Markus D. Dubber Professor of Law and Director, Centre for Ethics University of Toronto
Published under the auspices of the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, Ethics in Context explores the ethical dimensions of interesting, provocative, and timely questions. Books in the series are accessible, yet provide something rigorous that stimulates thought and debate, in keeping with the interdisciplinary and inclusive vision that animates the Centre for Ethics at the interface between academic research and public discourse.
The Ethics of Architecture
Mark Kingwell Department of Philosophy
University
of Toronto
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kingwell, Mark, 1963– author.
Title: The ethics of architecture / Mark Kingwell, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020039408 (print) | LCCN 2020039409 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197558546 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197558560 (epub) | ISBN 9780197558553 (updf) | ISBN 9780197558577 (digital-online)
Subjects: LCSH: Architecture—Philosophy. | Architecture—Moral and ethical aspects.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039408
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039409
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197558546.001.0001
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“Without Architecture”
There would have to be another vision for occupying space, new rituals for sitting and standing, for the physical interruption of the planar world. No longer would we distinguish between exist and inhabit. No asking where we live.
We live. Now to lug our dwellings like a hermit crab or not. What would the word for shelter be? Like cave or under-hang, or more like shade or company? Two hundred words for horizon comprise an anthem.
Without walls, privacy would still occur, only wilder. We would vote by standing upright, and emphasize ourselves by raising our hands, lengthening our votes as a challenge to the levelness of the meeting place.
Prisons would be nothing—but banishment theoretical and severe: how best to find a cave or shade beyond the vanishing point? And who goes there? It was the heretic and prodigy who said: I can make a cathedral of my condition and worship there.
Paul Vermeersch, from Self Defence for the Brave and Happy: Poems (Toronto: ECW Press, 2018)
* * *
“Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.”
Jane Jacobs, from The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961)
Preface: Plague Cities of the Future
Some years ago I wrote a book about millennial anxiety that concluded with an affectionate description of the Canadian city, Winnipeg, where I spent seven years of my life before heading off to college. Recalling the annual waves of floods, blizzards, tentcaterpillar infestations, and summer hailstorms that battered trees and cars into failure, I labeled the town known officially as “The Gateway to the West” as “Plague City.” It is indeed a bleak and forbidding place, where the sidewalks crack from deep winter cold snaps and summer seems to last about a month. Not surprisingly, its longtime residents are resilient, friendly, and cooperative. They look out for each other. The rest of us take the first viable opportunity to move somewhere less hostile to human existence.
The year 2020 has seen most of the world’s cities transformed with startling swiftness into new versions of a genuine Plague City, not just a Midwestern town beset by routine environmental events. The novel coronavirus outbreak that likely started in wet markets in China spread with deadly speed and virulence across the planet, creating global pandemic conditions unprecedented in human history, even including the 1918 Spanish Flu, the 1665 Great Plague, or the Black Death. The final death tolls may prove smaller than those world-historical crises—one hopes substantially smaller—but the overall social and economic effects are larger, and will continue longer, than anything the world has witnessed before.
I had just completed the main manuscript of this book when news of the virus and its wildfire COVID-19 infections were beginning to take hold in mainstream consciousness. Everyone will recall that there was a period of six weeks or more, roughly all of February and at least half of March 2020, when most North Americans and many Europeans acted as if the virus was containable, and hence ignorable, in the same way that earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks had
been. There was a sense that extreme measures were unwarranted if not hysterical, and some commentators insisted the disease was less worrisome than the annual flu. By early April, of course, the world had decisively and permanently changed. As the first weeks of social distancing and lockdowns grew into months, it became clear that nothing in our world would ever be the same.
This is especially evident in cities, where more than half of the world’s population currently resides, a figure estimated to rise to more than two-thirds of the total global population within thirty years. Once jammed city streets were, almost overnight, stripped of all traffic except delivery vehicles and stunt-speeding joyriders risking tickets for the chance to unleash on open concrete. Sidewalks, once among the clearest signs of urban health when filled with jostling shoppers, cafés, and bars, became zones of proximity suspicion and long queues of frustrated citizens in search of groceries or liquor. The household threshold, always a bulwark of privacy and security, was now a kind of virus-proofing airlock, closed to casual visitors and close family members alike. Those of us with the luxury of staying at home—and, despite all the inconveniences and cabin fever, it was a luxury—learned to order our days in a new manner, working to stay productive and hopeful, while maybe also trying not to start in on that hard-won liquor too soon.
