Five Formal Fallacies of the New Urbanism

Bedford Square, London, a designed urban space with coordinated facades

I suppose the word “New” insulates New Urbanism from expectations that it corresponds to the old or pre-Modernist way of making cities and towns. That would be true if it weren’t for the fact that many New Urbanists talk about tradition, the traditional city, and vernacular architecture, suggesting they form part of an unbroken chain with the past. The reality is, their formal principles are often very new, or not rooted in longstanding historical precedent. Well and good you may say, but there is a lot of confusion, especially among younger practitioners (who didn’t witness the rise and evolution of the movement in the 1980’s and ‘90’s) about what they are embracing formally when they embrace New Urbanism. Allow me then for them, and anyone else who’s interested in historical and modern cities, to illuminate some of the formal fallacies in what is sometimes called traditional urbanism today.

One. Let’s start with the word traditional. What do people mean when they use the word? Do they just mean anything before Modernism (and when, exactly, do they think Modernism began? I know some people who would say the Renaissance!)? Do they mean built with pre-twentieth century technologies? Is there really only one tradition that comprises and explains everything from classical Greece to Edwardian London?

This would be a semantic issue if it didn’t have impact on how architects think about form. I would argue the word traditional is mostly meaningless formally, unless it merely distinguishes Modernism from everything before. Otherwise, it’s not very precise about which tradition it espouses. The paradox is that most contemporary “traditionalists” are not really part of any particular tradition. And eclecticism, practicing a variety of “styles,” is maybe the most modern way of thinking about architecture (it may have begun in 18^th century England, but is perhaps the defining condition of the 19^th century everywhere in the West). Eclecticism is not very traditional, because it sees styles as a palette of options.

Which is not to say that historical towns and cities do not have a variety of buildings one next to the other. But that was a result of historical accident, not design. When architects historically (before the 19^th century) could design a series of buildings at one time, they designed them as if they were coordinated. The idea that traditional means disparate, uncoordinated and apparently undesigned is a formal fallacy.

A Tuscan barn

Two. Vernacular architecture: just another confusion of terms? Léon Krier once produced an illustration distinguishing vernacular building from classical architecture. While not meant to critique either, he rightly assigns vernacular to the act of building, not designing. Vernacular building, by one definition, is precisely building by non-architects. It is indigenous, unaware of style or formal principles, based on local materials and habits of building. It is not Architecture, which is self-conscious. A Tuscan farmhouse, or a log cabin, are vernacular buildings. And they are some of the few kinds of buildings that can be called part of a “tradition.” A Victorian house, or a neo-gothic church, are not vernacular, because they are self-conscious evocations of a style, not the simple and effective process of building a durable structure from time-tested local materials and in response to local conditions of soil, topography, and climate.

The reality is, in the West at least, there is almost no place that today has a living vernacular building tradition. Vernacular is a feel-good word, which often carries with it connotations of the popular, or a moral sense of the humble, simple, and austere; or, it espouses an anti-authoritarian taste for the idiosyncratic, quirky, and non-classical. It is often used instead of the more accurate term “typical,” or “historically-typical.” A Georgian house might have been typical in eighteenth-century London or Philadelphia, but it was not vernacular.

Naarden, Netherlands

Three. Organic urbanism. Cities are not plants. They do not grow out of the ground. They are products of human will and artifice, built with time and effort, but also sometimes the result of speculation, or capricious or unchecked power. And not infrequently, in the darkest of ages (the early Middle Ages, and now), by chance. No one ever, before the late 19^th century at least, deliberately built a winding street—which many New Urbanists advocate as an “organic” form—for aesthetic purposes. Streets wiggled and wound to avoid obstacles (some natural and some manmade), follow terrain, or resulted from incursions into otherwise straight streets. Historical examples are legion, and well-documented in the histories of cities. Liking them aesthetically is understandable, but unless some conditions obtain to sponsor them, there is no legitimate reason to use them to design a street system from scratch today.

None of which would matter if organic weren’t posited in opposition to, and as superior to, classical or rational planning. Organic is supposed to be more human, more humane, more pleasant than anything “formally” laid out. But designing winding streets is merely one form of formal design, and it has a history much shorter than the classical system. It is the history of the picturesque.

