Inside the universal “outside” that surrounds us, there is an inferred and imaginary consciousness: inferred because we believe in it the way we believe in Other Minds (surface, after all, means “on the face”); imaginary because it is purely projected — not without excuse — but projected beyond the simple smile lines which say smile, or the brow’s wriggles which write puzzlement or anxiety, to create the emotional state we regularly assume would draw them. These conditions of consciousness, which live metaphorically “behind” the configurations of the city’s face, can dampen or liberate our feelings almost by osmosis, the way any friend’s or lover’s gestures can, through the frank show of this state of mind. —William H. Gass, “The Face of the City”
Because architecture defines the human landscape, it is the most public of art forms. No matter what the use or context, a work of architecture—or, more accurately, the aggregate of architecture—dominates the visual field in which we live our lives. Architecture’s visual prominence drives the contentious debate over public values in architecture. What makes a building good or bad, worthwhile or wasted, progressive or conservative, is often what makes us the same. Thus it follows that good architecture is critical, that it searches to define us but does not stop there. The best architecture carries us forward by appealing to vision, not nostalgia, and aspirations, not fears. Doing so requires a challenge to, and not the mere confirmation of, our assumptions.
In “The Face of the City,” William Gass illustrates the reflexive relationship we have with architecture. Our consciousness affects the way we read the city and our consciousness is affected by the signs that the city’s surfaces project back to us. Implicit in this relationship is the importance of the language of architecture. How the surfaces are articulated, what they allude to or disregard, is as important a component in urban design as the scale and arrangement of the pieces. The surfaces of the city have the power not only to shock, but more significantly to quietly shape our everyday lives. They are the most visible murals of the inspiration or the complacency of the public will. This is the context, both physical and spiritual, that anticipates architecture and demands rigor in its appraisal.
Yet if criticism of context is so vital to public architecture, who provides the criticism? Traditionally, of course, criticism has been part of the authorial purview of the artist. For the architect, that most public of artists, this purview creates a special conundrum. On one hand, authorship is a private undertaking, part of the creative process that is at its heart very personal (even if undertaken as part of a professional collaboration). On the other hand, an integral component of the best design is specificity to its site, and the architect is in most cases a citizen of a metropolitan world, not a representative of a particular locale. As an interpreter of context, a provocateur who translates the known into the unfolding, the architect requires assistance in making a complete assessment of what best informs the design.
This is the reason that the contemporary process provides structured opportunity for the public to voice its priorities for a given design. This structure typically defines “the public” through elected or appointed representatives in government, the principal “users” of the space to be created, as well as other “stakeholders” from the community at large, residents and businesspeople who will be affected in any number of ways by the design. However, the public voice often fogs the mirror in which the public image is reflected, leading to the lack of inspiration—or worse, the equivocation—that is among the most virulent cancers of architecture. Another very real problem is that a handful of vocal advocates can hijack the public process and impose a vision for the design that is not only unrepresentative of the public character but also reactionary and retrograde.
Our conundrum restated: it takes two to tango, but the architect and the public are uneasy partners. The democratization of the process of architecture has destabilized the traditional relationship between architect and public. How might a new, workable relationship be formed?
A sustainable balance between public and architecture lies in the vernacular—that is, in the particulars of the form, memory, and rituals of a place. The public’s ability to frame an authentic cultural context in which architecture may be created derives from these particulars. Rather than prescribing the outcome of a design, the public process should set goals and elucidate the patterns and traditions of a place.
Likewise the architect, in imparting sensibility, should respect this information by making it fundamental to the design rather than peripheral, the meat rather than the garnish. This priority does not preclude, but further necessitates, the architect’s role as observer and interpreter, which involves a stepping away from the vernacular to get a critical perspective. The public process gives the architect more to consider, more to synthesize, and demands, if anything, a greater critical distance in order to see the forest for the trees. It is in the architect’s reunion with context, in the return from the critical distance, that the success of the design is measured. After all, the public process is an act of entrustment, and it is a betrayal for the architect to return from his Olympian retreat with an inflexible design that disregards or minimizes or mocks the contributions of the stakeholders. To do so casts the architect as an unrepresentative special interest, the alter ego of the most fractious element on the other side of the equation.
