THE POSTURING OF THE MEN OF SYSTEM.

Strong Towns contributor Edward Erfurt notes the passing of his mentor, Léon Krier.  Both Mr Krier and Mr Erfurt are architects and thus bring the biases of the Men of System to their thinking.

My passion for architecture is rooted in the vacations of my youth, when my family would wander through the historical towns of the eastern United States. I was captivated by these places: brick homes, boxwood-lined walkways, and grand porches and arcades. The architectural features of these historical buildings seemed to tell a story with every detail.

While other children may have groaned during historical walking tours, I absorbed them. I wanted to design buildings like those. I wanted to contribute to the long and rich history of these places that celebrated tradition and humanity. But when I reached high school in the late 1990s and began looking at architecture schools, it did not take very long to realize how out of step my desire for traditional architecture was with the prevailing orthodoxy of the architectural academy. Architectural education had largely abandoned traditional patterns. Glass boxes, stark modernism, and “innovation for innovation’s sake” dominated the curriculum.

None of that resonated with me.

Nor should it have.  "The only constant is change" is a profound-sounding statement that comes to grief against the reality that emergence cannot be planned.  That's true of urban structure, but there aren't as many grants to be had in understanding emergence as there are in attempting to control it.  "Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d**n well please, including the complex adaptive systems we know as cities, or as metropolitan areas.  And somewhere (perhaps it goes back to Daedalus sketching pretty lines in the sand) comes the idea that something so built must require intelligent design."

Unfortunately, wrangling over what the intelligent design looks like leads to wrangling over who should have the authority to do the designing, and therein begins the foolishness.  In Mr Krier's case, it starts with another profound-sounding but wrong statement, "Are our cities the result of choice or fate?"

I didn’t know who Krier was at the time. But when he took the stage, he started sharing slides of sketches from his latest book that had just been submitted to his publisher. I was completely spellbound. His presentation, accompanied by his simple, eloquent sketches, revealed not only how far contemporary cities had strayed from traditional urbanism, but also why that mattered so deeply.

Mr Erfurt presents one of those "simple, eloquent sketches."

What's missing from those pictures?

That's a mill building in the same general style and scale as the religious, civic, and commercial buildings of Mr Krier's "mature city."  It's along the Cayuga-Seneca Canal, as viewed from the George Bailey Bridge in Seneca Falls.  No elderly AS-2 jumped into the river while I was taking pictures.

That might be sufficient if all you want to do is engage in a battle of wits with other Men of System.  Consider the reminiscence from James "Long Emergency" Kunstler.

He is perhaps best-known for designing the project known as Poundbury in Britain, sponsored by Prince Charles (now King Charles III). Poundbury was intended to demonstrate that traditional urban design will produce places worthy of our affection — as opposed to the spiritually annihilating environments of strip-malls, “housing developments,” and skyscraper city centers that became the norm after 1950, the world of eyesores this website features.

Though he worked for King Charles on the Poundbury project, Leo dissociated himself from the “Globalist” / Woke agenda years ago, which he regarded as the political expression of the despotic Modern-isms cultivated in the graduate schools and promoted by the money-chasing architectural firms.

The reform movement Leo heralded became the New Urbanism movement in America, a very potent force, since the 1990s, for rectifying the mutilated human habitat all over our country. Alas, the past decade, the New Urbanists succumbed to Woke idiocy and, even more catastrophically, their model of the “walkable community” has become conflated with the Globalist “Fifteen-minute City,” based on surveillance and control of the population. I hope they can work that out.

The absence of factories, let alone power stations or railways, from Mr Krier's sketches is not something Mr Kunstler will fret over.  These are doomed to a short life because of resource depletion, or something.  (I stumbled upon his site years ago by way of doomsday environmentalist James "Political Environment" Rowen, whose site has been inactive of late.)  Thus, scoring points against a different sort of Man of System might have been all that mattered.

Such commentary is commendable, if not necessary.  But what good does it do to suggest that Norman Bel Geddes had a crabbed vision of urban form and that Charles-Edouard "Le Corbusier" Jeanneret-Gris "was far more anti-Semitic and a fan of Hitler than previously thought."  (Paul de Man, anyone?  What is it about Deep Thinking artistic types and their admiration for tyrants?  I'm tempted, hereafter, to refer to Corbo as Eddie Gray.  But I digress.)  

There is a place for the Men of System to have their faction fights.  It is the common room, where the pretentious mock the pretentions of others, as noted by Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan.  "This was my first encounter with Léon Krier — his obnoxious, hilarious, response to a fellow architect’s presentation of his latest project."

Well, yes, anyone who In All Earnestness says things like "find the true character of houses and an authentic way of life by overcoming physical limitations of size and by establishing — through complex spatial compositions — a close relationship between architecture and daily life" deserves at a minimum to be subjected to ironic clapping at a symposium and at a maximum spending all of eternity being chased by the Devil among the columns of Penn Station.  And yes, that means some of those complex spatial compositions must go.

[Brutalist] buildings never had a heyday, but were hated when they were erected and are still hated now.

The seedbed of the trend was a Kennedy administration commission that advocated contemporary designs and said — laughably, in retrospect — that federal architecture should “reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American national government.”

