What is Democratic Architecture the Public Life of Buildings

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ARTICLES

What Is Democratic Architecture? The Public Life of Buildings

JOAN OCKMAN

Democracy: A Man-Search, a book by Louis Sullivan, was first published fifty years ago, although he wrote it in 1908. The great Chicago architect completed what is a kind of 350-page prose poem at a moment when his career was at a low ebb. Its belated publication and the obscurity into which it has fallen are not surprising. By turns declamatory and almost deranged, evoking Whitman and Nietzsche, the book virtually guaranteed that architects, its most likely readers, would ignore it, as it did not mention architecture at all. Yet the idea of democracy it put forth is the same as that which Sullivan propounded in all his writings on American architecture. What was this idea? That “democratic form” is an organically unfolding process and an object of symbolic representation; that it emerges from the collective imagination of a modern, progressive society and is an act of individual poetic genius. The tensions within this conception are evident, but you could say that they inhere in architecture itself, which erects fixed monuments to serve as spaces for action and participation. The coexistence in Sullivan’s skyscrapers of massive technological structure and exuberant, arabesquing ornament—an opposition Sullivan did not hesitate to label masculine and feminine—was the architectural expression of this dialectical possibility. Sullivan transmitted his hortatory lessons whole-cloth to his disciple Frank Lloyd Wright, who in turn succeeded in transforming “the architecture of democracy” into a slogan that he brandished throughout his sixdecade career. In the middle of the Second World War he had the temerity to direct a

“citizens’ petition” to the National Planning Resources Board requesting a mandate from the federal government “to continue the search for Democratic FORM as the basis for a true capitalistic society.” By this he meant the building of Broadacre City, a utopian scheme for a decentralized, suburban society that he first conceived during the New Deal. Such a petition by an architect today would be almost unthinkable, but Wright managed, remarkably enough, to collect signatures for it from John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Robert Moses, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thornton Wilder, and fifty other luminaries. A few years later, in a tribute to his mentor, Wright denounced the tendency within democracy to “mob the tribe up” while “mobbing the master down,” excoriating American society for failing to recognize the originality of Sullivan’s, and by extension his own, vision. The ideological ambiguities that surround democratic claims by architects point not only to the difficulties of translating political concepts into three dimensions but also to the historical instability of the term democracy itself, which, despite its symbolic value, has frequently amounted to a hurrah word or a safe-conduct pass. During the early Cold War, “architecture of democracy” was shorthand for the embassies and hotels that leading U.S. firms were triumphally exporting around the world as cultural representations of the pax Americana. Over the next generation, democratic architecture became bound up more with “public space,” an ostensibly populist discourse that has at times devolved in practice into bureaucratic requirements for plazas and outdoor sculptures. In the pluralistic context of postmodernism, the idea of democracy has often been taken as

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Contemporary view of the Seagram Building. Photo: stevecadman.

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the freedom for consumers to choose among a range of lifestyles and products. This tendency reached its architectural apotheosis in the 1990s in the redevelopment of Times Square and in the neotraditional ideology of the New Urbanism. In Times Square, a long-derelict district of Manhattan was transformed into a raucous display of advertising according to a script based on the Alice-in-Wonderland logic of “unplanning.” The master plan, carried out by a public-private partnership under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the architect Robert A. M. Stern, was jumpstarted by the Walt Disney Company, which suddenly appeared on the New York scene in 1993 with its version of clean family entertainment, touted as a way to make the Deuce safe “for everyone.” Outside the metropolitan center, New Urbanists Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have pursued what superficially seems an opposite imagery, conjuring the image of the New England town green in their conception of community and democracy, yet prescribing an equally consumerist, cartoonish, and controlled brand of late-modern life. Here are the first two bullet points from their Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) checklist: (1) Is there a civic space such as a square, plaza, or green at each neighborhood center? (2) Does each neighborhood reserve at least one prominent, honorific site for a civic building, typically at the neighborhood center? The notion of democratic architecture in late-capitalist society has thus become at once more marketable and more elusive as the paradigm has shifted over the last half century from a culture of monuments to one of spectacles. Meanwhile, outside architectural culture proper, recent world events have demonstrated that citizenship tends to find places of representation and enactment wherever it has to, from the rotunda of the Wisconsin State House to the pavements of Tahrir Square to the Internet. The Italian architect Aldo Rossi once described the task of the architect as setting the table for the meal to take place. Architects today want to design the meal itself—to create

”experiences” and ”events.” In today’s media environment, the consumption of such places is liable to produce real effects. This most famously occurred in the late 1990s with Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which turned a decaying and provincial city in the Basque region of Spain into a tourist destination overnight. The sensational “Bilbao effect” spawned many wouldbe Bilbaos. While appetites for this particular urban strategy have recently been reined in by economic realities (except in booming cities in China and the Persian Gulf), the reception of the Bilbao museum differed notably from its predecessor Guggenheim in New York City. A similarly virtuoso design by Frank Lloyd Wright, completed in 1959, the year of the architect’s death, the Guggenheim New York had few imitators in its day and was taken (and intended by its architect) as a deliberately anti-urban gesture.

