Design
ARCHITECTURE OR TECHNO-UTOPIA: Politics After Modernism by Felicity D. Scott.
BRANDSCAPES: Architecture in the Experience Economy by Anna Klingmann.
Both published by MIT Press.
Scott excavates and narrates designers and architectures both well known and little remembered from the late 60s and early 70s, in a context and in language of primary interest to academics. I was interested to see Buckminster Fuller taken seriously within 20th century design, though his theoretical context is not fully stated. Klingmann’s approach is more generally accessible and more contemporary. I appreciated her detailed treatment of architectural guru John Jerde, but her description of how Faneuil Hall Marketplace came about is a little off.
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Friday, December 28, 2007
Saturday, May 19, 2007
The Real Work Continued
Where are we now, how did we get here, what can we therefore do to save the future? These are the concerns of serious books in these serious, critical times. The climate crisis and related environmental catastrophes as well as geopolitical, social and cultural factors that combine to threaten the existence of civilization and humanity itself, form the context if not the content of our most important writing.
The present and recent past are the subject of the most prominent and popular of these books, such as Bill McKibben's Deep Economy (Times Books), Benjamin Barber's Consumed (W.W. Norton) and Al Gore's forthcoming The Assault on Reason (Penguin Press.) But there are also new scholarly books that examine more of the history contributing to the crises of the moment, and that go into greater detail about what a successful future could look like, and how to get there.
The mid 19th century era of industrialization is emerging as a key period in analyzing our present predicaments. In West From Appomattox (Yale University Press), historian Heather Cox Richardson chronicles the rise of a peculiarly American middle class in the post-Civil War Reconstruction and western expansion. She presents a compelling narrative of this era of racial tensions and the greed of the Gilded Age.
American Leviathan (Hill & Wang) by historian Patrick Griffin begins the story even earlier, in the westward expansion after the Revolutionary War. Like Richardson, he writes about savagery on the frontier, particularly against American Indians but also against the land itself in a war for dominance of all against all and for the accumulation of power and wealth. Yet Griffin also organizes a nuanced political argument concerning the development of a peculiarly American relationship of citizen and state.
Alan Trachtenberg emphasized the rise of corporations in the late 19th century in his classic book, The Incorporation of America, (Hill & Wang) just reissued in a 25th anniversary edition. Now Trachtenberg (Yale Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies) adds color and cultural context to this period in a collection of essays entitled Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas (Hill & Wang.) These essays expand on another important theme linking the past to the future: the influence of media--from photography to film, fiction to architecture-- in shaping perceptions. Though he begins with Hawthorne, Lincoln, Whitman and Mark Twain, he also takes us into the 20th century and into the modern city, with Horatio Alger, Walker Evans, Louis Sullivan, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford and Wright Morris. These frequently provocative portraits provide the sense of the times that supplements broader narratives.
The benefits and destructiveness of technology have been major themes from the 19th century onward, and technology is certainly at the center of the climate crisis and other challenges to the future. In Culture of Improvement (MIT Press), Robert Friedel concentrates on technological developments and their relationship to their times. This is a thorough study, well illustrated, that emphasizes the social context--the expectations that new technologies fulfilled and in turn created for newer technologies. The significance of Friedel's central argument--exploring how new machines were conceived to improve the life of their times--is in the specifics rather than the idea of "improvement," a familiar corporate rationale for new tech. A particular virtue of this book is this examining of actual historical context, rather than imposing a perspective. But though it begins these examinations in the European Middle Ages, it perhaps does not go back far enough. Looking at the role of tools and technologies in indigenous societies and cultures, as well as in non-western cultures, would add valuable perspective, and probably needed insight. Still, this careful and thoughtful book contributes to a necessary knowledge of how technology both responds to society and shapes it.
And what of the future beyond the general suggestions of many present-centered books, including those mentioned in the first paragraph? Design for Ecological Democracy by Randolph T. Hester (MIT Press) details a vision for the future in buildings and related systems of the built landscape, which is essentially a vision for daily life in the future that combines and expresses democratic ideals and functions, together with sound ecology and better relationship to the natural world. This is likely to become increasingly important as citizens demand greater response to the climate crisis as well as energy efficiency, but without sacrificing choice or happiness. This book offers social and environmental principles as well as technical detail and practical approaches to design in real world contexts that respect all aspects of human life. Planners and landscape architects in particular should find it illuminating and inspiring, but it is also filled with ideas accessible and attractive to anyone who cares about how to save this world while making it a world worth saving, full of pleasure and fulfillment. For example: "For us to derive pleasure from our cities, we must learn again how to walk."
Degrees That Matter: Climate Change and the University by Ann Rappaport and Sarah Hammond Creighton (MIT Press) is even more specific, relating university communities to the climate crisis. Besides academic research, the university community can provide experiential learning and living experiments for larger communities in interconnected strategies for meeting climate crisis challenges. Without visual illustration and with undistinguished and often technical prose, this is more of a summary and a handbook than a persuasive or visionary work. Still, in the right hands, it can make an important contribution.
Where are we now, how did we get here, what can we therefore do to save the future? These are the concerns of serious books in these serious, critical times. The climate crisis and related environmental catastrophes as well as geopolitical, social and cultural factors that combine to threaten the existence of civilization and humanity itself, form the context if not the content of our most important writing.
The present and recent past are the subject of the most prominent and popular of these books, such as Bill McKibben's Deep Economy (Times Books), Benjamin Barber's Consumed (W.W. Norton) and Al Gore's forthcoming The Assault on Reason (Penguin Press.) But there are also new scholarly books that examine more of the history contributing to the crises of the moment, and that go into greater detail about what a successful future could look like, and how to get there.
