In praise of a new manifesto for cities
“Gadfly” is a word that might be restored to greater dignity. It’s come to connote a preening and pot-stirring charlatan posturing as a civic-minded do-gooder. But its etymological origins, dating back to the Shakespearean era of especially inventive English-making, are far more inspiring. The “gad” has the same root that you hear in “goad” — pushing, pressing, persuading toward motion and the taking of action. The “fly” connotes less the presence of aerial insects than the necessity of all due speed. Given the slowness and intermittence with which buildings are made, and the solemn social and ecological moral imperatives behind the configuration of these high-embodied-energy artworks that we dwell in, a complementary parallel practice for architects is just such a role. Public intellectual. Advocate. Street preacher. And goad to goodness. You have to talk the walk.
If anyone can do it, it’s the New York architect Vishaan Chakrabarti. Once a New York City Department of City Planning official during the venture capitalist and property developer-friendly mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg, and now the founding partner of his personal studio, called the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), Chakrabarti has otherwise eschewed conventionally authoritative positions. In 2015, he departed after three years in a straight-to-partnership role at the blue-chip design firm SHoP, and in 2021 departed after one year in the deanship of his alma mater, the Berkeley College of Environmental Design — perhaps, in part, to sustain the quicksilver agility and ubiquity required by a maverick ministry. The message of that ministry, appropriately for our era of hyper urbanization in which 85% of 10 billion human beings will live in cities by century’s end, is about the obligations and opportunities, local and global, offered by urban life.
The powerful insight on which that message is premised is that the inexorable movement of humanity to cities, may also — despite sometimes presenting as its own crisis for the quality of human lives — be inherently palliative to the other defining condition of our times: the planetary poly-crisis triggered by global heating, and the coming post-energy-surplus era. The reason for this is less the result of any architect or urbanist’s art, than the radical efficiencies, systematic and energetic, built into cities’ inherent spatial and material concentration of infrastructures and commensurate economies of scale. Crowds tread lighter on the earth.
“In 2013,” by Chakrabarti’s account, “I wrote a book … that extolled the environmental, economic and social benefits of building dense, transit-based cities both in the United States and globally.” ‘A Country of Cities: Manifesto for an Urban America’ was well received, but for its Achilles’ heel. Informed by exhaustively researched data and infographics, readers were open to the argument that dense urban life produces a lower carbon footprint per capita, creates more opportunities for shared health and prosperity, and improves social mobility.But the dilemma of this argument is that it is largely quantitative without speaking to the qualitative aspects of city building. Many people, even if they are open to greater urban density, find most contemporary growth to be soul crushing.
The crush comes at extremes, such as the injustices to be found from informal homeless settlements to food deserts. But there are also the more banal discouragements experienced by a narrow but influential cohort of aspirational middle-class urbanites, who in their visits from residential suburbia are correctly disappointed by the pathetic streetscapes that Chakrabarti laments: privatized public space; wan and whimsical historicist pastiche blighted by hostile design; empty and obsolete blue glass office towers looming over chain coffee shops that are now app-takeout-centric and post-third-space (a phenomenon ostensibly no longer required when your cellphone seemingly offers you a more compelling virtual version of incidental encounter and search).
In New York City — whose city planning has historically been crude, listless and mercantile, these case studies are a goad to finally raise expectations.
Addressing that crush is the mission of the lively new volume in which that lament appears: Chakrabarti’s latest, “The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy.” (For poetry I would have gone with rapture!) The objective is described somewhat more prosaically, in Chakrabarti’s utilitarian phrasing, as, “experiential uplift.” The useful charm of the word urbanity is that it describes both the quantitative conditions assessed in Chakrabarti’s earlier volume — the increasingly self-evident ecological and technological felicities of dense conurbations — but also the humane civic virtues necessarily occasioned by metropolitan life: cosmopolitan, worldly, tolerant, curious, agile, streetwise, sophisticated, urbane. Urbanity speaks, in a very New York City way, to the Jane Jacobean “eyes on the street” of mutual witness and mutual care, and to the truism that folks like New Yorkers — all going places but all in it together — are never nice but always kind. (The book’s engaging graphic design, by Pentagram, reinforces with appropriately stylish form this substantive content.)
