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SHADRACH WOOES

Architecture at Rice 27

Architecture at Rice University is a series of reports on thoughts and
investigations of the School of Architecture, published in the belief
that education of architects can best be advanced when teachers,
practitioners, students, and interested laymen share what they are
thinking and doing.

All contents are the sole
possession of the contributors;
partial or total reproduction
of the material herein
contained is prohibited by law.
Library of Congress Catalog
Card Number: 72-134358

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This is intended to be an elucidation of what '.
believe are the purposes of urbanism, and
architecture, today. I shall be concerned not
only with what I think is happening in cities
of the west but also with what I think could
and should be programmed in them for the im-
mediate future. I shall be concerned with what
I think urbanism is, which means defining its
characteristic scope and purpose: What U Can
Do, in other words.

OUESTIUNE or TIITTI

Urbanism is a French word, and although my
partially Anglo-Saxon heredity rebels at bor-
rowing words from such Latinate sources, I have
not yet found a good English or American
equivalent. The English have a discipline
called town-planning, which is something like
urbanism; The Americans have city-planning
which is nothing like it. In some places,
'Urban Design' is used to render the approxi-
mate meaning of the content of 'urbanism. '

The essence of urbanism, on the most mundane,

practical level, is organization. This is also
the essence of architecture. The relationship
between architecture and urbanism is that they
are parts of the same entity, which might be
called environmental design, and that each is a
part of the other.

"Urbanism and architecture are parts of a con-
tinuous process. Planning (urbanism) is the
correlating of human activities ; architecture
is the housing of these activities . . .
Urbanism establishes the milieu in which

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architecture happens ... It remains abstract
until it generates architecture." This quote is
from the "Carre Bleu," Nov. 3, 1961, and is one
which I would not change very much were I writ-
ing it today. It went on to describe the junc-
tion of urbanism as exploring and explaining
the relationships among human activities.
Naturally this remains rather vague. It may
help if we try to pin down some of the uses of
organization in architecture and urbanism.

All analogies are false, to begin with, and

thus forewarned we might consider the analogy
of agriculture. We organize nature to support
the growth of food, clothing, building ma-
terials, fuel, tobacco, hemp and so forth, and
as the field and forest are organized through
plowing, cutting, irrigation and drainage
systems, so is the city formed around systems
of public and private spaces, communications,
supply, and elimination.

The built world thus is organized to support
the growth of society, as the natural world is

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organized to supply agricultural produce. And,
extending our false analogy, as the farmer
works with nature, so must the citizens learn
to control the beneficent and malignant forces
in the urban context so that, through urban
husbandry, they may create a place and a
climate in which their society will thrive.

Urbanism, the organization of the urban con-
text, is first of all concerned with the sweet
workings of the various systems which are
needed to support life in the city, bringing

the vital goods, fluids, and energies to all
parts, and carrying away the wastes. At one
level of consideration at least urbanism is
underground, in subways and pipes and conduit.

Since we consider that life in the city is
worth living, we are most immediately concerned
with the establishment of a milieu in which
life can flourish. The question of whether or
not it is worth it is, I believe, rhetorical,
since life for a vast number is lived in
the city. In our western civilization, (the

very word comes from civis: citizen), the built
world is the natural habitat of man. This
milieu is organized according to systems of
conduct (law) and systems of exchange of goods
and services and of supply and elimination
(economy). But first, before any of these,
there are the intangible, imponderable, inex-
pressible human relationships which establish
themselves among the citizens. These form a
kind of unwritten code which men apparently
need in order to live together. Tenuous though
they may be, they are yet of the greatest

importance: the essential prerequisite of urban
life. When these relationships are no longer
vital, or viable, or clearly understood by all
the citizens, they are replaced by cant, dogma,
codes, regulations, and laws. And these systems
of human interaction, feelings, belief, and
legislation continuously evolve, reacting to
the forces crystallizing out of the urban
social magma.

These forces result partly from the physical
properties of life in the city, which are, in

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turn, determined by systems which manifest
man's impulsion to live together in some kind
of physical urban harmony. These are the ways,
the pipes, the wires and tubes, the viscera of
the city, the urban underground which has so
radically transformed men's lives, raising them
above nature, freeing them from natural con-
straints, liberating them. Men in cities thus
become free not only from the tribal social
order but also from the rural natural order.
And they find themselves obliged in their
freedom, and perhaps by their freedom, to in-

vent new and sometimes strange constraints
such as those which are developed by a bureau-
cratic, administrative apparatus.

The marvelous liberty which is gained through
control over the physical environment, thanks
to technical advances, is too often frittered
away or entirely wasted in footless, inconse-
quential administrative incompetencies, or else
is negated by such vicious unnatural practices
as the preparation for, and the waging of war.