The mid 19th century era of industrialization is emerging as a key period in analyzing our present predicaments. In West From Appomattox (Yale University Press), historian Heather Cox Richardson chronicles the rise of a peculiarly American middle class in the post-Civil War Reconstruction and western expansion. She presents a compelling narrative of this era of racial tensions and the greed of the Gilded Age.
American Leviathan (Hill & Wang) by historian Patrick Griffin begins the story even earlier, in the westward expansion after the Revolutionary War. Like Richardson, he writes about savagery on the frontier, particularly against American Indians but also against the land itself in a war for dominance of all against all and for the accumulation of power and wealth. Yet Griffin also organizes a nuanced political argument concerning the development of a peculiarly American relationship of citizen and state.
Alan Trachtenberg emphasized the rise of corporations in the late 19th century in his classic book, The Incorporation of America, (Hill & Wang) just reissued in a 25th anniversary edition. Now Trachtenberg (Yale Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies) adds color and cultural context to this period in a collection of essays entitled Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas (Hill & Wang.) These essays expand on another important theme linking the past to the future: the influence of media--from photography to film, fiction to architecture-- in shaping perceptions. Though he begins with Hawthorne, Lincoln, Whitman and Mark Twain, he also takes us into the 20th century and into the modern city, with Horatio Alger, Walker Evans, Louis Sullivan, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford and Wright Morris. These frequently provocative portraits provide the sense of the times that supplements broader narratives.
The benefits and destructiveness of technology have been major themes from the 19th century onward, and technology is certainly at the center of the climate crisis and other challenges to the future. In Culture of Improvement (MIT Press), Robert Friedel concentrates on technological developments and their relationship to their times. This is a thorough study, well illustrated, that emphasizes the social context--the expectations that new technologies fulfilled and in turn created for newer technologies. The significance of Friedel's central argument--exploring how new machines were conceived to improve the life of their times--is in the specifics rather than the idea of "improvement," a familiar corporate rationale for new tech. A particular virtue of this book is this examining of actual historical context, rather than imposing a perspective. But though it begins these examinations in the European Middle Ages, it perhaps does not go back far enough. Looking at the role of tools and technologies in indigenous societies and cultures, as well as in non-western cultures, would add valuable perspective, and probably needed insight. Still, this careful and thoughtful book contributes to a necessary knowledge of how technology both responds to society and shapes it.
And what of the future beyond the general suggestions of many present-centered books, including those mentioned in the first paragraph? Design for Ecological Democracy by Randolph T. Hester (MIT Press) details a vision for the future in buildings and related systems of the built landscape, which is essentially a vision for daily life in the future that combines and expresses democratic ideals and functions, together with sound ecology and better relationship to the natural world. This is likely to become increasingly important as citizens demand greater response to the climate crisis as well as energy efficiency, but without sacrificing choice or happiness. This book offers social and environmental principles as well as technical detail and practical approaches to design in real world contexts that respect all aspects of human life. Planners and landscape architects in particular should find it illuminating and inspiring, but it is also filled with ideas accessible and attractive to anyone who cares about how to save this world while making it a world worth saving, full of pleasure and fulfillment. For example: "For us to derive pleasure from our cities, we must learn again how to walk."
Degrees That Matter: Climate Change and the University by Ann Rappaport and Sarah Hammond Creighton (MIT Press) is even more specific, relating university communities to the climate crisis. Besides academic research, the university community can provide experiential learning and living experiments for larger communities in interconnected strategies for meeting climate crisis challenges. Without visual illustration and with undistinguished and often technical prose, this is more of a summary and a handbook than a persuasive or visionary work. Still, in the right hands, it can make an important contribution.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Holiday Gift Books from 2005: Design & the Future
The Things of Shapes To Come
by William S. Kowinski
SHAPING THINGS
by Bruce Sterling
Mediawork Pamphlet Series
The M.I.T. Press
I tend to see the future in terms of story, while real professional futurists see it in terms of design. (Then there’s Star Trek, which sees it as both. I know, you don’t want to hear about Star Trek.)
As a science-fiction writer and a futurist, Bruce Sterling also sees it as both. This particular slim but very full of pith and moment book (under 150 pages) is about designing---and redefining---things, as leading the design of the future.
Things, as created objects, and more. “Properly understood, a thing is not merely a material object, but a frozen technosocial relationship. Things have to exist in relationship with an organism: the human being.” Though this book comes pre-underlined and highlighted, that’s a quote I lifted all on my own.
But things are not generic. They are, for example, artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, spimes and arphids. My spell-check doesn’t like spimes and arphids, they come pre-underlined in red, but that’s because these are new words Sterling coins to extend the technosocial relationships into the present and future characterized by new proportions of physicality and information.
This is all pretty fascinating, especially when Sterling links the design future to the sustainable society he understands as the only lengthy future possible for civilization, though he assumes this more than makes a case for it. There are real designers referenced---the section on Raymond Loewy, for example, is informative and entertaining. I like the brisk elegance and wit of Sterling’s prose, so I went along for the ride even when I wasn’t quite sure where I was going, or even where I’d been.
Of the stuff I understood, I found some revelatory, some reassuringly what I believe is so, and some I’d like to argue about. Oddly, for a book that articulates the changes and possibilities of the Internet and information technology, the book doesn’t name a website for the discussions this book prompts. (However, Sterling is a principal of Viridian Design , with a website where more of his entertaining commentary can be found.)
Here’s one of the parts I like: “ A SYNCHRONIC SOCIETY sets high value on the human engagement with TIME…we are not objects, but processes. Our names are not nouns, but verbs.” Though Sterling disses Buckminster Fuller later in his book without naming him (specifically Fuller's “Utopia or Oblivion” choice, which he topples partly by constricting the definitions), I seem to recall that it was Fuller who famously said, “I seem to be a verb.”