There were and are so many stories of the long-term effects of this pandemic that it is futile to catalog them all. What was on my own mind, as I observed changes in my neighborhood and in the virtual space of the Internet (without which, obviously, the psychic costs of self-isolation would have been much greater), were the ethical implications of the virus for everyday life.
Some of these are general and structural. Community-wide challenges demand collective response over individual interest. The needs of the few may have to be sacrificed for the well-being of the many. This is obvious, even one does not endorse a strict felicific calculus on the order of Jeremy Bentham’s potentially ruthless utilitarianism. You don’t have to advocate forced selective sacrifice of some to preserve the comfort of others—the nightmare dystopia of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”—to
accept that luxury goods like restaurant meals, easy air travel, and baseball games may become dispensable when overall public health is at stake.
Nevertheless, this basic logic of collective sharing of the health burden caused bristles as the weeks turned into months. We in the developed world have been steeped in an ideology of liberal individualism that does not always mesh well with other-oriented sacrifice. There are also, depending on political context, currents of anti-authoritarian or even scofflaw sentiment running beneath general norms of civility and cooperation. Competitive advantage is not curbed by sentiments about the vulnerable; quasi-Darwinian and Malthusian ideas of “population-correction” continued to swirl.
Couple this with the exposed social fault lines of life and we witnessed disturbing realities. Viruses are thought be indiscriminate in their visitation of disease and death, but of course this was not the case. Populations experienced the ravages of the virus in uneven ways: the elderly, the poor, in the United States the Black population all suffered far worse disproportionate effects of the spread. That these facts were linked to underlying social and economic conditions somehow did not halt the relentless advance of neoliberal ideology, the twisted child of individualism, whereby all suffering is somehow the victim’s responsibility. Yes, those sick and dying should have had the foresight to be born wealthier, whiter, and better educated.
There is then a deeper level of what might be called specific and existential ethical challenges. As boredom and anxiety rose, for example, even unto the most economically privileged, crises of loneliness and despair began to loom. Mental illness, or simply stress, is an inevitable byproduct of fast and comprehensive change in life patterns. And not all coping mechanisms are solutions better than the problem itself. Some of us found philosophical reflection in our boredom, a source of possible wisdom and perhaps an altered sense of time and expectation. Value scales were revised, the seemingly crucial concerns of work or social appearance relegated to a lower status, the worth of connection and fortitude, of radical hope beyond concrete short-term optimism, elevated.
At the same time, reflexive desires for a “return to normal” were serially revealed as unworkable, dark dreams of what were in fact the yawning injustices and planetary dangers of that pre-pandemic fantasyland of privilege. The exclusive fortress of prosperity, in some places literally walled against incursion from without, was shown to be a house of cards where a tiny minority experienced entitlements so invisible to self-reflection that we had, even before, made a joke of so-called “First World Problems”—which were, to many, still seen as actual problems in need of solution, usually involving money and stronger gates both physical and social.
The structural and the existential dimensions of ethics are linked, to be sure, and the latter can help limn the contours of the former. Even so, one clear insight from these first weeks of ethical challenge, pandemic-style, was the old lesson that reflection is itself a luxury good. When you are fighting for your life or livelihood, there is no time for boredom or even for thoughts about time. There is no experience of time at all, if by that we mean a feeling of projection or possibility rather than grinding duration. There is just the ever-present, ever-renewing moment of struggle: the image of Sisyphus permanently on the hillside, and not enjoying the happiness that Albert Camus alleged for him.
For the rest of us, this has been an opportunity, not always taken up, to think hard about what we have done and what we might do. The backbone of ethical life is the possibility, even if somehow fictional or delusional, of human continuity. Responsibility means nothing if consequences are not tied to actions, if past selves are not held accountable to future iterations of them. Extreme philosophical thought might dispute this temporal stringing of selfhood, and with good reason, but we cannot live our everyday lives without it. I must assume, even if fundamentally unjustifiable, a connection between who I was yesterday, who I am today, and who I will be tomorrow. * * *
Every human undertaking, certainly every profession, likewise relies on such necessary fictions of future realities hinged to present and past. Architecture is no exception, and indeed given its fundamental
project of building—an activity that is inherently future-oriented— it provides a clear exemplar of human belief in continuity. From the most temporary hut or tent in which to shelter for a night, to a temple meant to last a thousand years and more, to build is to believe: in survival, in protection, in shared aspiration, even when possible in the lasting but variable quality of beauty.