12

It is dangerously commonplace to say that we
thrive on adversity. It is sometimes true we
tend to over-react in an adverse situation and
in so doing we may prove once more our adapt-
ability by bringing a good result out of a bad
set of circumstances. But we do not need to be
so perverse as to create conditions of ad-
versity. The flowers that bloom on the dung
heap are, after all, not more beautiful than
the flowers of the fields and gardens. They are
only a welcome relief. On the other hand,
disease proliferates in dung. There is no

excuse for creating a hostile climate, nor
should we tolerate any in which our humanity is
threatened. Our technologies can protect us
from a naturally hostile physical environment.
It is a mis-use of technology for it to be
allowed to render the environment still more
hostile, until, as each solution engenders yet
more problems, running harder and harder to
keep from falling flat, we go over the ulti-
mate cliff. What I am trying to say is that,
although the uses of adversity may be sweet, we
should have the good sense to stay in control.

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having invented the machines and methods, to
remain the masters of these servants.

Urbanism, urban design, which is architecture
at the scale of the city, is principally con-
cerned with organization, and therefore with
the allocation, distribution and use of ma-
terials and energies. The techniques of
building are essentially ways of associating
materials and energies, of organizing wealth
into present and future patterns of use. In the
present we determine the actual choice of

materials and their use in buildings. The
general organization of buildings, and their
relationships to the distribution and servicing
systems from which they draw sustenance,
dictate future patterns of use of energies.
This means that decisions made by architects,
planners, and urbanists have global import
today and tomorrow, a state of affairs which
had been lost from view in the immediate past,
although I believe that it was fully understood
in antiquity. These conditions under which we
now work, knowing the global connotations of

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our every decision, implicate us directly
and expressly in a revolutionary, or pre-
revolutionary situation. We are part of the
forces which act on the resources of the world
in an immediate way. Our decisions, or our
counsels, affect the use to which those re-
sources are put.

U is also urgency. Everyone is concerned with
urbanism. It is everybody's business. We all
suffer from decisions not made, or made on a
basis of inadequate information, or insincere

commitment. Yet those decisions determine the
physical and psychological milieu, the environ-
ment in which we live and in which we hope our
society, or societies, will thrive. We have
discovered, after decades and centuries of
fumbling, that a little bit of government
('the least possible') is far too much to allow
a free play of free market process, even if
that theory could apply in our crowded world,
and that we probably need much more than we
think. 'The least possible' may very well look
like the spectre of socialism which was used to

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terrify Grandpa, but we will probably find it
quite acceptable, since we are losing the
voracious appetite which Grandpa had for "the
things of this world" and irrational concentra-
tions of wealth. As our numbers increase around
the globe, presumably toward some optimum mass,
we cannot continue to allow critical decisions
to be arrived at, or deferred, by some arcane
process of which even the best-informed admin-
istrators seem to be ignorant. We run great
risks, I believe, in continuing to allow power
to float free of responsibility. (The CIA, the

use of seniority in House and Senate Com-
mittees, the States' authority over cities, are
all manifestations of this particularly un-
savory phenomenon, which seems to be on the
increase. )

We live in constant degrading and dehumanizing
fear of such superdangers as fission and fusion
bombs, CBW, the population explosion, irrevers-
ible ecological disasters, total alienation of
entire classes, races, sexes, and generations.
In the face of such dangers man organizes, even

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subconsciously, in self-defense. The danger now
is real, and it is visible. We can feel it, we
can even see it. Our great scientists, many of
them winners of the dynamite prize, are
constantly cautioning us. The history of the
twentieth century would appear to be one of
unrelieved disaster, the poor dying of inani-
tion while the rich choke on their own wealth,
fouling the earth and the sea and the air with
the putrid by-products of an illusory
affluence.

What Can U Do? As I indicated before, urbanism
is a part of the process that determines the
use of resources. It may sometimes be only a
minute part, but all parts are significant. You
may feel that our position as architects and
urbanists, handmaidens and footmen to the very
forces which are said to be the most pernicious
- — the state, the institutions and the corpora-
tions — leaves us little or no power to in-
fluence the decisions that create inexorably an
increasingly hostile world. No matter how
little our power, we must use it and our

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skills, to demonstrate alternatives to the
present suicidal course of policy revealed
the positive and negative actions of
government and business.

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In London, on April 16, 85 of the 110 seats on
the G.L.C. were contested by a consumer group,
organized by transportation, planning, and
urban specialists. The group called itself
"Homes Before Roads", and campaigned on a
platform of public transportation spending in
lieu of further motorway construction. What is

significant is not the number of seats they
might have won (they won none) but the fact
that this was the first time such a consumer-
oriented party had been organized in London.