Anyway, before this becomes longer than the book, Shaping Things is a highly recommended read, and a great gift for “designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists” (I’m copying the cover now) and anyone on your list interested in how information technology is changing us, and its role in designing the future. Because that’s what's on these folk's minds, that’s what the buzz is going to be, and besides it’s, you know, short.
MAKING THINGS PUBLIC: Atmospheres of Democracy
Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
M.I.T. Press
As Shaping Things is short, this book is long---really, really long. Well over a thousand pages. But at only fifty bucks, it’s a truly great deal. It’s a compendium of fascination, an anthology of great photos, illustrations and pieces of prose you are unlikely to find anywhere else.
My first browsing foray took me to Richard Powers describing his process on his novel about the personhood of technology’s freak child, the corporation, and its relationship to the personhood of people; a chronicle of the role of photography in the human-Great Ape relationship, and another about the contemporary obelisks of Stockholm, attractive, oddly iconic and mysterious objects which also visually monitor urban water quality. And an essay on Northwest Coast Native art (which I actually know something about---and recognized people in the photo.)
I’m sure that the editors have a carefully worked out progression of arguments about making, unmaking, remaking, assembling (as in assembly lines and also the state assembly), disassembling and dissembling, of things as they define public relationships. But at least for the first many hours, my guess is this book’s main appeal is in its gorgeous variety, a browser’s paradise, a dilettante’s delight, a playground of ideas and images ultimately relating to contemporary and future design and technosocial meaning, including especially the political---a different emphasis of Sterling’s schema.
More than a hundred writers are represented (including relevant excerpts from the likes of Melville, Hobbes and Jonathan Swift)—philosophers, scientists, political scientists, anthropologists, sociobiologists, artists and scholars. And the illustrations are very well done, probably worth the price alone. Making Things Public is related to a show at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, where co-author Peter Weibel is Director.
IN THE BUBBLE: Designing in A Complex World
by John Thackara
M.I.T. Press
So this makes a trifecta for MIT Press, but design and the future is clearly a major theme for this publisher. The people involved are all over the world---a lot from Europe-- but as a group it's probably a small world (this book comes with a plug from Bruce Sterling on the cover.)
Still, I believe this is an important book, at least as much as Sterling's, and it's also fascinating to read. So it's a highly recommended choice from earlier in the year.
Thackara skewers conventional wisdom and many guiding delusions of the digital revolution with pungent facts, while noting contrarian trends and suggesting greater possibilities with all the elusive precision of aphorism. His intent goes beyond analysis. Director of a design firm called Doors of Perception, headquartered in Amsterdam, Thackara uses 10 principles to organize his ideas about "sustainable and engaging futures and the design steps we need to take to realize them."
The tech revolution didn't lead to the paperless office, nor to eradicating business travel or product transport (in fact, it created much more), and many plans for future uses, such as implanting computers in appliances and "smart" buildings, seemed doomed to equally dour unintended consequences. Nor does technology exist in a valueless vacuum. For all its vaunted efficiencies, like most consumer products it involves vast waste: It takes 15 to 19 tons of energy and materials to make one desktop computer. Cyberspace may seem ethereal but Internet computing alone may soon use as much power as the whole U.S. economy did in 2001. "We've built a technology-focused society that is remarkable on means," Thackara writes, "but hazy about ends."
The ends are near, though Thackara is not so indelicate to say so, but he does point out that we're using up the planet with incredible rapidity, even as we refuse to face the greatest threat that may very well dominate human history for the next century: the climate crisis. Instead, he accentuates the positive. Some 80 percent of environmental impact is determined by design, and "If we can design our way into difficulty, we can design our way out. ... Designing is what human beings do."
"Sensitivity to context, to relationships, and to consequences are key aspects of the transition from mindless development to design mindfulness," he writes. This includes paying "close attention to the natural, industrial, and cultural systems," and material and energy flows. It means focusing on services over things, and treating place, time and cultural difference as positive values rather than obstacles. " 'Out of control' is an ideology," he writes, "not a fact."
As much influenced by Italian literary artist Italo Calvino as by visionary American architect William McDonough, Thackara brings a refreshingly European perspective, not only in examples from societies consciously grappling with social implications and solutions, but in an ability to bring the macro and micro, the big picture and life as it is lived, into a more capacious and balanced perspective. His principles include lightness, conviviality, smartness and flow. "Our machines are disturbingly lively," he points out, "and we are frighteningly inert." He calls passive acceptance of technology "borg drift."
"In the Bubble" is often delightful, stimulating and surprising. Thackara may well emerge as a visionary voice for the wired era. For planners, designers and anyone with an interest in the future, this book is a rich resource of inspiration, ideas, and guiding principles as well as sharply observed cautionary tales. It suggests that what the tech revolution most needs, and may already be moving toward, is a sense of purpose.
If you search for new or used books from the Powell's Bookstore box on this page, and buy something after linking from here, this site gets a cut. Thanks.
The Things of Shapes To Come
by William S. Kowinski
SHAPING THINGS
by Bruce Sterling
Mediawork Pamphlet Series
The M.I.T. Press
I tend to see the future in terms of story, while real professional futurists see it in terms of design. (Then there’s Star Trek, which sees it as both. I know, you don’t want to hear about Star Trek.)
As a science-fiction writer and a futurist, Bruce Sterling also sees it as both. This particular slim but very full of pith and moment book (under 150 pages) is about designing---and redefining---things, as leading the design of the future.