As we all watched our built environments altered metaphysically by the COVID-19 pandemic, the concrete, stone steel, and glass apparently unchanged and yet decisively altered, I kept thinking about what the emergent new world would mean for the ethics of architecture. I asked an architect friend of mine, who was as it happens the last person I met physically for a drink in a downtown bar before the social restrictions and closures altered daily life decisively in March 2020. “My expectation is that the topic will be more relevant in that world than it would have been otherwise. I’m used to spending almost all of my time mentally in the near future and I think most of the people I spend my days with do the same thing. This experience, the isolation and the uncertainty about what’s to come, has really snapped the lot of us into the present. I think one of the consequences of that is a heightened awareness of one’s physical environment, the built environment, your community. There’s something paradoxical about that when we’re breaking the Internet with all of the virtual meetings and hangouts. Nonetheless, a global population emerging from some medium-term house arrest seems like a pretty fertile audience for reflection on the ethics of architecture.” I believe he may be right but, as with all other aspects of the new pandemic world, it is impossible to predict accurately.
What we do know, from past experience, is that architecture and design have regularly been fundamentally directed and altered by world-historical events, including wars, plagues, famines, and pestilence. The specter of the atomic bomb drove not only a miniature industry of bomb-shelter design and underground-bunker military installations but, more obviously and inescapably, the vast interconnections of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Authorized by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, this brainchild of the U.S. President and former Supreme Commander of Allied
Forces in Europe during the Second World War, was inspired in part by the Reichsautobahn system, which then-General Eisenhower recognized as essential to national defense and the free movement of troops and matériel in times of crisis or war.
On a smaller scale, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001— whose total death toll was surpassed by COVID-19 late in March 2020—reset security and construction protocols throughout the United States, especially in public places. The American death toll then surpassed that of the Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars combined by late April, accounting for a quarter of the reported global total. Not a great deal of actual design was immediately changed as a result of these numbers, to be sure; indeed, there was only passing mention of the deaths, and no official federal recognition of mourning, such as lowered flags. Rather, it was our ways of occupying public spaces that was shifted. Security checks and the presence of armed agents of the state, not to mention growing camera-cover surveillance in most parts of big cities, themselves became design features of the built environment—to the point that surveillance itself was a kind of architectural element, built into new projects as much as HVAC systems or the choice of glass friendly to migrating birds.
Going back further, one think of numerous examples that shaped building styles and occupation patterns over the centuries: the revolutionary ferment, crime, bad sanitation, and overcrowding in Paris that enabled Baron von Haussmann to transform the City of Light into spiraling arrondissements, wide boulevards, and broad parks or forests for the benefit of citizens and air quality alike. One cannot imagine the structure of medieval cities absent the forced migration of countryside peasants seeking shelter, food, and stimulus away from the uncertain depredations of isolated life. Public squares and temples, open marketplaces and boardwalks, sweeping Georgian crescents or narrow Edinburgh granite towers—every familiar feature of architecture is an answer to prevailing social, cultural, and economic conditions.
We can ever survey the fictional depictions of plague conditions for insight here. The three most-often mentioned books in the
first months of 2020’s pandemic were Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (It., Decamerone, 1353), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Albert Camus’s The Plague (Fr., La Peste, 1947). Each of these was plumbed for its lessons about living with, and through, a pandemic. There was much to learn in all three cases, but little attention was given to the architectural aspects of the scenes unfolded in narrative.
The most striking thing about The Decameron, for example, is that its framing story is of a group of young aristocrats who repair to a country estate to avoid the worst ravages on the Black Death in their city. This privilege, not unlike the frowned-upon flight of wealthy urbanites to country cottages in the spring of 2020, provides the enabling conditions for the series of ten tales that then unfold. Defoe’s Journal, presented as an eyewitness account of the Great London Plague of 1665 (a millenarian milestone: a thousand years plus the mark of Satan), is detailed in its description of Whitechapel streets, houses, and intersections. Camus’s story, meanwhile, is inseparable from its setting in an Algerian city, perhaps based on Oran, that has suffered waves of disease affecting residents and vacationers, rich and poor, in varying ways depending upon their manner of occupying the crowded Arab quarter or the more salubrious districts.