In San Francisco the Embarcadero Freeway was
stopped by citizens' manifestations; in New
York the Lower Manhattan Expressway was halted,
ostensibly by a vocal minority. There are many
other examples of "action urbanism" of this
nature, but the London one is perhaps the most
satisfactory since it predicates acceptance of

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responsibility and positive action — not
merely stopping something but advancing intel-
ligent proposals for changes to harmonize
administrative goals and priorities with the
citizens' needs and aspirations. This citizen
and professional participation in programming
is increasingly being practiced in cities and,
as long as it does not become obscure in a fog
of advocacy of good but extraneous causes, it
gives great hope for the future of community
control and a direct relationship between the
urbanist or architect and his ultimate client.

Advocacy has often been denounced as a hoax,
and rightly so, when it pretended to render
services which it could not provide, such as
obtaining funds, or when it seemed only to
defuse the righteous indignation of the com-
munity without performing any real services. I
believe that it is essential that the community
have a hand in choosing its advocates from the
professions, and that clearly defined programs
of action be developed with those advocates,
and then, finally, that the entire notion of
advocacy be removed by establishing typical.

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normal, professional relationships with no
sentiment of charity involved. Since this is
usually the case (there is no charity; the
architects are looking out for their clients)
it should be possible, from there, to lead an
assault upon the fastnesses of bureaucracy
where the repressive rules are invented, and,
finally to restore decision-making to an
intelligible process.

At another scale of involvement, U can do much
to redress the system of economic disparity and

social injustice in the world, first of all
simply by not seeking to perpetuate and even to
extend it. We should not give up the struggle
to improve the balance between numbers and
wealth, to insist that the vast resources of
our complex technologies be applied to making a
better life for every person on this earth,
and to apply ourselves to demonstrating how
this can be done. And that means discovering
how to do it.

To go back to a previous point; urbanism is

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primarily an organizing process, as is archi-
tecture. The wealth of nations, the world's
wealth, can be used for either constructive or
destructive purposes. Urbanism, a constructive
use of wealth, can have destructive connota-
tions if it uses the world's resources un-
wisely, if it wastes them. In addition to the
obvious dangers of waste (pollution, for
example) there is the danger of imbalance in
the distribution systems, with congestion at
some points and penury at others. At the
present time some 3/4 of the world product

(which might be called the Gross International
Product, or GIP) is being consumed by about 1/4
of the population, most of it in the Northern
Hemisphere. This clearly reveals an irrational
concentration of wealth, on the edge of a sea
of poverty. The scientific prediction people,
working from observable trends, expect this
disparity to increase, with North America
consuming about 80% of the GIP and representing
6% of the population in, for example, 1984. It
seems to me that this frenetic consumption of
the world's wealth could very well create a

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revolutionary situation, in which we would be
cast in the role of the oppressors although
this is hardly the idea we have of ourselves,
if we take our great political documents as
evidence. It will not be "revolution for the
hell of it", in America, but, for the rest of
the world, revolution for survival. Since we
have clearly demonstrated that we do not
require all this wealth — look how much of it
we squander in the waging of war and how much
we dissipate in various forms of pollution —
for our own needs, and since we seem actually

to suffer from our so-called affluence with
physiological distress and pyschological vying
for top honors in the hostile environment which
this affluence has created, and since, finally,
it turns us against one another, and against
our brothers and they against us, hadn't we
better reconsider this kind of progress which
strangely resembles that of the lemming?

Well, we are reconsidering, in the Northern
Hemisphere. The birth rate is receding in
Japan, for instance. Young people all through

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the 'western' or developed nations are ques-
tioning the precepts of greed, and growth for
its own sake. Ecology is a campaign issue. Even
John Volpe, a king of the road if ever there
was one when he was governor of Mass., is
talking about mass transit, as an alternative
to further urban highway building ! I may be
clutching at straws, and whistling in the dark,
but I feel that the self defense mechanism of
which I spoke earlier is beginning to operate,
and perhaps we may look forward to a saner
future.

For Urbanists and architects a saner future
means that we can at last rid ourselves of all
those nutty ideas about throw-away buildings,
built-in obsolescence, high energy consuming
schemes, and walk-around cities on the one
hand — but it also means that we must recon-
sider extreme low-density development, with its
enormous waste potential and over-extended
supply lines, on the other. We come at last to
the useful end of the 'waste produces wealth'
period, having discovered that the wealth

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produced by waste is ill-gotten, a two-edged
sword, a poisoned gift.

Architects and urbanists will make their plans
and develop them in light of economic, rather
than merely financial considerations, for
instance.

Decisions will be made on the basis of reason,
perhaps, and not merely in the light of polit-
ical opportunism. Reason will dictate con-
tinuous renewal of the environment at every

scale, not massive blight followed by massive
reconstruction.

Shadrach Woods
Spring 1970

Graphic Design: Peter C. Papademetriou
Production Assistant: Peter G. Rowe