Two other celebrated works of architecture that bracket the historical change from the building-as-monument to the building-asspectacle are the Seagram Building in New York and the Public Library in Seattle. Each had a transformative impact on its immediate context at the time it opened, radically reimagining the urban public realm, while also attesting to the fluid and undecidable meanings of “democratic architecture.” Completed in 1958 on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, the Seagram, designed by Mies van der Rohe, was famously described by the late architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri as glacially “aloof” and “tragically” self-aware of its separation from the city. The Marxian historian intended this as praise. Standing ninety feet back from the street on a raised plaza, the thirty-eight-story building sublimely surveys the urban scene from behind a dark-glass, bronze-clad facade. By refusing to engage with its surrounding context, according to Tafuri, the building mutely registers its distance and dissent from the capitalist city. Tafuri quotes the Austrian writer Karl Kraus: “He who has something to say, step forward and be silent.” I think Tafuri’s reading is incorrect, and a little melodramatic. Indeed, it is equally F A L L 2 0 1 1 D I SS E N T

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possible to view Seagram as a paragon of urban decorum. Not just its classically balanced front façade but its setback from Park Avenue, painstakingly finessed along the sloping side streets, has the effect of relating it all the more effectively to McKim, Mead and White’s 1916 Beaux-Arts Racquet and Tennis Club across the street, with which its entry is directly on axis. The high-modern Seagram thereby acknowledges its neighbor at a civilized distance. While its laconic demeanor and austere plaza project a message of “do not enter” to those who don’t have business inside, its siting provides needed aeration from midtown Manhattan’s flux and fray of traffic and pedestrians. As far as capitalist criticism goes, Mies hardly had qualms about working for corporate clients. Indeed, upon emigrating to Chicago in the late 1930s (after designing several projects for Hitler’s Reich), he quickly became one of the preferred architects of real estate developers and business moguls, adding prestige and refinement to luxury apartment towers and office headquarters. The Seagram Building remains one of the most lavish buildings in New York, less Marx than Medici in its custom-designed mail chutes, fire alarms, and bathroom fittings. Lewis Mumford called it the Rolls Royce of contemporary buildings when it opened.

Seagram inevitably invites comparison with another modernist icon, Lever House, which stands catercorner to it one block north on the other side of Park Avenue. Lever House was completed six years before Seagram by the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In an effort to make more palatable what was at the time a brazen disruption of Park Avenue’s traditional masonry street wall, Lever House has an elevated horizontal base that overhangs the edges of its lot, while a slim slab containing twenty stories of office floors rises asymmetrically from its northern portion. This ingenious reinterpretation of the zoning code, which at the time permitted extra height for buildings occupying less than one quarter of their footprint, not only gives passersby access to its all-glass lobby but also made possible the adjacent amenity of a landscaped

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courtyard open to the public and the sky. Within the high-rise slab, the stacked floors with their well-lit, climate-controlled office landscapes provided the original employees— a largely female work force at the time—an unusually generous standard of workspace. Until the building was sold in the late 1990s, the enlightened paternalism of Lever Brothers’ founder was duly noted on a plaque attached to a stainless-steel column at the entry to the courtyard. Yet these benevolent gestures tend to be dissipated in the hyperactivity of the sloping avenue, and the shiny blue-green curtain wall with its “egalitarian” grid of flush metal and glass—created for a soap company that made a show of sudsing its façade in a special gondola designed for the double purpose of window-washing and advertising—lacks Seagram’s elegant and authoritative articulation. If Lever House projects the more “democratic” image, Seagram exhibits the greater formal dignitas. Mies unquestionably was less preoccupied with projecting a rhetoric of democracy than with expressing the Zeitgeist of modern technology. Yet his building paradoxically harks back to Sullivan, who, in 1896, posed a fundamental problem of the skyscraper: How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration, this stark, staring exclamation of eternal strife, the graciousness of those high forms of sensibility and culture that rest on the lower and fiercer passions? How shall we proclaim from the dizzy height of this strange, weird, modern housetop the peaceful evangel of sentiment, of beauty, the cult of a higher life?