One could multiply the examples to include more recent novels such as Timothy Findley’s brilliant but neglected Headhunter (1993), in which a starling-borne deadly plague called sturnusemia is traced through the posh homes, back alleys, public libraries, university quads, and tangled ravines of downtown Toronto. The book contains this passage, near its beginning, that will haunt our memories of early 2020:
Somehow, there seemed to be a secondary plague on the loose—one of non-belief. This is not happening, people said—this is not plausible. We will wait for an acceptable explanation. And yet, though no other explanation had been forthcoming, and even in spite of the mounting death toll, the population at large gave every indication of ignoring the threat of sturnusemia. . . . Many were bored with what they claimed were scare tactics. Most were skeptical—others were incredulous. A very few
Preface: Plague Cities of the Future
believed—but neither belief nor incredulity prevented the disease from claiming its victims.1
The disease does not care what you believe. And then, some pages later, there is this detail:
Because of [the contagion], there was a roaring trade in surgical masks for those who could make their way to stores and hospitals. But, in time, the supplies ran out and the people reverted to old-west style—a city of frontier bandits done up in red and blue bandannas.2
Yes indeed: the everyday bandits of pandemic and plague, those ordinary robbers of complacency and comfort . . .
In all of these cases and more, the architectural contours of the city are themselves part of the plague condition. They sculpt and steer responses and attitudes, mold behavior and reaction. So much is obvious. What then, do current conditions mean for the cities of the future? What design principles will have to be abandoned, what news ones adopted, and what may the ethical implications of these choices amount to? In the short term, we walked down the middle of empty streets and skirted other dog walkers in parks, shuffled along in our queues, and answered the door only after the delivery person had left. What part of these changes, and what others, will prevail in the longer span of time?
The proximate answer, I think, concerns once-dominant ideas of public life, especially in cities. For decades, many planners and architects have been devoted to visions of urban existence modeled, or at least partly influenced, by the Jane Jacobs school of thought. Which is to say: small scale, mixed use, significant density, thriving street life, pedestrian priority, and the celebration of public transit and sometimes bicycles over automobile traffic. The legendary battle between Jacobs and New York Über-Planner Robert Moses captures the stakes, albeit often with caricature rather than nuance. The preservation of Washington Square Park over the planned downtown extension of Fifth Avenue is a symbolic but also material synecdoche for a clash of urban philosophies.
But some tenets of the Jacobs vision are no longer viable. Public transit, already viewed as undesirable, may never rebound, even when people no longer routinely fear infection through proximity. Downtown density may be unavoidable in working life, but stayat-home labor will likely empty out once-full office towers the way the Empire State Building was systematically vacated in the postwar 1950s.3 The hard-won revitalization of residential downtowns may give way to new waves of white flight to the widely spaced, car-friendly suburbs, where grocery shopping can be done in vast uncrowded big-box stores and cars can enter garages with a direct door into the living space. Already in the spring of 2020, critics began to note how 1960s high-rise residential developments on the Corbusian Radiant City model, formerly reviled for their creation of ground-level crime zones and vertical ghettos, were now in addition overcrowded viral hotspots, dense with disease along narrow hallways and in elevators.4 At the same time, some urbanists insisted that we not blame density itself, and high-rises in particular, for the spread of the virus, as writers from New York to Minneapolis to Vancouver had done, blaming “New Urbanist overlords” for the contagion.5 One analysis, of Oscar Niemeyer’s Edifício Copan apartment complex in São Paulo, the densest pocket in the country with more than 5,000 residents in one block—also a building mentioned later in this book—noted that social distancing and collective action had largely stopped the virus. This is a real success amid the bizarre denial-rhetoric of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.6
Whatever one’s views on high-rise residential developments, exurban sprawl, once the enemy of all right-thinking planners, may prove the solution for a frightened populace—or that portion of it wealthy enough to afford isolation. We will see less Manhattan, and more Los Angeles.
The authors of a New York Times feature on the future of postpandemic cities put it this way: “The pandemic has been particularly devastating to America’s biggest cities, as the virus has found fertile ground in the density that is otherwise prized. And it comes as the country’s major urban centers were already losing their appeal for many Americans, as skyrocketing rents and changes in the labor
Preface: Plague Cities of the Future
market have pushed the country’s youngest adults to suburbs and smaller cities often far from the coasts.”7 That was published on April 19, 2020, even before the largest effects could be registered.
