NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 10, 2002
Tung in groove
The full horror of contemporary urban development was brought home to me last week when I took my boys to see a war movie Black Hawk Down at a suburban multiplex in what I think is called a "strip mall". Emerging from the matinee onto a treeless asphalt plane one squints to the horizon -- acres of parked and road-snarled SUVs; monster signage; viciously ugly big box stores; a user-pay foodbank; grim-faced roadweary pedestrians; and the ratfood franchise for which my children longed. I realized how beautiful the war-shattered Mogadishu had just been its meandering streets and closes courtyards terraced roofs and shophouse arcades -- compared to the squalor now around me. Even in ruin and riot that city had intimacy; as once had every city in the world. The 20th century put an end to all that. "It was a century of dramatic urban expansion improvement and redefinition but it was also a century when urban architectural culture was destroyed." The sentence is from a new book by Anthony M. Tung Preserving the World's Great Cities. The author is a former New York City landmarks preservation commissioner and general architectural and lecturing busybody. He has done a fine job of assembling the dossier of conservation issues for an arbitrary list of 18 "world cities" and makes a superb tour guide. He writes sparkling expert historical sketches explaining how each city came to have its shape. His potted summary of the three ages of Rome (imperial papal and modern) is for instance a masterpiece of the pamphlet-writer's art. I've gone looking for preservation material myself in seven of Mr. Tung's cities and a few others and can't help admiring the author's industry intelligence and good taste. What is most striking is the variety of these cities that nothing learned from one really applies to another except vaguely. Each has a "planning culture" peculiar to itself. In most according to him and all according to me it has gone badly wrong. Mr. Tung loves Amsterdam where the control-freak Dutch acted in the 1950s to preserve regardless of cost the low-rise 17th-century city core and the canal system to which it is married cleverly merging the conservation effort into various social-engineering schemes in a triumph of "enlightened bureaucracy". And it works outwardly as Mr. Tung describes nearly singing about the hues of Amsterdam's stained and glazed bricks almost forgetting that the bureaucrats didn't lay them. He is in awe of the continental European approach of systematic regulation -- "a place for everyone and everyone in his place". It is what we in North America call "aristocratic socialism". It keeps the lower orders in line through the ministrations of the "taste police" -- in contrast with our Anglo-American habit of giving the proles what they want however ugly. London is a hodgepodge compared to height-regulated Paris tourist-trap Venice earnestly schizophrenic Berlin or Vienna in its encasing Ringstrasse. The Old Town of Warsaw has now been twice lovingly rebuilt stone by numbered stone (after a fire then after the Nazis). The European cities are more beautiful than ours and their people are impossibly uptight. They build a museum and call it life. Athens is the case study in European failure the Acropolis now dissolving in diesel fumes. The 19th-century Athens with its ordered street geometry and axial vistas of the Parthenon was built German neo-classical for the newly-minted state which Europe in concert had pried from the Turks. But then in the 20th century the Greeks took it over and the "controls" all fell apart. And yet the most beautiful section of Athens has throughout been the Plaka -- the remains of the old Ottoman town clinging to the north slope of the Acropolis and the one place in Athens where you can't see the thing. And the only reason the Plaka is still standing is that the Europeans ran out of money to clear it for an archaeological park. Farther afield we see the error in extremes. Both Moscow and Beijing were gutted of their heritage by ideological fiat. Singapore purposely bulldozed its irreplaceable blend of Chinese Malay and British tropical vernaculars for standard-issue air-conditioned glass and steel. At the other end Cairo's miles of enchanting mediaeval streetscape are being ground to dust by unsupervisable squatters. Read it all and cry. The struggle to conserve buildings and neighbourhoods is not new. An edict from the 7th-century B.C. promises to hang from his rooftop anyone who despoils the Royal Road of Nineveh. Emperor Majorian in 5th-century Rome decreed that workmen found stripping marble from imperial monuments would have their hands cut off. This has been the general approach of planning commissioners over the centuries and as we see it hasn't worked. At the core of this book I find the old mistake repeated. It does an heroic and painstaking job of missing the main point: that you cannot undo the effects of central planning by central planning. For in almost every case the unprecedented destruction of built heritage in the 20th century -- not only in totalitarian countries -- was done by central plan was "visionary" in the worst sense. Suburbia for instance didn't just happen it was designed through zoning by-laws. Cars didn't merely crash their ways spontaneously into the hearts of our cities they were let in by master plan. The economies by which building anew from scratch is made almost universally cheaper than restoration and refitting is the product everywhere of government legislation and tax codes. And the "homogenization" and "globalization" that Mr. Tung decries comes from the top down. Whereas the world's most beautiful cities were built from the bottom up building by building neighbourhood by neighbourhood. They were built by architects working over time communicating with each other by experiment and emulation through their works speaking inherited pattern languages and responding in detail to very local pressure. Mr. Tung represents the received view today a somewhat Jane-Jacobed and Witold- Rybczynskied view that is a reaction to the worst excesses of the old Bauhaus modernism. But it is still big-scale and big-project by disposition. It is inclined to create extravagant "historical quarters" that are for tourists not inhabitants. In the end we will need something far more radical: to take the building decisions now made and regulated by metropolis province nation and return them to the ward level. For it is only at this scale that you can see what's going on. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top