Lay readers especially will benefit from Chakrabarti’s TED-talk-accessible accounts, in the charismatically named chapter, “Rebel Rebel,” that colorfully illustrate bottom-up and crowd-sourced acts of occupation, improvisation and maintenance with which end users become the ultimate designers of their environments: a literal and figurative resignifying of a Washington, D.C. thoroughfare into Black Lives Matter Plaza. A generic protest (the illustration pointedly leaves the signs blank) in downtown Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. That park’s similar but scruffier neighbor, Tompkins Square (“with all four corners open, the park is tied seamlessly into the grid”) is provocatively juxtaposed with the posher but similarly accommodating Place des Vosges in Paris (“a continuous perimeter arcade creates intimacy and a porous relationship with the pedestrian realm of the city”). Such case studies elucidate best practices for design at the in-between scale of XL architecture and micro-urbanism. There’s the everyday dignity of Harry Weese’s design for the Washington DC Metro, the enduring ingenuity of Chamberlain Powell and Bon’s mixed use and residential Barbican Estate megastructure in London and more. Especially in New York City — whose city planning (even setting aside the deliberate sins of Robert Moses) has historically been crude, listless and mercantile, and whose block-by-block competence in architectural design is, relative to the excellence to be found in neighboring Boston and Philadelphia, astonishingly low — these case studies are a goad to finally raise expectations.
Urbanity speaks, in a very New York City way, to the Jane Jacobean “eyes on the street” of mutual witness and mutual care, and to the truism that folks like New Yorkers — all going places but all in it together — are never nice but always kind.
An exemplary proof of concept within Chakrabarti’s own practice, (celebrated in a chapter “The TAU of PAU”, whose title might bemuse guileless Winnie and selfless Lao Tzu), is his dedicated and enterprising speculative work around reusing and upcycling — rather than, at extraordinary social and embodied energy cost, destroying — midtown Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden. This habitually reviled yet remarkably serviceable complex was developed in 1966 by the New Formalist Charles Luckman, infamously to replace the celebrated but demolished McKim Meade and White precursor of a mere half-century earlier.
Chakrabarti has methodically advanced ethically regenerative alternatives to demolition: from pedagogical assignments at architecture schools; through 2016’s Penn Palimpsest, a picturesque proposal, commissioned and published by The New York Times’ art writer and architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, that repurposed MSG’s drum as a “luminous” glassy atrium; to a recent proposal, in which PAU partnered with HOK and Italian private equity and public infrastructure specialists ASTM group. That proposal sensibly keeps the Garden in place, but cleverly removes the Theatre below to create an airy arrivals hall and hospitable urban crossroads that confirms Luckman’s original vision of ingenious topology and Jet Age sparkle. The elegance of the renderings of that last proposal — independently volunteered to coincide with more official and more dire studies — has appreciably shifted the window of likely outcomes toward conservation and stewardship.
Chakrabarti has methodically advanced ethically regenerative alternatives to still more demolition.
The fulfillment of Chakrabarti’s ministry will be in work that always thinks big but that is never grandiose; that liberates itself from any stimulating spectacle or soothing sleekness except those, however abraded or scruffy, already to be found in the built environment. For this reason, those renderings’ elegance — an insistently Chipperfield-ish re-skin in extraction-heavy stone veneer — may also be a problem. Nothing, other than the putative necessity of images that comport to received ideas of beauty and propriety, requires it. Penn Station doesn’t especially need to look like an AI’s account of a trad-classicist-meets-sci-fi colosseum. Luckman’s marvelous midcentury modern pile need only look ever more like itself, albeit with some surgical design interventions for daylighting and wayfinding and non-hostile accommodations for every kind of transitory population to whom it is useful. This requires affectionate upkeep by its upstate administrators—out-of-towners with perhaps no particular love for public transit and basketball, who blame the building itself for the consequences of their own neglect.
The 1965 loss of Old Penn Station is often weighed against the triumphant 1958 preservation against the attempted freeway of Washington Square Park. Absent from the celebrations of that park in “The Architecture of Urbanity” is a discussion of its 2014 destruction in a revanchist top-down Parks Department renovation. This disgrace featured stultifying Victorian pastiche; pointy perimeter fencing; bleak flattening of the signature sheltering sunken plaza, urban conversation pit and bohemian amphitheater; and a wrenching of the fountain from the park’s exact center into a pointless alignment with a nearby triumphal arch. All this ignored the genius of the place, which was its original 1969 bottom-up community-led design.
That original/ 1969 design had been overseen by polymath, artist, activist and general downtown scene-maker Robert Nichols — a singular figure, and the defining and dignifying apotheosis of the role of the gadfly as an agent in public service. Endearingly, when Chakrabarti founded his current studio, he told a magazine that, fairly well along in his career, “I’m not going to be doing kitchens and bathrooms.” Yet what made Nichols’ joyous and natural urban work so exemplary was precisely his understanding that the biggest problems often resolved to the finest grain, to the humblest intersections between private lives and public spaces. And so all the way down to fixtures and furnishings, washing and watering. Nichols modeled the curious, non-hierarchical and intersectional citizenship that Chakrabarti also asks of himself and others — the very mode of citizenship that will be required and inspired by the urbane and humane cities he envisions. If there is a third volume to what would become an indispensable trilogy, it may be ever more about this human scale, about how even urban fabric ultimately resolves to needlework.