Cities have often been modeled intellectually as layers of circulation and transaction: the endless movements of heat and cold; of people and their desires; of money and its objects; of food and waste; of materials and designs; and so on. These circulatory systems, some clearly physical, others more ephemeral or metaphorical, have been severely disrupted by new environmental conditions. The long tail of effects on the very idea of the city, and of buildings within it, will not abate for some decades, if ever.
The architecture critic Oliver Wainwright pointed out that disease has long been a feature of basic design:
From antibacterial brass doorknobs to broad, well-ventilated boulevards, our cities and buildings have always been shaped by disease. It was cholera that influenced the modern street grid, as 19thcentury epidemics prompted the introduction of sewage systems that required the roads above them to be wider and straighter, along with new zoning laws to prevent overcrowding.
The third plague pandemic, a bubonic outbreak that began in China in 1855, changed the design of everything from drainpipes to door thresholds and building foundations, in the global war against the rat. And the wipe-clean aesthetic of modernism was partly a result of tuberculosis, with light-flooded sanatoriums inspiring an era of white-painted rooms, hygienic tiled bathrooms and the ubiquitous mid-century recliner chair. Form has always followed fear of infection, just as much as function.8
This apt summary, as well as reminding us of some hidden lessons of history, highlights what is very likely to change in architecture as a direct function of the COVID-19 pandemic.9
Bars and restaurants will disappear or be comprehensively altered into semi-isolated gathering zones, perhaps demanding remote
ordering and service. Parks, walkways, and pedestrian zones will continue to be governed by suspicion and the remnants, whether officially mandated or not, of social distancing. The measures of so-called defensive architecture, already in place in many cities, will be expanded. Bars on park benches to discourage lying down; metal spikes beneath highway overpasses to prevent camping out; cow-gate barriers on parks to control access: these features of urban architecture are already with us. It is easily conceivable that planning commissions, clients, and calls for proposals will include such things, and more, to minimize contact between persons. More and more preventive internal features will be demanded by clients: fullwall display screens, isolated-office uplinks, private or limited-access elevators.
Designers will also need to incorporate public-health mechanisms within their plans. The widely spaced hand sanitizers of yesterday will be supplanted by temperature stations, testing pods, perhaps full-body scanners. Security checks will be operationalized to validate immunity credentials, the way they now do for sharp objects and fluids. Large public buildings—airports, government offices, stadiums, and theaters—will need to redesigned with ongoing social distancing in mind: widely spaced seating, long security and health-check corridors, remote delivery of concessions or forms. It may even be the case that large public gatherings will be banned or, if not that, looked upon with misgiving and so allowed to fall into nonexistence.
In addition to airlock-style entry and exit thresholds already noted, residential housing will likewise demand more boredomrepelling virtual features and connections, plus floor plans that facilitate possible future quarantine or isolation. Outside spaces, from porches and lanais to gardens and open public expanses, will need to be rethought comprehensively. Testing pods will be established at the controlled entrances to parks and common fields. Policing, whether in-person or on-camera, will be constant in such spaces, to punish noncompliance. Ticketing of distancing violations will soon prove to be a municipal revenue stream greater than old-fashioned speeding tickets and parking fines.
All of this will exacerbate existing socioeconomic divisions, and create new ones based on access to testing, vaccination, and ongoing reliable healthcare. Our ideas of public and private, already widely contested or just misunderstood, will suffer further conceptual erosion. Privacy, which had become a species of luxury goods under former conditions, will be elevated into preserves enjoyed only by the hyper-rich, even as public space will cease to mean anything good, rather a kind of presumptive death sentence. Visionaries of architecture and urban planning often speaking of utopian and dystopian futures as if they operated as a binary function: it is either Nineteen Eighty-Four or it is Brave New World. The reality is that it is always both at once, and one person’s nightmare city is another person’s endless playground.
How will architects cope under these emergent conditions? All the ethical quandaries that are outlined in the pages that follow will remain. Some will be ramped up, to the point of dilemma or even self-betrayal. Can you design to specifications that you know are unjust to the many in the service of the few? Can you facilitate safety features that work only to further inequalities and even lead to shunning or punishment of violators? Or are there nimble compromises to be executed here, the usual massaging of clients toward better choices? The challenges posed by pandemic and post-pandemic reality will be as grave for future architects as environmental responsibility, social justice, and the reach of artificial intelligence are for present ones.
