Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [95]
ARCHITECTS
Many different professions contribute to the making of sprawl, and they all need to change. We have not shied away from criticizing the planners, traffic engineers, and land-use attorneys, and greater scrutiny needs to be applied by those practitioners to their own work. As architects, we are best qualified to discuss the negative contributions of our own profession. This may come as a surprise, since it has not been the habit of architects to air their dirty laundry.
The previous chapters have already laid out in detail the specific techniques that architects may use to counter sprawl. But there is a larger lesson to impart, which is that architects can truly make a difference. In this case, making a difference requires architects to accept a proposal that may run counter to their schooling: design affects behavior.
Disputing this truism may seem silly, yet for some reason it is still a topic of heated debate at architecture schools. The persistence of this non-issue is probably due to the way it gets confused with another, more esoteric inquiry, which is whether the design of the environment exerts any influence on human nature itself. While it is easy to have strong feelings about that question as well, there is no need to answer it; human nature is not at issue here, but simply whether people behave differently in different physical surroundings. For us, that question is as obvious as asking whether locking a door keeps someone out of a room, or whether creating an environment in which nothing is nearby causes people to drive. One does not have to believe that front porches encourage sociability to accept that unwalkable streets discourage it.dt
This state of affairs has a complex and lamentable history. It developed in response to the arrogance of modernism, an ethos that believed unquestioningly in the beneficial power of design. Inspired by the unrealized utopias of the Enlightenment, early-modern architects were convinced that they possessed the means for solving society’s problems. By applying theories from the incipient quasisciences of psychology and sociology, architects invented new forms of buildings and cities that they believed would transform their inhabitants into the most benevolent of creatures. These forms were actually built in places such as Pruitt Igoe and Cabrini Green, with disastrous results: entire projects were subsequently abandoned and demolished, as they continue to be. The antisocial behavior that immediately developed in these places was far from what had been predicted.
These failures were fresh in the minds of our professors when we arrived at architecture school. The lesson was clearly stated by the sociologist Nathan Glazer: “We must root out of thinking the assumption that the physical form of our communities has social consequence.”2 With that single statement, architects were absolved of all responsibility to society. The profession retreated into itself, and we were encouraged to avoid social issues and address only topics that were strictly architectural and largely selfreferential. Thus began the pursuit of form for its own sake that continues today.
The wrong lesson learned: failed modernist housing schemes taught architects to stop trying to solve society’s problems
What is now clear is that our generation learned the wrong lesson from the failure of modernism. The abysmal performance of the social housing projects of