The Transforming North American City

Graham Livesey, MAAA, MRAIC

The space of urban sprawl is not enclosed and directed as in traditional cities. Rather, it is open and indeterminate, identified by points in space and patterns on the ground; these are two-dimensional or sculptural symbols in space rather than buildings in space, complex configurations that are graphic or representational [1].

Many have written about the seemingly chaotic and incoherent evolution of late twentieth century North American cities, of the endless development and lack of connection between structure and inhabitation. When one examines urban growth during the last several decades it is evident that traditionally recognizable urban spaces, forms and elements have given way to a more complex and elusive interplay of constructions, technologies and spaces. Albert Pope, in his recent book Ladders, explores the radical transformation that the North American city has undergone. Pope argues that we have collectively failed to understand the true nature of the changes to the city, knowledge of which would substantially alter our strategies for urban design. In particular he stresses that applying formal models from the past will not do anything to contribute to or change the new urban spaces that surround the vestiges of the nineteenth century gridiron city.

The primary transformation has been the shift from an emphasis on form to an emphasis on space. The predominance of space, paradoxically, developed at the same time that the structure of the city changed from an open to a closed system. Pope makes much of the fact that the open and fragmented city, the city of "ladders;" a ladder he defines as the "remainder of a partially eroded grid" [2]. The ladder is a useful structural notion that describes suburbia and shares, as Pope points out, peculiar similarities with urban models proposed in the 1940s by Ludwig Hilbersheimer.

Pope also notes that an important innovation of modernist architecture and urbanism was the materialization of space and the consequent dematerialization of architecture. Reyner Banham has succinctly described the early modernist conception of space as infinite and homogeneous, measured by an invisible system or structure of coordinates, and having a particular emphasis placed on motion, either by the observer or implied by the structure. [3] Along with other developments, modernist preoccupations with space began to have a dramatic effect at the urban scale in the post Second World War era. This has resulted in the immense spaces of the contemporary city that "overwhelm the architetural gesture, [and] ultimately dominate the contemporary urban environment. Vast parking lots, continuous or sporadic zones of urban decay, undeveloped or razed parcels, huge public parks, corporate plazas, high-speed roads and urban expressways, the now-requisite cordon sanitaire surrounding office parks, industrial parks, theme parks, malls and subdivisions..." [4] These are some of the new spatial types or conditions that define contemporary urbanism and which, in the late twentieth century, are of a different nature from the Cartesian space that defined early modernism. These are spaces that architects and planners tend to ignore as forms of urban blight.

The postindustrial city, that emerged coincidentally with the electronic revolution, can be described as complex, free-flowing spaces interrupted by urban detritus (buildings, signs, etc) and zones, paradoxically, as closed systems, by the transportation and infrastructure patterning (roads, parking, nominal pedestrian spaces, etc) of the horizontal surfaces. Urban space is made sensible by rules and signs that direct movement and action. This notion is affirmed by Susan Sontag when she writes '...space is black, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets...' [5] Similar ideas are explored in Robert Venturi's important study on the urban strip, Learning from Las Vegas, in which the large roadside sign scaled to the moving automobile becomes synonymous with architecture.

Some architects and urbanists are responding imaginatively to the challenges provided by the contemporary city, these include Rem Koolhaas and OMA, Steven Holl, Bernard Tschumi and Foreign Office Architects. Koolhaas's Euralille project for Lille, France ties together various transporation systems (rail, roads, etc) with exhibition, commercial and office space in an enormous complex that takes on issues of infrastructure and scale typical of the postindustrial city. Steven Holl has confronted the edge of cities with a series of provocative recent projects, including Stitch Plan (Cleveland, Ohio), Spatial Retaining Bars (Phoenix, Arizona) and Spiroid Sectors (Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas). FOA's Terminal Project for Yokohama also addresses a major transportation hub with an intriguing architectural strategy for engaging the ground plane of the city and functionality. There are strategies for inhabiting the spaces of the postindustrial city: deconstructing the rules, building new reference systems, searching for new architectural typologies and scales or establishing a choreography of events.

"The latest mutation of space--postmodern hyperspace--has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. And this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment..." [6]

The anchoring of the body in space, or as Merleau-Ponty describes it, "the laying down of first co-ordinates" [7] is an essential part of human existence. This establishing of orientation and direction in space, or location, indicates that any understanding of space emanates from the body. Our actions take place against the background of the world, and it is through human movement, our motility, that we discover our spatiality, both bodily and worldly. Our bodies belong to space, and space belongs to our bodies; it is a reciprocal relationship that we experience and construct. We anchor ourselves through our motions in and through space, laying down coordinates of our inhabitation: the positioning and orientation, mapping and dreaming. However, as Frederic Jameson states, a disjunction has arisen between the body and the city.

In an architectural vein Merleau-Ponty writes: "to experience a structure is not to receive it into oneself passively: it is to live it, to take it up, assume it and discover its immanent significance." [8] Through the intentionality of our actions, through our human inventiveness (ie. building [9]), we make the potential in space come alive. Despite the scale of contemporary urban space (and the closed systems on the ground), its constantly shifting boundaries and the necessity for an endless system of signs to render it comprehensible the hermeneutical role of architecture persists, as does the need to find strategies for finding locations in space.

Notes

1. R. Venturi et al, Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1972, p. 81.
2. A. Pope, Ladders. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, p. 61.
   
3. R. Banham, Age of the Masters. London: The Architectural Press, 1975, p. 51.
   
4. Pope, Ladders, pp. 3-5.
   
5. S. Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980, p. 117.
6. F. Jameson, "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review, No. 145 (1984), p. 84.
   
7. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 100.
   
8. ibid, p. 258.
   
9. see M. Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" in Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Graham Livesey, MAAA, MRAIC, is an Associate Professor in the Architecture Program (Faculty of Environmental Design) at the University of Calgary and a principal in Down + Livesey Architects.