Urban Spaces and Cultural Settings

Author(s): Gwendolyn Wright

Source: Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 41, No. 3, Urban History in the 1980s (
Spring, 1988), pp. 10-14
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools of
Architecture, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1424887
Accessed: 04-02-2016 20:08 UTC
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Urban
Cultural

and

Spaces

Settings

U
Gwendolyn Wright is an associate
professor of architecturalhistory at the
Graduate School of Architecture,Planning, and Preservation,Columbia University. She is the author of Moralism
and the Model Home: Domestic Archilecture and Social Conflict in Chicago
icago, 1980)and Buildingthe Dream:
rmSocial Historyof Housing in America
(Cambridge,Ma., 1983).Hercurrentwork
focuses on Frenchurbandesign policies
in the colonies.

seem to draw openly from a range of

sources that includes certain admired
precedents (whether classical or Modernist-itself now a partof history)which
transcend specific locales, as well as
more local architectural and urban
design traditions.Itis almost a commonplace to show how a new buildingrelates
to its context-to the city,town, or neighborhood street-scape-and thus pays
homage in another way to what came
before.

The complexityof cities calls for a multidisciplinary approach, urging urban

historians to draw from social, economic, political, intellectual, as well
as architectural sources. In exploring
different materials, urban historians
must carefully consider the motives
of the various people who shape urban
form and record urban change. They
must approach urban history not as a
canon of precedents or a chronicle of
progress, but as a complex and ongoing
enterprise.

All the same, it is by no means an easy

task to embrace the past and the larger
urban milieu. Responding to local traditions entails serious appraisal of a
complexculture,even for a small placeskills few designers have been taught.
And the intellectualchallenge of broadeningthe scope of ourarchitecturalcanon
to include great urban spaces, as well
as buildings, requires new approaches.
These larger settings cannot always be
neatly classified according to specific
dates and individualdesigners.One must
consider how they took form and
changed over time, acknowledging the
cumulative influence of many different
groups and persons.

Equally importantis the meaning of a

cityand how thatmeaning changes over
time. Urbanhistoryis not justa synthesis
of prioritiesand disciplinarytechniques,
but also a synthesis of experiences and
visions. Integrationof social and formal
analyses is crucial, for both are formative and each helps shape the other. The
intricate webs of power and meaning
thatare elaborated througharchitectural
space need explorationas well. Towrite
urbanhistoryis to give narrativeformto
these processes.
The recent rise of interest in urban history among architects and architectural
historians signals major shifts in both
professions. Architects, absorbing the
collapse of an absolutistand ahistorical
version of Modernism,are searching for
new meanings. They have retrievedhistory out of the shadows to make it the
very basis of contemporarydesign, providing both a parti for individualbuildings and a way of relating buildings to
their surroundings.Most architects now

Simultaneous with this shift, the very

boundaries of architecturalhistoryitself
are changing,too. Hithertothe discipline
was characterizedby a preoccupationwith
the intentionsof the designer and the formal analysis of singular monuments.In
recent years the field has suddenly and
dramatically expanded. Scholars are
examining the relations of architecture:
issuesof patronage,publicauthoritiesand
legal codes, site planning,and the sociopoliticalreactionsof a community.Buildings are seldom studied in isolationnow;
in fact, many historians delve into the
infrastructure
of streets,landscaping,open
spaces, and even publicservices, as they
once extended theirdomain to constructiontechnology.Theloosely defined"vernacular"has become a significantfield
of study,coveringeverythingnot designed
by architects,rangingfromfolk traditions
to the mass-producedworld of speculatively-built
housing,amusementparks,and