In answering this question, Mies comes closer to Sullivan than might be suspected. Seagram’s façade achieves its subtle effects not through stripped-down functionalism but through a pasted-on appliqué of vertical Ibeams, a form of high-modernist ornament. In this respect, Seagram is very different from Lever House, its historical contemporary, and the two neighbors engage in an instructive public conversation about civicism and urban representation. It is a conversation, moreover, that continually gets inflected and recontextu-

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Contemporary view of Lever House seen from the plaza of the Seagram Building. Photo by David Shankbone.

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The Seattle Public Library. Photo by Frankphotos.

alized—like all else in the city—by new inputs. Recently, for example, Seagram’s plaza was occupied for five months by a giant yellow teddy bear conjoined with a helmetlike desk lamp. A sculpture by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer, placed there to advertise its auction last spring at Christie’s (and perhaps a commentary on the office workers in the area), it served to undercut the pretensions of Sullivan’s “high forms of sensibility and culture,” making Mies’s Baukunst a backdrop for pop culture’s axiomatic wisdom: this too shall be consumed. History tends to be fickle with respect to the reception of buildings. If Lever House initially appeared an audacious architectural gesture, and Seagram a transcendent one, within a few years they both were replicated up and down the avenue by imitations of lesser quality. And by the time the despised Pan Am Building (now Met Life) was completed in 1963 ten blocks south at 45th Street, designed by Walter Gropius in association with Pietro Belluschi, Lever House appeared practically demure. Straddling Park

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Avenue just above Grand Central Station, Pan Am—in its day the largest commercial office building in the world, built at one of its busiest hubs—rudely closed off the view corridor like a big thumb in the city’s eye (or, as the artist Claes Oldenburg had it, a melting Good Humor Bar). A cartoon in the New Yorker read, “It’s a sad day when Lever House appears a warm old friend.”

Fifteen years later, the young Rem Koolhaas would take a different view of this midtown behemoth, celebrating Manhattan’s “culture of congestion” in his brilliantly imaginative book Delirious New York. For the Dutch architect, monotony in the city is a far worse crime than incivility. Precisely what cities have to offer besides propinquity, in his view, are cultural stimulation and the incessant experience of difference. After years of making paper projects, he finally got the chance to test out his urban theory of delirium in the early 1990s with a winning competition project for a new transportation hub in Euralille,

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France—a scale shift in his practice that he registered in another significant book, S, M, L, XL. In 2004, he brought this thinking to fruition in his design for the Seattle Public Library. The Seagram Building was the headquarters of a whiskey company whose Canadian owner made his fortune during Prohibition and therefore wanted to burnish his company’s reputation with an exclusive, buttoned-down monument. The Seattle Library, in contrast, was a deliberate effort to create an urban attraction, a building that would reverse the lackluster image of Seattle’s downtown and, through the glamor and prestige of an internationally acclaimed architect, put the city on the nation’s cultural map. Traditionally a temple of knowledge, the municipal library was totally reprogrammed by Koolhaas (together with a large and talented team of collaborators) as a building type for the twenty-first century on the basis of both updated functional criteria, namely the increasing obsolescence of books, and irreverent formal ones. The scheme overturned all the established hierarchies and ingeniously remade the library into a carnivalesque space of urban happenings. Was Koolhaas’s radical gesture then a democratizing one, an effort to make an august public institution more crowd-pleasing and friendly? Or was it a slap in the face of a city known for its conservative taste by an architect whose reputation is based on being an enfant terrible? The client was the most public one possible, and the project’s primary funding came from the largest library bond in U.S. history. The design process, which commenced in 1999 after Koolhaas was awarded the commission, was exceptionally well-documented and was intended to be maximally public, as befitting the creation of an institution that should have, as the city librarian put it, the “transparency of democracy.” Yet despite the unusual lengths to which the institution’s representatives went to invite public input and to keep citizens informed of the project’s development, it is difficult to say whether the process was more about public accountability or public relations. Most of the questions and suggestions put forward by the local community tended to

get deflected or to have a negligible impact on the ultimate building, which remained very close to the original diagram. This is not too surprising. Notwithstanding Koolhaas’s much-vaunted research methodology, public opinion has never been among his privileged data sets. The new library’s vortex-like presence in Seattle’s downtown has undoubtedly pumped energy and excitement into the heart of the city, much like Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao. It has generated civic pride, boosted tourism, and, like the Gehry building, it is popular among both the architectural cognoscenti and the general public. Media reviews at its opening were enthusiastic in declaring the building to be among Koolhaas’s best.