Monteriggioni, Province of Siena

Formal, rational design is what distinguishes human buildings from those of beavers and badgers. Indeed, the earliest evidence of agriculture we have, from 4000BC Mesopotamia or perhaps even earlier in India, shows planting in rows: a rational, logical, systematic way of growing crops. And for literally thousands of years, including in the Middle Ages, when people had a chance, they laid out cities rationally, meaning geometrically.

Lucignano, Tuscany

Part of the organic preference is an aversion to the square grid. But the square grid is not the only rational system of planning, and historically many grids were rectangular, not square. There are also radial plans and concentric plans, not to mention warped grids and irregular grids. These systems can also be found in combination.

Siena, Piazza del Campo, planned/designed 1290's

Four. Cities are accumulations of autonomous neighborhoods. Like much of New Urbanism’s formal principles, this one is rooted in opposition to perceived problems with the modern city—specifically, its vast, scaleless, sprawling quality. But historically, for all the local bonds certain residents felt toward their neighborhood, cities fostered in every way possible a sense of communal, collective identity as one city. Neighborhoods were never planned or designed to be distinct or detached from other neighborhoods. Some cities, like Siena, had both micro-neighborhood identities (the contrade) and were also composed of larger distinct urban districts (the three Terzi, on three distinct hills). This was the result of historical evolution and topography (the Terzo di Città being the oldest, perhaps Roman, and on the highest hill). But the whole point of the Piazza del Campo and its Palazzo Pubblico was to link and unite these three districts into one city. Florence had the Oltrarno, the neighborhood beyond or across the Arno River, and Rome had Trastevere across the Tiber, both the result of growing up on a river that was at once conduit and boundary. Nancy had its old town, which acquired a circuit of anti-artillery walls, but when a new quarter was laid out adjacent and acquired its own set of walls, it took the eighteenth-century Place Stanislas to relink them into one city. Ancient Rome had its regions or rioni, which were reestablished in the Renaissance, but I challenge anyone to perceive the formal boundary between one rione and another in the Roman urban fabric.

London is a rather unique case of a city formed of a loose agglomeration of relatively contiguous villages. But it is hard today, apart from toponyms, to know when one is leaving Westminster and entering Camden. Wren’s post-fire plan for London was nothing if not an attempt to link the city together inextricably as the popes had done in Rome in the previous century.

Via dei Servi, a thirteenth century street in Florence

Five. Cities are designed differently than buildings. Again, almost no one before maybe the late twentieth century would have made that argument. This is the newest twist in the New Urbanism, and it is also the most embedded and hidden. The assumption is so accepted as to be “self-evident.” But if Alberti was right that the city is a large house and the house a small city, he would have had a lot of support from the ancient world through even the nineteenth century. The formal principles of planning a house and planning a town were the same. It’s hard to know precisely when this particular fallacy emerged, but again it’s likely the result of opposing some perceived flaw in Modernism, whether the extreme rationalism of Ludwig Hilberseimer or the deference to the abstract diagram in both Modernist buildings and cities.

Conclusion

As Bob Marley said, “If you know your history, then you would know where you’re coming from” (Buffalo Soldier). New Urbanism seems to have settled into a post-design phase, now concerned much more with social and economic issues than design issues per se. Even preferring the term urbanism to urban design tends to marginalize the formal design principles that are the primary concern of the architect. Many of the formal tenets of New Urbanism were personal preferences of some of its founders: matters of taste that are not borne out by an even cursory investigation into the history of cities. If urban design is to reacquire the capacity to equal the great urban achievements of the past, it needs to jettison not a little of its received opinions and look again more closely at what architects and patrons once believed and practiced. It is a much richer, and more beautiful, model for the future.

Suggested Reading (not in alphabetical order):

Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, MIT Press

Alberto Perez Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, MIT Press

Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge Univ. Press

Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, Bullfinch Press

Klaus W. Herdeg, The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy, MIT Press

David Watkin, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement, U. of Chicago; and the same title, Revisited, with context on what transpired after the first edition

Not to be confused with OMD’s album Architecture and Morality, which includes the song Souvenir with its romantic-classical video set partly at the Palladian bridge at Stowe House. The album title was, in fact, inspired by Watkin’s book.