Things, as created objects, and more. “Properly understood, a thing is not merely a material object, but a frozen technosocial relationship. Things have to exist in relationship with an organism: the human being.” Though this book comes pre-underlined and highlighted, that’s a quote I lifted all on my own.
But things are not generic. They are, for example, artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, spimes and arphids. My spell-check doesn’t like spimes and arphids, they come pre-underlined in red, but that’s because these are new words Sterling coins to extend the technosocial relationships into the present and future characterized by new proportions of physicality and information.
This is all pretty fascinating, especially when Sterling links the design future to the sustainable society he understands as the only lengthy future possible for civilization, though he assumes this more than makes a case for it. There are real designers referenced---the section on Raymond Loewy, for example, is informative and entertaining. I like the brisk elegance and wit of Sterling’s prose, so I went along for the ride even when I wasn’t quite sure where I was going, or even where I’d been.
Of the stuff I understood, I found some revelatory, some reassuringly what I believe is so, and some I’d like to argue about. Oddly, for a book that articulates the changes and possibilities of the Internet and information technology, the book doesn’t name a website for the discussions this book prompts. (However, Sterling is a principal of Viridian Design , with a website where more of his entertaining commentary can be found.)
Here’s one of the parts I like: “ A SYNCHRONIC SOCIETY sets high value on the human engagement with TIME…we are not objects, but processes. Our names are not nouns, but verbs.” Though Sterling disses Buckminster Fuller later in his book without naming him (specifically Fuller's “Utopia or Oblivion” choice, which he topples partly by constricting the definitions), I seem to recall that it was Fuller who famously said, “I seem to be a verb.”
Anyway, before this becomes longer than the book, Shaping Things is a highly recommended read, and a great gift for “designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists” (I’m copying the cover now) and anyone on your list interested in how information technology is changing us, and its role in designing the future. Because that’s what's on these folk's minds, that’s what the buzz is going to be, and besides it’s, you know, short.
MAKING THINGS PUBLIC: Atmospheres of Democracy
Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
M.I.T. Press
As Shaping Things is short, this book is long---really, really long. Well over a thousand pages. But at only fifty bucks, it’s a truly great deal. It’s a compendium of fascination, an anthology of great photos, illustrations and pieces of prose you are unlikely to find anywhere else.
My first browsing foray took me to Richard Powers describing his process on his novel about the personhood of technology’s freak child, the corporation, and its relationship to the personhood of people; a chronicle of the role of photography in the human-Great Ape relationship, and another about the contemporary obelisks of Stockholm, attractive, oddly iconic and mysterious objects which also visually monitor urban water quality. And an essay on Northwest Coast Native art (which I actually know something about---and recognized people in the photo.)
I’m sure that the editors have a carefully worked out progression of arguments about making, unmaking, remaking, assembling (as in assembly lines and also the state assembly), disassembling and dissembling, of things as they define public relationships. But at least for the first many hours, my guess is this book’s main appeal is in its gorgeous variety, a browser’s paradise, a dilettante’s delight, a playground of ideas and images ultimately relating to contemporary and future design and technosocial meaning, including especially the political---a different emphasis of Sterling’s schema.
More than a hundred writers are represented (including relevant excerpts from the likes of Melville, Hobbes and Jonathan Swift)—philosophers, scientists, political scientists, anthropologists, sociobiologists, artists and scholars. And the illustrations are very well done, probably worth the price alone. Making Things Public is related to a show at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, where co-author Peter Weibel is Director.
IN THE BUBBLE: Designing in A Complex World
by John Thackara
M.I.T. Press
So this makes a trifecta for MIT Press, but design and the future is clearly a major theme for this publisher. The people involved are all over the world---a lot from Europe-- but as a group it's probably a small world (this book comes with a plug from Bruce Sterling on the cover.)
Still, I believe this is an important book, at least as much as Sterling's, and it's also fascinating to read. So it's a highly recommended choice from earlier in the year.
Thackara skewers conventional wisdom and many guiding delusions of the digital revolution with pungent facts, while noting contrarian trends and suggesting greater possibilities with all the elusive precision of aphorism. His intent goes beyond analysis. Director of a design firm called Doors of Perception, headquartered in Amsterdam, Thackara uses 10 principles to organize his ideas about "sustainable and engaging futures and the design steps we need to take to realize them."
The tech revolution didn't lead to the paperless office, nor to eradicating business travel or product transport (in fact, it created much more), and many plans for future uses, such as implanting computers in appliances and "smart" buildings, seemed doomed to equally dour unintended consequences. Nor does technology exist in a valueless vacuum. For all its vaunted efficiencies, like most consumer products it involves vast waste: It takes 15 to 19 tons of energy and materials to make one desktop computer. Cyberspace may seem ethereal but Internet computing alone may soon use as much power as the whole U.S. economy did in 2001. "We've built a technology-focused society that is remarkable on means," Thackara writes, "but hazy about ends."
The ends are near, though Thackara is not so indelicate to say so, but he does point out that we're using up the planet with incredible rapidity, even as we refuse to face the greatest threat that may very well dominate human history for the next century: the climate crisis. Instead, he accentuates the positive. Some 80 percent of environmental impact is determined by design, and "If we can design our way into difficulty, we can design our way out. ... Designing is what human beings do."
"Sensitivity to context, to relationships, and to consequences are key aspects of the transition from mindless development to design mindfulness," he writes. This includes paying "close attention to the natural, industrial, and cultural systems," and material and energy flows. It means focusing on services over things, and treating place, time and cultural difference as positive values rather than obstacles. " 'Out of control' is an ideology," he writes, "not a fact."