Unlike Seagram, though, the library does not try very hard to be part of an urban ensemble; it mainly calls attention to itself. Inside, the dominant diagrid of steel and glass, which clads the offset stack of “floating platforms” like a fishnet stocking, deftly frames fractured vistas. But these tend to accentuate the skyline’s vacuity, and gazing through the omnipresent bars makes the library’s occupants, in accord with the “paranoid-critical” method Koolhaas put forth in Delirious New York, into voluntary or involuntary prisoners of architecture. Meanwhile, problems with the innovative circulation concept and the shelving system, as well as shoddy finishes, have elicited a quiet stream of complaints and the need for plenty of ad hoc signage to redirect disoriented users lost in the Dewey decimal system. Perhaps in a project of such scope and ambition complaints of this kind are inevitable. Yet other issues are at stake. What used to be, in great public monuments, the grand staircase, has morphed into a lemoncolored illuminated escalator, which passively channels circulation upward much like an amusement-park ride. The organization of books, based on a continuous four-story spiral that correlates (sometimes vertiginously) with escalator, elevator, and stairwell landings, is a concept explicitly modeled on a parking garage. In addition to the book spiral and a

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rather unexceptional upper-level reading room—a space where one might have expected the architect to lavish a lot of attention—the major public elements of the library program are rezoned into spaces of “tailored flexibility”: a “mixing chamber” (also described as a “trading floor”), a “meeting” platform, and a “living room.” Librarians wear voice-activated devices around their necks that are equipped with a GPS system—a technology borrowed from hospital emergency rooms—to facilitate communication. The overall ambience is playful, mechanistic, and manipulative. Ultimately, the verdict on the library may hinge on whether one comes to it primarily to experience the building’s spatial and social performance or to read and work. Members of the city’s homeless population also appear to have found a haven there, although their presence has not been altogether welcomed. When I visited several years ago, what seemed most extraordinary to me was that the architect had managed to sell all that glass to—of all people—librarians. Cubic volume not only takes precedence over the bound volume at the Seattle Public Library, but subordinates every other activity, however inventively and stylishly reconfigured, to the architectural spectacle. While the city librarian has described the building as having a “brutal beauty,” a more common reaction is that it is “really cool.” The extravagant use of glass, as bedazzlement and blur more than as transparency, and the obsession with circulation systems— the fetish of ramps and escalators—are two hallmarks of today’s signature architecture. The current architectural spectacle is a highly engineered system of control that seduces with scintillating surfaces. Koolhaas’s newest building, the CCTV Tower in Beijing, commissioned by the Chinese government’s media monopoly, bestrides that capital city like a hallucinatory colossus. A contemporary forbidden city, it allures to its empty center those living within eyesight of it in the city’s few remaining traditional neighborhoods as well as those sitting around television screens in far corners of the global village. Here, the rhetoric of transparency and

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openness appears to have arrived at a perverse and panoptic dénouement.

CCTV and Seattle are architectural emblems of the present moment as surely as Seagram was of the mid-twentieth century (and Sullivan’s Wainwright Building in St. Louis was of the 1890s). Even in an age of digital communications and electronic books, however, citizenship practices continue to have their most vivid enactment in real places. And such places will feel welcoming or inhospitable, ennobling or degrading, exhilarating or deadening, liberating or oppressive by their spatial attributes. As such—and suspicious as I remain of democracy talk in architecture—I believe it’s essential to continue to aspire to “the possibility for richer, more inclusive expressions of what holds us together as citizens and human beings,” as the historian Casey Nelson Blake has put it. The message in Seattle with respect to “democratic architecture” is a mixed one. The librarians’ desire to provide a lively and urbane civic setting can hardly be doubted. Nor can the building’s contradictions entirely be laid at the doorstep of the architect, whether one considers him visionary or cynical. Yet like all else, public institutions are enmeshed in contemporary culture, tied to an economy that demands a particular kind of renovation in order to attract global tourism and—in no case more than a municipal library—struggling for survival in the electronic maelstrom. Paradoxically these forces have both popularizing and hollowing-out effects on embodied space. They are unlikely, in themselves, to promote democracy, however one defines it. Architects have the job of channeling these forces in their buildings, even if it is also part of their task to rise above them. Joan Ockman is an architectural critic and historian. Her book Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America will be published early next year. This article is revised from a paper presented at the “Civility and Democracy in America Conference,” sponsored by the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service and held in Spokane, Washington, in March 2011.

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