Like many of us, I would like to think that this moment of forced reflection, this pause in the reckless velocities of neoliberal life, will indeed offer a respite from the relentless near-future thinking of most architectural practice, and also that the pages that follow may be of some in that reflection. We cannot help but project our thoughts and plans into the future, yet we can only act in the present. The event horizons of designing and planning are variable, but they are not otherworldly. If the long-term vistas right now seem bleak— and they do—there are nevertheless many things we can do to shift them: as citizens, as architects, and as all those whom the built environment affects and affords.
Architecture has ever been a struggle between human aspiration and the material conditions of the various environments that encompass the biosphere. Our desires must follow that path of improvement, not acquiescence, and the journey must begin right here, right now. The city of the future, plague or no plague, is and always will be built by us. There is, after all, nobody else.
Built Forms and Ethics: The General Issues
One commentator has argued, persuasively, that it is a story about “everything that is wrong with architecture.”1 It defends and maybe inspires a form of “morality” that permits its “dictatorial protagonist” to commit “architectural terrorism.” It is the most notorious fiction ever written about architecture, and especially about architecture and ethics.
I first read Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead when I was fifteen years old. This may be the optimal age for a reader of this ponderous tome, especially an adolescent male with grand creative ideas about construction and city-building but no outlets for them except designing graph-paper levels of tortuous adventure for an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons game or gluing together elaborate polystyrene replicas of airships and assault vehicles.
The latter pursuit could be expanded into what was then known as “kit-bashing,” where elements of a few preset model designs could be repurposed to enable outlandish science-fictional hybrids—jetpowered dinosaurs, flying tanks, undersea cars—but these always somehow fell short of imagination’s pull. Nobody I knew could, for example, come close to the transcendental modeling abilities of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who created the “SuperMarionation” television and film franchises Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds Are Go! (both mid-1960s). In these miniaturized worlds created on tiny sets, whole futuristic cities came to life under the narrative guidance of Martian invasion or global safety crisis. The models visible on the shows could then be purchased as die-cast treasures.
Even the actual architectural toys then available, in particular a fiendishly difficult design-and-build line called Super City (Ideal Toys, 1967–68), with sharp plastic modular pieces and tinted-glass inlays, never quite delivered on the promise of making something in the world that translated vision into concrete reality. Bought for me and my brothers by our father, this series of kits was like some engineer’s version of what happens when people graduate from LEGO—a building kit capable of producing Modernist cities of tomorrow and multiple Sixties-Mod skyscrapers.
As we have seen in the years since, though, not only has LEGO evolved into elaborate by-the-numbers kits that make old airplane models look simplistic and dinky by contrast, but basic LEGO has itself become an artistic and architectural material in its own right, enabling the work of, among others: Ekow Nimako, who uses only black bricks in his sculptures; Raymond Girard, who creates fantastical buildings and skylines using only the most basic of playset bricks; and Jan Vormann, who uses standard-issue plastic bricks to fill in and shore up old brick walls.
Artist Douglas Coupland has reflected on both kinds of toys in various publications and exhibitions, noting “the profound effect toys can have—not only on how children learn to perceive the world, but also in terms of the kinds of things they produce as adults.” In one brilliant riff on Super City, he annotates the image on the box cover with imagined locations drawn from modish 1960s iconography: Henry Kissinger and Jill St. John having sex, a parking garage that only accepts vehicles with gull-wing doors, Walt Disney’s head stored in liquid helium, Karen Carpenter’s apartment, a Jarvik heart transplant center, and the Qantas airline headquarters (trivia check: as Dustin Hoffman notes in Rain Man [1988, d. Barry Levinson], there were no passenger fatalities on that carrier, the world’s safest). A 2005 exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture featured many different kits and notional constructions but also a perfect downsized version of the World Trade Center towers, then still freshly mourned, and the thankfully still-standing CN Tower in Toronto.
Architecture, we might say, is everywhere in the imagination, even if that means the universe of the toy box or false-paneled
basement rec room before it is the building site or actual cleared-city footprint. The high drama, or maybe high cheese, of Rand’s novel excited the nascent imagination of many a budding architect. I recall a television of the day, Art Garfunkel on the Mike Davis or Dick Cavett shows, explaining that he enrolled in architecture school after reading Rand’s feverish paean to individual creative genius. Perhaps luckily for the world, he teamed up with Paul Simon instead.