As much influenced by Italian literary artist Italo Calvino as by visionary American architect William McDonough, Thackara brings a refreshingly European perspective, not only in examples from societies consciously grappling with social implications and solutions, but in an ability to bring the macro and micro, the big picture and life as it is lived, into a more capacious and balanced perspective. His principles include lightness, conviviality, smartness and flow. "Our machines are disturbingly lively," he points out, "and we are frighteningly inert." He calls passive acceptance of technology "borg drift."
"In the Bubble" is often delightful, stimulating and surprising. Thackara may well emerge as a visionary voice for the wired era. For planners, designers and anyone with an interest in the future, this book is a rich resource of inspiration, ideas, and guiding principles as well as sharply observed cautionary tales. It suggests that what the tech revolution most needs, and may already be moving toward, is a sense of purpose.
If you search for new or used books from the Powell's Bookstore box on this page, and buy something after linking from here, this site gets a cut. Thanks.
Friday, August 16, 2002
THE CITY IN MIND by James Howard Kunstler. Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $25.
THE LIMITLESS CITY: A Primer on the Urban Sprawl Debate by Oliver Gillham. Island Press, 309 pages, $30. ISBN 1-55963-833-8
SOLVING SPRAWL by F. Kaid Benfield, Jutka Terris, and Nancy Vorsanger. National Resources Defense Council/Island Press. 200 pages, paper $20.
THE GOOD IN NATURE AND HUMANITY: Connecting Science, Religion and Spirituality with the Natural World, edited by Stephen R. Kellert and Timothy J. Farnham, Island Press, 278 pages, cloth $28. ISBN 1-55963-838-9
by William Severini Kowinski
From the publication of THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE, James Howard Kunstler has been an informed provocateur in the court house of the built environment, carving out a niche in the marketplace of expression somewhere between Hunter Thompson and Jane Jacobs. Kunstler is known as an advocate, a gadfly, and now officially on the Orion website, a curmudgeon, which tend to obscure his reporting, description and scholarship. But it is these qualities that are particularly sharp in his new book, THE CITY IN MIND.
Chapters on five European capitals, three U.S. cities and Mexico City each narrate a particular history that presents a theme ("Rome: In Search of the Classical," "Atlanta: Does Edge City Have a Future?" for example.) These themes in turn inform further ruminations on cities in general as they are today, while forming an argument about how they should be.
The narratives are often fascinating simply as good reading, and even though he elsewhere allies himself with the New Urbanists, there's no overt attempt to push a particular program. Kunstler sees the virtues of large scale planning in Paris, and the accidentally effective changes that add up to a livable Boston. He doesn't spare the vitriol when conjuring up the sprawling horrors of Atlanta or the altered unreality of Las Vegas, but for a writer with a reputation for attack, the concepts that conspicuously recur are "beauty", "civilized" and "worth living in." These comprise his goals for places.
He remains provocative, even apart from the spasms of verbal abuse. He criticizes advocates of "open spaces" as urban panacea, resulting in "these little cartoons of the countryside deployed everywhere" between the malls and the condos. They are a reflexive but inadequate answer, especially for one city he cites when "everything it contained was so poorly made, not worth caring about, and unworthy of the continuation of collective self-respect called civilization."
Those phrases exemplify a chief virtue of this book: simple and eye-opening eloquence on matters often obscured by thick pastes of jargon. There is no mystery about what Kunstler likes and doesn't like, but that's not the standard that most interests me. Do we really agree that our places should be well made, beautiful and worth caring about and living in, even if we don't share the same vision of what such places would look like? I wonder. The energy of any excesses or arguable propositions the reader might find here is balanced by the power of this central notion: that our civilization reflects our own self-respect.
Kunstler's past work influences those closer to the trench warfare of planning: Oliver Gillham quotes him at length several times in THE LIMITLESS CITY, and the authors of SOLVING SPRAWL start their book by quoting a passage from his HOME FROM NOWHERE, saying it "provides inspiration to those of us who have been concerned about the American landscape." While Kunstler inspires, cajoles, lambastes and celebrates, others in the civic ecology have to sweat the details, figure out what is doable right now, and then do it. They will find a strong foundation of facts, clear analysis and direct, engaging writing in Gillham's THE LIMITLESS CITY.
Formatted in the friendly fashion of a 1950s textbook, it is a peerless one volume summary not only of the urban sprawl debate which is its announced subject, but of much of what has shaped American cities up to the present moment. (It was going to press just after the events of 9-11-01, so while some text on New York City was added, other discussion and photos remain but are now more historic than intended.)
As a broad survey, THE LIMITLESS CITY is a perfect companion to an earlier volume, SOLVING SPRAWL, which focuses on a number of specific examples in U.S. cities and suburbs where the perils of growth and change were transformed into new ideas for places "worth living in." Though each example seems to have been selected to illustrate a solution to problems that recur in various places, the stories are highly individualized, with the players named, the dollar figures given, and the testimony of people who live or trade there.
The writing is crisp, informative and involving-like magazine journalism once was, when magazines published stories about reality. It's an attractive book, with clearly consecutive text broken by unobtrusive sidebars and small but surprisingly sharp and effective color photos.
Since suburban sprawl raised its ugly head as a bizarre counterpart to the dehumanized city, the built environment has gotten more complex and yet more uniform, resulting in both deadly places and wasted spaces. What is wasted by the scorched earth of sprawl is another profound concern.
The issue of sprawl links those whose professional purview is the urban environment with advocates for the natural environment. Thanks to existing sprawl and its effects, "the urban and the rural have cruelly cancelled each other out" as Kunstler observes. Though as Gillham points out, the built places still take up only about 5% of U.S. land, the feeder mechanisms of our society---highways, skyways, the office, farm and manufacturing factories; the mines, grids and strips--- rule over most of it, and threaten to bring ruin to all of it. So it shouldn't be too surprising that an anthology emanating from a conference concerned with connecting science, religion and spirituality with the natural world should include some painful awareness of "often inherently conflicted" moral and civic "responsibilities to both human communities and natural ecosystems and landscapes."
