just as Katniss and Gale's relationship is defined by their shared struggle to provide food for their families. ...

Although Laura Kurgan was not directly one of my studio critics at GSAPP, I was able to work with her somewhat as part of the C-BIP Studio, where she, David Benjamin, and my assigned critic Scott Marble teamed up to co-teach a joint studio on parametric design and building systems.  I appreciated Laura as an attentive and careful critic, but I didn't get to learn much about her own work until reading her book, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics (2013).  I attended a lecture that she gave introducing the book in 2013, then finally got around to reading it this past year. As the title of the book suggests, Laura's work focuses on mapping, especially on satellite and surveillance imagery as used in mapping, which allows for a "close up" image of the world taken "at a distance."  I thought her lecture was extremely interesting, which was the reason I bought and read the book.  Her work tries to deconstruct the process of satellite i...

Every year Columbia GSAPP releases a yearbook of sorts , full of student work from the previous year.  This year's Abstract , designed by Stefan Sagmeister ,   has been setting the school a-buzz, but not for the usual reasons.  Because this year's  Abstract  was a decoy. Inside the flimsy plastic case that resembles a book is... nothing, just a web address spelled out in block letters, like the packaging for some alphabet toy.  The actual  Abstract  is an electronic-only affair, downloadable from this website , available as an application only for desktop computers (Windows and Mac) and iPads (sorry, Android).  There is no web version.  So far I've only seen a limited preview, since I don't have an iPad, and I don't spend much time at home.  I've heard numerous complaints that the application doesn't work at all, but I hope to find out for myself... eventually.  From what I've seen by looking over the shoulder of someone ...

I finally finished reading YES IS MORE: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution (2009), which is the monograph by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) in Denmark ( company website ).  My overall feeling from reading the book, which is in comic-book format, complete with endless images of Bjarke Ingels himself speaking in speech bubbles, is that it's like watching a train wreck: terrifying and somewhat sickening but you can't look away.  It's organized into a series of apparently chronological chapters, each of which covers one design.  I understand that this book is directed to a general public, not to architects, which accounts for some of the vast oversimplification that occurs in its descriptions of the architectural design process; and that it's a manifesto of sorts, which explains its overly enthusiastic tone and sweeping generalizations.  And yet, there were many points at which I didn't want to continue reading any further, didn't want to look at any more of the...

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by scientist and geographer Jared Diamond was not a book I intended to read, but it was sitting around the house after being lent to us by a friend, so I picked it up to read on the plane.  Collapse describes how different factors have contributed, to different degrees, to the collapse of various human societies across time and around the world, with a focus on the role played by environmental degradation.  Diamond is better known for his bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, and has a journalistic rather than academic style, addressed to educated laymen.  While I wasn't very impressed with his writing style or his overly pedantic presentation of the material ("Now we will discuss X, then we will discuss Y"..."As we saw in X, we will now see in Y," etc), I was interested enough in the topic to make it through all 500+ pages of the book.  In short, Diamond lays out how human impact on the environment, especially d...