My brother, already in engineering school, heard me enthuse about Howard Roark and beautiful but emotionally unstable Dominique Francon; wavering Gail Wynand; evil Ellsworth M. Toohey; and above all steadfast, stalwart Howard Roark, servant to no man or system. He suggested architecture might be my own university major. He also argued what is true and better, that architecture combines the best of technical and humane study into a potentially glorious mixture, the most basic of all applied arts.
When I then came to see King Vidor’s luscious black-and-white, post-Expressionist film adaptation of the novel (1949), I was, like many viewers, even more fetched by the story. Roark, described in the book as squat, muscular, and red-haired, is stretched into gaunt, stiffly handsome Gary Cooper, the most wooden of matinee idols, a barely moving totem of masculine reticence. Dominique, portrayed by Patricia Neal just twenty-two and at her most sulky, is irresistible. Indeed, the two stars found each other irresistible off the set as well as on, even though Cooper was twenty-five years older.
Their subsequent tumultuous affair nearly ruined his marriage and led to physical abuse—Cooper hit Neal when he thought she was giving in to the predations of rival Kirk Douglas—and a forced abortion of their conceived child. The rape scene that features so disturbingly in both novel and film, when imperious Dominique is made to submit to overpowering Roark and then later admits this was her secret wish, is made even more unpalatable when these tabloid details float to the surface.
But the film has virtues and some moments of unintended humor. Canadian-born actor Raymond Massey, playing the Hell’s Kitchen kid made good as newspaper baron Wynand, is creepily charming even in his hypocrisy. The evil Toohey, overplayed hilariously by
Robert Douglas, is the ultimate Rand straw man, a demagogue without scruple, wielding a long cigarette holder held Nazi-style between thumb and forefinger. Maybe best of all is actor Kent Smith as the craven, talentless, brush-cut Peter Keating, a mediocre social climber who depends on Roark’s genius for his fragile reputation. When Roark—spoiler alert!—decides to dynamite the publichousing project Keating has allowed to become compromised, we see Rand’s basic drama of good and evil played out explosively. (An architect friend of mine once told me that when she was in school, she thought every one of her classmates was a Peter Keating.)
The production design, meanwhile, especially the obvious Frank Lloyd Wright and International Style rip-off building designed by Edward Carrere, are rendered in gorgeous black-and-white stills. Roark’s mentor Henry Cameron (Henry Hull) uses his dying words to express the standard Louis Sullivan mantra that “form should follow function,” and laments the “popular taste” that dictates modern architects should design buildings that look “like Greek temples, Gothic cathedrals, and mongrels of every ancient style they could borrow.”
In one memorable scene, a sleek elevated-base office tower proposed by Roark is “improved” with Doric doodads pasted on post facto by a gang of thuggish neoclassicist lackeys. They are led by Gus Webb, played here by John Doucette, a stocky actor best known for playing hit men, gangsters, cowboys, and sea captains. “Why shouldn’t we get to express our creativity?” he snarls, bringing a walking stick swiftly down on Roark’s original model. This violent insistence on dead forms seems bleakly funny in the film, but its real-world equivalents might be the tiresome and frankly idiotic architectural meanderings of Britain’s Prince Charles, enemy of anything he considers “modern” because, perversely, he is concerned about the future.2 As a writer in The Guardian pointed out, the arguments in favor of “timelessness” are no more than veiled conservative, even reactionary forays. And so, as critic Douglas Murphy writes circa 2014:
An unpleasant sense of déjà vu occurs every time HRH The Prince of Wales comes down from Balmoral to pipe up about contemporary
architecture. For more than 30 years now, he’s been the bane of the architectural profession, wielding his accidental power to influence the design not only of individual buildings and projects, but the entire debate about what architecture is, who it is for and what it should look like.3
And then:
By the time Charles was making his pleas for traditional design based upon “timeless” principles, the dismantling of the welfare consensus of the postwar world was in full swing. Rejecting modern architecture went hand-in-hand with fighting the unions, deregulating the planned economy, smashing industry and rejecting the spectre of socialism that had almost ruined Britain.4
Huzzah for non-reform!
Murphy’s intervention is worth exploring. He takes Charles’s “ten key principles” for architecture and counters with ten of his own, both worth quoting in full:
Charles’s Ten Key Principles . . .
• Developments must respect the land.
• Architecture is a language.
• Scale is also key.
• Harmony: neighboring buildings “in tune” but not uniform.
• The creation of well-designed enclosures.