That's how Strachan Donnelley's essay in the anthology, THE GOOD IN NATURE AND HUMANITY, begins. Donnelley is an ethicist trained in philosophy who runs a project focused on regional planning in Chicago. To create a framework for planning, he considers Plato, Darwin, and Aldo Leopold (who he calls "the Alexander Pushkin of American environmental and conservation ethics." A more accessible if perhaps less accurate description of Leopold, the author of THE SAND COUNTY ALMANAC, might be as a godfather of American ecology.) Donnelley also mentions his own background, growing up in Libertyville, Illinois when it was a farm town of 5,000. It is now, he writes, a suburb of some 30,000. Thinking about urban life was more or less forced on him.
Donnelley's conclusion isn't programmatic-just that he has learned particularly through Leopold to apply his more informed and comprehensive understanding of the context of nature to urban planning. But given that what planning considers is usually much more limited than the effects of the plan, this is something. The web of life may be more visible outside the city, but it reaches everywhere. It is a context that is more than physical-- a "moral ecology" and a source of our sense of beauty, quality and places worth living in.
Though the writing in this book's essays is uneven, they demonstrate that the complex concerns involved in the human relationship to the rest of nature must also be addressed in the built parts of the ecology. Nature is not just what sprawl destroys. We are part of it. And it is part of our individual and collective self-respect.
MASTER PASSIONS: Emotion, Narrative, And the Development of Culture by Mihnea C. Moldoveanu and Nitin Nohria. M.I.T. Press. 247 pages, $29.95.
A consultant I knew had just presented some basic psychological concepts of group dynamics to executives of a division in a large and powerful corporation facing painful change, and was driving a couple of the execs back to their office. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, he saw that the exec in the back seat had picked up a teddy bear left there by the consultant's child. When the consultant mentioned this in a kidding way, the exec was astonished--he didn't realize he was holding a teddy bear to his heart.
Skills of psychological manipulation may be high art there, but in psychological self-knowledge few places are more primitive than American corporate offices. Denial seems a necessary function of the ambition and envy that authors Moldoveanu and Nohria assert drive the daily operations of allegedly rational, bottom-line businesses in MASTER PASSIONS. The authors are academicians in management and business administration so they apply the fruits of their selected erudition to corporate cultures and those most directly invested and embroiled in it.
Examples from non-working life (especially marital and sexual relationships) and other contexts (like writing a book) also abound. The examples, which they call "thought experiments, are the scariest part of a scary book. They reveal endless spirals of rationalization as tools of denial, as the master passions are justified by master narratives which appropriate history, ideology and cultural norms to create "reasons" that hide the real motives, especially from the perpetrator.
Along the way the authors get in some acerbic and entertaining asides on the dubious claims of economics as a science, or how the subtle ways that baboons manage leadership transitions are more evolved than the clumsy ways that humans usually do it.
Talking about emotions in the land of corporate numbness is fairly radical-emotions have long been devalued by the ideology of "rational choice" and a constricted view of the scientific purview. The work of neuroscientists like Antonio and Hanna Damasio (who the authors don't cite) now support the idea that emotions are primary and not the handmaiden or even the ugly stepsister of reason.
But the authors of this sharp and stimulating book up the ante by asserting that these master passions pulling the strings are inescapable except by escaping the self altogether, through catharsis-- not by blindly acting on them but by "bringing these emotions as emotions before consciousness-becoming conscious of their sway on the body and hold on the mind. It is therefore about wakening to greater self-knowledge."
While this may be the kind of news that fills flipcharts in corporate consulting sessions, it has been basic program of a lot of psychology-Jung's for instance-- for about a century. Even here, the authors remain scary with their examples of those who attained self-knowledge: Shakespeare's Iago and Richard III, two paragons of sociopathic evil. But at least they knew how evil they were, and this, apparently is progress.
The authors don't seem to trust the conceptual mind to deal with the master passions and change behavior. There is little shrift given to developing a sense of proportion, of countervailing feelings or forces or disciplines within and without that could break the tyranny of the big bad passions without denying them. They don't acknowledge recent ideas about emotional intelligence, from Daniel Goleman to Martha Nussbaum.
Their only advice on how to escape the master passions sounds an awful lot like Zen meditation. Perhaps ambitious for the book's success, envious of other corporate gurus and fearing to lose half their audience, they never call it that. Meditation is a valid technique to apply, but my reading of contemporary Zen writers (Mark Epstein, for instance) suggests they would advise some conscious thought and effort as well, as one of many possible personal and cultural strategies to shift the internal balances towards other passions and more conscious control of actions, especially in order to keep those passions from hurting others. The authors are certainly correct, however, that the first steps are to acknowledge that we have these passions, and to understand as fully as possible their power to motivate and deceive.
The authors intend this book to be an "invitation to reflection" on the complex mechanisms at work, leading the reader to "understand social phenomena from within." But by concentrating on the subjective (the motives for actions) and essentially ignoring the object (the actions themselves and their results in the world) gives the book an amoral aura, and adds to its claustrophobic tinge of horror. At worst, it could be used to justify even more bad behavior: I pollute the world because evolution, capitalism or the devil made me do it, is not much changed by the insight that I do it because I have the devil in my heart and I just can't help myself.