Instead, the brutalist buildings speak of a lumbering bureaucracy with no regard for the sensibilities or priorities of ordinary people.

They are about what you’d expect if a DMV were headquartered in a maximum-security prison, or in a massive pillbox.

These buildings could easily be used as stage sets for docudramas about East Germany.

They are a tribute to soulless monumentality and a gut punch to the human spirit.

If they don’t eventually get a well-deserved appointment with a wrecking ball, they should be donated to North Korea.

The original justifications of brutalism no longer apply. The buildings aren’t new anymore, and they aren’t cheap.

They haven’t aged well in any sense, not aesthetically or functionally. The FBI building is literally falling apart, and the expense of maintaining the HUD building has become ruinous.

We used to crack wise, incorrectly, about "riot renaissance" design on campuses.  Predictably, the perpetually neurotic aestheticians of The Nation see in a restoration of the Federal Style or that Grand Roman Quality as reflections of dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability more Creeping White Supremacy.  Cue the ironic clapping.

There is something missing, though, from the entire "New Urbanist" project, whether dealing with architects' creations individually, or in the urban form generally.

Milwaukee's Commission Row, looking north-northwest along North Broadway, no date given.
Retrieved from Milwaukee Public Library.

Let's consider Mr Krier's Poundbury first.

Poundbury is Krier’s most substantial built legacy, a project that was widely ridiculed when it began in the 1980s, but which time has vindicated in many ways. Set in 200 hectares of the Duchy of Cornwall in Dorset, the plan was modelled on an 18th-century English village, with narrow, winding streets, lined with traditional terraced homes, leading to public squares, where grander classical buildings would indicate their civic function.

Critics compared it to Marie Antoinette’s “hameau” in Versailles, a pretend rustic hamlet where the haughty queen played at being a peasant. The Observer slammed it as “fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute,” decrying its “counterfeit design and cack-handed pastiche.”

Yet unlike so many lifeless developer-built estates, it combined industrial space, stores and small workshops among the housing, now employing 2,600 people in 250 businesses. It has worked: house prices are up to a quarter higher than the surrounding area, while 35% of the homes are affordable, scattered throughout the development, rather than corralled into separate blocks.

Is that industrial space suitable for fabricating consumer electronics or smelting steel at scale?  How much commuting is there both among those 2,600 workers coming from elsewhere in Dorsetshire or among other residents of Poundbury, who are apparently willing to pay a premium to live there?

Next let's consider Professor Soltan's Garrett Park.

Derided as reactionary, nostalgic, and authoritarian, Krier was an enemy of capitalist excess who realized, rightly, that most people prefer living a grounded existence (rather than a remote, abstracted, skyscraper one) in a meaningful town with architecturally recognizable shops, libraries, churches, schools, cafes, and the rest within walking distance. Many of his realized projects, like Seaside, are, again, madly popular, which UD thinks vindicates his earthy, historically grounded, daily social mixing, instinct. The larger, well-known movement, New Urbanism, that he inspired, has been hugely successful here and in Europe.

Of course UD‘s own Garrett Park has many of the characteristics Krier championed; but a town a few miles away from her – Kentlands – was directly conceived in his New Urbanist style, and has been a big hit.

Seaside is in Florida.  As is, speaking of "fake, heartless, authoritarian, and grimly cute," the Main Street U.S.A. section of Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom, although Cinderella's castle gazes down on a main street modelled on a 19th Century Missouri town.

Unattributed image retrieved from Touring Plans.

Where are the manufactories, even those of nineteenth-century Seneca Falls proportions?  Where is the Commission Row or the local cold storage warehouse?  Where are the draymen bringing those cases of pop and cartons of mouse ears to the stores?  You don't see those at the Magic Kingdom because underneath those streets runs a modern version of the Chicago Freight Tunnels, through which pass the draymen, as well as cast members, who must stay in character until they enter the locker room, coming on or going off duty.  Garrett Park or Kentlands or Seaside don't go quite that far, and yet, Garrett Park and Kentlands can outsource the mundane logistical stuff to Rockville and the earning a living to the Federal Government.  (Likewise, without people going about their business in Milwaukee or Seneca Falls or Duluth or what have you, there's no Magic Kingdom.)

That's what the Men of System miss.  Here's Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn, in an earlier invocation of Léon Krier.

The key insight of Krier—and the answer to the question of “what works”—is that the organic city worked. Human habitat, co-created and co-evolved with us over thousands of years, worked. It used feedback loops to harmonize many competing objectives over time.

The question of “what works” is premised on the notion that there exists a pattern of development, or a series of actions, that can be implemented without the struggle of harmonizing competing objectives. That premise is incorrect. Whether we are comfortable with it or not, cities as complex systems require us to work incrementally as a way to obsessively seek out and respond to feedback.

The Men of System, inevitably, will attempt to Impose System based on their ability to recognize patterns, irrespective of what those patterns are, and they might have a vested interest in continuing to find Things Gone Wrong, in order to be able to continue to Apply Their Expertise.  That won't work.  "Prioritization with an overlay of planning mandates is a political environment conducive to rent-seekers."