• Materials also matter: local wood beats imported aluminum.
• Limit signage.
• Put the pedestrian at the center of the design process.
• Space is at a premium—but no high-rises.
• Build flexibility in.
. . . and Douglas Murphy’s:
• The city belongs to everyone
Public space gets ever more murkily private; we need to redress the balance of who owns what. It’s people like the prince that stand to lose out.
• Your home is not a castle
We’d be a far more equal and civilized island if the desire for home ownership wasn’t pandered to at every turn.
• Architecture is not a language
The idea of an underlying grammar to architecture implies urban life peaked in the piazzas of Renaissance Florence—a period of pestilence, gangster princes, and public executions.
• But architecture can still be read
Buildings have no language. But the mightiest palace and the tiniest shed can tell us how those who build see the world and their place in it.
• Mimesis is not mimicry
Talented architects can work with classical traditions in contemporary architecture. It’s unlikely Charles would recognize this if he saw it.
• Honesty is still a virtue
The architectural era Charles helped usher in was filled with inane jokes and frivolous nonsense. Architecture doesn’t need to be fun.
• The street isn’t everything
It’s right that the importance of the street is recognized, but we must avoid turning city centers into identical forests of privatized space.
• Nature is not our friend
On respecting nature, let us quote Werner Herzog: “There is a harmony [to nature]—it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.”
• Harmony involves dissonance
Cities must improve their interactions with the natural world. This does not mean architecture must copy natural forms; rather it must reconcile itself with cycles of energy and material.
Change Is Coming
The next century will be pivotal for humanity, and architecture will play a huge role. Cute cottages with nice local stonework won’t help.
This kind of controversy is familiar territory, alas, when those with influence weigh in on aesthetic issues. But the prince’s “accidental power” must now be laid alongside the real power of an elected, even if in fact mandate-free, politician. Thus, worse because it might actually prove effective in law and practice, there is the American Trump Administration’s 2020 call, “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” for all national administrative buildings to be executed in classical Greek and Roman style. This directive is familiar confection of bogus populism and aesthetic retrenchment in favor of “beauty,”5 if not cute cottages with nice local stonework.
Of course Ayn Rand’s choice of architecture as a site for her Objectivist philosophy of individual independence and capitalist freedom is, in retrospect, somewhat bizarre. Architecture is the most collective of the applied arts, an undertaking impossible without the cooperation of many professionals beyond designer or designers, including HVAC and wiring experts, structural engineers, and construction companies. Moreover, any building requires a client, a developer, a municipally approved site, and zoning permissions.
More widely still, no building takes its place in the abstract isolation sometimes suggested by drawing or maquette. A building speaks to and is spoken to by its surrounds. Even beyond aesthetics, a building is a place within a city, a gathering of citizens who must work and walk around the creation. One may choose to visit an art gallery or not, and to view a given painting or sculpture within. One has no choice but to experience the architecture of the city.
And once more beyond that, a building, like any human creation, takes its place within both markets and environments, some financial and some natural. We cannot understand architecture without taking account of this widening gyre of influence and, sometimes, compromise. The designer and his or her design are just the beginning. The solitary genius, the “starchitect” of recent cultural celebrity, is kind of retroactive fiction, protagonist of a false narrative that can succeed only in distracting us from the realities of genuine building.
All of this is by way of noting something hollow about Rand’s depiction of Roark as the “moral” architect, one single-mindedly dedicated to his singular vision against all obstacles. Rand commits both a conceptual and a political error, and allows her own ideological blindness to occlude the nuance of a profession whose genuine ethical demands are far more complex, and rewarding.
Wynand, meanwhile, is revealed as the slave of his own ambition, in apt urban metaphors: He “walked at random. He owned nothing but he was owned by any part of the city. It was right that the city should not direct his way and that he should be moved by the pull of chance corners. Here I am, my masters, I am coming to salute you and acknowledge, wherever you want me, I shall go as I am told. I’m the man who wanted power.”
A moral ideal who could argue with that? And then unwavering character and integrity over fashion and popular taste? Yes! It’s easy to see how this stand-up morality would fetch the soul of an adolescent, the same way Holden Caulfield’s complaints about “phoneyness” resonate with the person in search of genuineness in a world full of poseurs and fakes, and a life lived without fear or favor. Would that we could all exist with a guiding ideal that allowed us never to care what anyone else thinks. But the real ethical world