Besides, without checking the result of actions, the role of the passions can't be realistically evaluated. I'm not going to preemptively deny the power of fear (the basis of most of the passions discussed here), and I have to admit that until recently I hadn't paid much attention to the prevalence and power of envy. But maybe the authors have spent too much time in business and academia to appreciate some balance. Perhaps envy and ambition drove a certain scientist to ignore the research of others and then claim it as his own, while thousands died unnecessarily of AIDs (as another recent book asserts.) But should we vilify Rachel Carson because in exposing the extent and deadliness of pollution she may have been motivated by the ambition of the whistle-blower? Writing a book may be an act of love as well as ambition.
THE LIMITLESS CITY: A Primer on the Urban Sprawl Debate by Oliver Gillham. Island Press, 309 pages, $30. ISBN 1-55963-833-8
SOLVING SPRAWL by F. Kaid Benfield, Jutka Terris, and Nancy Vorsanger. National Resources Defense Council/Island Press. 200 pages, paper $20.
THE GOOD IN NATURE AND HUMANITY: Connecting Science, Religion and Spirituality with the Natural World, edited by Stephen R. Kellert and Timothy J. Farnham, Island Press, 278 pages, cloth $28. ISBN 1-55963-838-9
by William Severini Kowinski
From the publication of THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE, James Howard Kunstler has been an informed provocateur in the court house of the built environment, carving out a niche in the marketplace of expression somewhere between Hunter Thompson and Jane Jacobs. Kunstler is known as an advocate, a gadfly, and now officially on the Orion website, a curmudgeon, which tend to obscure his reporting, description and scholarship. But it is these qualities that are particularly sharp in his new book, THE CITY IN MIND.
Chapters on five European capitals, three U.S. cities and Mexico City each narrate a particular history that presents a theme ("Rome: In Search of the Classical," "Atlanta: Does Edge City Have a Future?" for example.) These themes in turn inform further ruminations on cities in general as they are today, while forming an argument about how they should be.
The narratives are often fascinating simply as good reading, and even though he elsewhere allies himself with the New Urbanists, there's no overt attempt to push a particular program. Kunstler sees the virtues of large scale planning in Paris, and the accidentally effective changes that add up to a livable Boston. He doesn't spare the vitriol when conjuring up the sprawling horrors of Atlanta or the altered unreality of Las Vegas, but for a writer with a reputation for attack, the concepts that conspicuously recur are "beauty", "civilized" and "worth living in." These comprise his goals for places.
He remains provocative, even apart from the spasms of verbal abuse. He criticizes advocates of "open spaces" as urban panacea, resulting in "these little cartoons of the countryside deployed everywhere" between the malls and the condos. They are a reflexive but inadequate answer, especially for one city he cites when "everything it contained was so poorly made, not worth caring about, and unworthy of the continuation of collective self-respect called civilization."
Those phrases exemplify a chief virtue of this book: simple and eye-opening eloquence on matters often obscured by thick pastes of jargon. There is no mystery about what Kunstler likes and doesn't like, but that's not the standard that most interests me. Do we really agree that our places should be well made, beautiful and worth caring about and living in, even if we don't share the same vision of what such places would look like? I wonder. The energy of any excesses or arguable propositions the reader might find here is balanced by the power of this central notion: that our civilization reflects our own self-respect.
Kunstler's past work influences those closer to the trench warfare of planning: Oliver Gillham quotes him at length several times in THE LIMITLESS CITY, and the authors of SOLVING SPRAWL start their book by quoting a passage from his HOME FROM NOWHERE, saying it "provides inspiration to those of us who have been concerned about the American landscape." While Kunstler inspires, cajoles, lambastes and celebrates, others in the civic ecology have to sweat the details, figure out what is doable right now, and then do it. They will find a strong foundation of facts, clear analysis and direct, engaging writing in Gillham's THE LIMITLESS CITY.
Formatted in the friendly fashion of a 1950s textbook, it is a peerless one volume summary not only of the urban sprawl debate which is its announced subject, but of much of what has shaped American cities up to the present moment. (It was going to press just after the events of 9-11-01, so while some text on New York City was added, other discussion and photos remain but are now more historic than intended.)
As a broad survey, THE LIMITLESS CITY is a perfect companion to an earlier volume, SOLVING SPRAWL, which focuses on a number of specific examples in U.S. cities and suburbs where the perils of growth and change were transformed into new ideas for places "worth living in." Though each example seems to have been selected to illustrate a solution to problems that recur in various places, the stories are highly individualized, with the players named, the dollar figures given, and the testimony of people who live or trade there.
The writing is crisp, informative and involving-like magazine journalism once was, when magazines published stories about reality. It's an attractive book, with clearly consecutive text broken by unobtrusive sidebars and small but surprisingly sharp and effective color photos.
Since suburban sprawl raised its ugly head as a bizarre counterpart to the dehumanized city, the built environment has gotten more complex and yet more uniform, resulting in both deadly places and wasted spaces. What is wasted by the scorched earth of sprawl is another profound concern.
The issue of sprawl links those whose professional purview is the urban environment with advocates for the natural environment. Thanks to existing sprawl and its effects, "the urban and the rural have cruelly cancelled each other out" as Kunstler observes. Though as Gillham points out, the built places still take up only about 5% of U.S. land, the feeder mechanisms of our society---highways, skyways, the office, farm and manufacturing factories; the mines, grids and strips--- rule over most of it, and threaten to bring ruin to all of it. So it shouldn't be too surprising that an anthology emanating from a conference concerned with connecting science, religion and spirituality with the natural world should include some painful awareness of "often inherently conflicted" moral and civic "responsibilities to both human communities and natural ecosystems and landscapes."