In many cases, failures in the public process have their roots in the way that the idea of context has come to be understood in the public realm. Discussions of context are now so biased toward the creation of continuity that more authentic interpretations of place have been abandoned. Is the fabric of the Northern Waterfront District in San Francisco best described by punched brick walls or the rawness of industry? Is the future of downtown Culver City best served by the recreation of an ersatz Main Street America or an exploration of the promise of media in the public realm? It is not for any individual or special interest to decide these issues. Yet, because a public process often pits architects fearful of having their authority diminished against a public wary of elitist architecture that makes little reference to, and has little use for, the people who must interact with it, substantive discussions about place are hard to come by. When such conflicts occur, the resolution is usually found in the lowest common denominator, in mimicry of the past rather than a progression from the past.
A case in point occurred recently in Berkeley. The city needed a new public safety building and chose a site adjacent to its City Hall, a classical building designed in 1938 by James Placheck. There were several iterations to the selection of an architect for the project, including a design competition. The competition brief stated that response to the goals of the community and the context of the City Hall building would be the key criteria for selecting the winner. Given the site and program, such a priority certainly makes sense and would seem to be the foundation for an exploration of cultural context, especially in a city as broad-minded as Berkeley.
At several points along the way, the city was presented with the portfolios of architects who would clearly be critical in their view of context. And at several junctures various architects had the opportunity to craft dialogue around the cultural context of Berkeley. Ultimately, however, the city chose a safe route. The pat solution of continuity as context won out over a progressive direction. How can it be that in Berkeley, where across town at UC the canon of the DWM’s (dead white men) was being challenged with vigor, it was ultimately seen as appropriately contextual that the public services building be wrought in the language of classicism? It is beyond the scope of this article to explain how this happened, but what is most poignant is that, from the inception of the need for the project to the final built reality, there was no process that elucidated the cultural context necessary to produce an authentic work of architecture. As a result, the city got a most a-contextual building. Nothing in the design speaks to Berkeley’s famously progressive civic values.
One way to form a link between the patterns and traditions of place and the language of architecture would be through the old fashioned notion of propriety. That is, one can make good matches among place, time, and program through judicious choices. Thomas Jefferson, for example, argued that classicism was a good choice for American civic buildings after his visit to that little temple in France. Gothic has been seen as an appropriate choice for college campuses, etc. In today’s world of expanded choices (like the multitude of television channels) a client or municipality or whoever could surf until she found an architect’s portfolio that suited some view of her needs. Surely there are architects whose work embodies values that can be recognized and matched to a situation. I would ask: is classicism an appropriate choice for Berkeley? This process of choice presumes that the architect has provided a priori a body of critical content that might be reconstituted in the particular locale. The process assumes, as well, that the choosers bring a critical mind to the process, for in their choice of architect they are effectively prescribing the building’s context.
The other direction would be toward so-called authenticity. In other words, each place has—or can have—its own architecture. To fulfill this view, the client would seek out an architect known not for a signature “look” but for a body of work whose signature has varied with the particularities of different sites. The act of arriving at an authentic response to a place would bias a process of research and discovery over a process of choosing and immediate understanding. Certainly there is more risk involved, because it opens the door to an ad hoc unconventionality (which, incidentally, might well be suited to the political climate of Berkeley).
There are, to be sure, many examples of public processes that have yielded greater success than that of the Tsukamoto Public Safety Building. During the development of this building, there was general agreement on siting issues, scale, and the arrangement of the pieces. But when attention turned to the surfaces and the language of the building, the absence of an adequate public process undermined the building’s potential to represent the city’s character. The very diversity and expressiveness that Berkeley’s political culture has popularized was in this case categorically barred from the built environment. Unfortunately, this sort of outcome is all too common in the American city.
The example of Berkeley is chilling because it exposes the disconnection between a cultural context and the legibility of an architecture. Why are we so loathe to accept diversity and expression in our built environment, when we applaud it in our political environment? If the architect is to act as provocateur, as an agent and partner in creating a critical public realm, she has the responsibility to teach the value of innovation and the ability of architecture to express a context beyond the merely adjacent. The architect must be convincing, not merely demonstrative, to be entrusted to steer the collaborative criticism that gives rise to our best architecture.
Author Bryan Shiles, AIA, is a partner with Gordon H Chong + Partners in San Francisco and adjunct professor of architecture at CCAC (California College of Arts and Crafts).
Photo by Marc Phu.
Originally published 3rd quarter 2001, in arcCA 01.3, “Publicness.”