That's how Strachan Donnelley's essay in the anthology, THE GOOD IN NATURE AND HUMANITY, begins. Donnelley is an ethicist trained in philosophy who runs a project focused on regional planning in Chicago. To create a framework for planning, he considers Plato, Darwin, and Aldo Leopold (who he calls "the Alexander Pushkin of American environmental and conservation ethics." A more accessible if perhaps less accurate description of Leopold, the author of THE SAND COUNTY ALMANAC, might be as a godfather of American ecology.) Donnelley also mentions his own background, growing up in Libertyville, Illinois when it was a farm town of 5,000. It is now, he writes, a suburb of some 30,000. Thinking about urban life was more or less forced on him.
Donnelley's conclusion isn't programmatic-just that he has learned particularly through Leopold to apply his more informed and comprehensive understanding of the context of nature to urban planning. But given that what planning considers is usually much more limited than the effects of the plan, this is something. The web of life may be more visible outside the city, but it reaches everywhere. It is a context that is more than physical-- a "moral ecology" and a source of our sense of beauty, quality and places worth living in.
Though the writing in this book's essays is uneven, they demonstrate that the complex concerns involved in the human relationship to the rest of nature must also be addressed in the built parts of the ecology. Nature is not just what sprawl destroys. We are part of it. And it is part of our individual and collective self-respect.
MASTER PASSIONS: Emotion, Narrative, And the Development of Culture by Mihnea C. Moldoveanu and Nitin Nohria. M.I.T. Press. 247 pages, $29.95.
A consultant I knew had just presented some basic psychological concepts of group dynamics to executives of a division in a large and powerful corporation facing painful change, and was driving a couple of the execs back to their office. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, he saw that the exec in the back seat had picked up a teddy bear left there by the consultant's child. When the consultant mentioned this in a kidding way, the exec was astonished--he didn't realize he was holding a teddy bear to his heart.
Skills of psychological manipulation may be high art there, but in psychological self-knowledge few places are more primitive than American corporate offices. Denial seems a necessary function of the ambition and envy that authors Moldoveanu and Nohria assert drive the daily operations of allegedly rational, bottom-line businesses in MASTER PASSIONS. The authors are academicians in management and business administration so they apply the fruits of their selected erudition to corporate cultures and those most directly invested and embroiled in it.
Examples from non-working life (especially marital and sexual relationships) and other contexts (like writing a book) also abound. The examples, which they call "thought experiments, are the scariest part of a scary book. They reveal endless spirals of rationalization as tools of denial, as the master passions are justified by master narratives which appropriate history, ideology and cultural norms to create "reasons" that hide the real motives, especially from the perpetrator.
Along the way the authors get in some acerbic and entertaining asides on the dubious claims of economics as a science, or how the subtle ways that baboons manage leadership transitions are more evolved than the clumsy ways that humans usually do it.
Talking about emotions in the land of corporate numbness is fairly radical-emotions have long been devalued by the ideology of "rational choice" and a constricted view of the scientific purview. The work of neuroscientists like Antonio and Hanna Damasio (who the authors don't cite) now support the idea that emotions are primary and not the handmaiden or even the ugly stepsister of reason.
But the authors of this sharp and stimulating book up the ante by asserting that these master passions pulling the strings are inescapable except by escaping the self altogether, through catharsis-- not by blindly acting on them but by "bringing these emotions as emotions before consciousness-becoming conscious of their sway on the body and hold on the mind. It is therefore about wakening to greater self-knowledge."
While this may be the kind of news that fills flipcharts in corporate consulting sessions, it has been basic program of a lot of psychology-Jung's for instance-- for about a century. Even here, the authors remain scary with their examples of those who attained self-knowledge: Shakespeare's Iago and Richard III, two paragons of sociopathic evil. But at least they knew how evil they were, and this, apparently is progress.
The authors don't seem to trust the conceptual mind to deal with the master passions and change behavior. There is little shrift given to developing a sense of proportion, of countervailing feelings or forces or disciplines within and without that could break the tyranny of the big bad passions without denying them. They don't acknowledge recent ideas about emotional intelligence, from Daniel Goleman to Martha Nussbaum.
Their only advice on how to escape the master passions sounds an awful lot like Zen meditation. Perhaps ambitious for the book's success, envious of other corporate gurus and fearing to lose half their audience, they never call it that. Meditation is a valid technique to apply, but my reading of contemporary Zen writers (Mark Epstein, for instance) suggests they would advise some conscious thought and effort as well, as one of many possible personal and cultural strategies to shift the internal balances towards other passions and more conscious control of actions, especially in order to keep those passions from hurting others. The authors are certainly correct, however, that the first steps are to acknowledge that we have these passions, and to understand as fully as possible their power to motivate and deceive.
The authors intend this book to be an "invitation to reflection" on the complex mechanisms at work, leading the reader to "understand social phenomena from within." But by concentrating on the subjective (the motives for actions) and essentially ignoring the object (the actions themselves and their results in the world) gives the book an amoral aura, and adds to its claustrophobic tinge of horror. At worst, it could be used to justify even more bad behavior: I pollute the world because evolution, capitalism or the devil made me do it, is not much changed by the insight that I do it because I have the devil in my heart and I just can't help myself.
Besides, without checking the result of actions, the role of the passions can't be realistically evaluated. I'm not going to preemptively deny the power of fear (the basis of most of the passions discussed here), and I have to admit that until recently I hadn't paid much attention to the prevalence and power of envy. But maybe the authors have spent too much time in business and academia to appreciate some balance. Perhaps envy and ambition drove a certain scientist to ignore the research of others and then claim it as his own, while thousands died unnecessarily of AIDs (as another recent book asserts.) But should we vilify Rachel Carson because in exposing the extent and deadliness of pollution she may have been motivated by the ambition of the whistle-blower? Writing a book may be an act of love as well as ambition.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)