workplaces. Structuresand spaces evoke

not justtheirdesigners, butall those who
intobeing,those
bringthebuiltenvironment
who use or inhabitit, if only by walking
througha city street.All of these tendencies have altered the scope and the very
enterprise of architecturalhistory. The
earlierconcernsare stillcentral,of course,
but architectand buildingare now both
partof a larger urbansetting.
Ideallythese two parallel developments
can 'and should benefit one another.
Urban historianscan teach architectsto
grasp thecomplexitiesof cities-or urban
design, incrementalchanges, and social
diversity. Likewise, close associations
with architects can remind historiansof
the formal and conceptual ideals which
preoccupy designers, for the methodologies of such scholars mustalways be
able to include a great variety of goals
and influences,even those which do not
readily fit into a social science model of
analysis.
Historians,like architects,often find this
larger urbandimension of theirwork as
frustratingas it is compelling.Thisis even
truefor the studyof cities up throughthe
early modern period, though when "the
world ... was half a thousand years
younger," in the words of Johann Huizinga, "the outlines of all things seemed
more clearly markedthan to us."1Many
diverse forces were at work, in harmony
or in conflict,to generate and then continuouslymodifythe urbanenvironment.
Unravellingall these influencesbecomes
more than anecdotal background if a
historian wants to analyze the placementof Atheniantemples, the street and
canal patternof Amsterdam,or the hierarchy of housing in colonial Boston.The
scale of earlier cities and the relative
clarityof the culturalforces at work do,
however, make them easier to take in
than most contemporary cities. Historians and architectscan more readilyperceive the kinds of questions they must
ask about cities in any period: What is
the effect of a building's location on
neighborhood development? What is
demolished to make room for a new

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U
structure?How does a projectaffect the
local economy and social order?
The interplayof historicalforces is even
more the case in cities since the early
nineteenth century, as the number and
diversity of actors has become ever
greater, as the scale of cities, theireconomy, and their cultural complexity has
increased almost exponentially.
Strangely, for those professional urban
historianswho focus on the modern era,
industrial cities have been the overwhelmingly preferred topic, and statistical analysis the prevailing methodology. In part for this reason, historians
concerned with architectureand urban
design can open up importantnew terrains, even if they concentrate on the
more traditional building types of their
discipline-religious and civic buildings, domestic and commercial architecture,theatersand the like. Cities,after
all, often lure people because of these
grand or exciting attractions,as well as
theireconomic potential.And, of course,
the two dimensions of urban life are intimately connected. As E.B.White said of
America's great metropolis, "No one
should come to New York unless he is
willing to be lucky."2
In this sense, I would argue, those historians concerned withthe culturalcomplexities of life in particularcities, rather
than urban historiansper se, provide an
importantmodel. Carl Schorske's work
on Viennaand Basel shows a wide range
of culturaland political figures-including architects like Otto Wagner and the
amateur architectural historian Jacob
Burckhardt-responding to the conditions of their particular cities, even as
they experimented within separate
professional spheres.3 RichardGoldthwaite's The Building of Renaissance
Florence makes us appreciate the great
palazzi more fully by explaining their
significance in the local economy, their
adaptation to changes in aristocratic
family life, and their impact on neighborhoods and public space in the city.4
Jerrold Seigel's penetrating analysis of
Parisian bohemia situates artists and

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1 Thomugadi(Timgad,Algeria),a Romancolonial city,was

settled by veteransof the armyat the heightof the empire,
ca. 100 A.D. Jean Jassus, Timgad(Algiers,1953)

writers within their culture, rather than

mythicallyapart from it,yet never underminescreativity.5JohnMerriman,in turn,
brings to life the working-class districts
of Limoges, France's first socialist city,
stressing the role of neighborhood institutions and the conflicts between tradition and modernity.6And Thomas Bender's New YorkIntellect shows generations of intellectuals responding to the
city's commerce and its ethnic diversity,
creating new institutionsof learningand
neighborhoods of culturalvitality.7
Itis no wonder that culturalhistoryhas,
in recent years, come to be perhaps the
most innovativeand excitingspecialization in the discipline of history.Yet,while
many cultural historians allude to the
significance of place and formal symbolism, architecture and urban design

still remain tangential to their explorations. This need not be the case.
Even in schools of architecture, urban
history can show how major buildings
and monumentsaffectedthe citiesaround
them:creatingdistinctivestylesand urban
spaces, to be sure, and likewise signaling changes in the professional statusof
artists or the political power of a governmentor the economic structureof a
district.We thereby juxtapose the many
constituencies which affected urban
design and city life at key moments of
the past, even though the primaryfocus
is on designers and theirclients. Suchan
approach can encourage students,most
of whom will go on to be architects,
planners or preservationiststo consider
not only their own profession's history,
but also how their predecessors' goals

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Ul
differed from their own. It comes quite
often as a revelation to see that one's
forebears, too, had to respond to the
exigencies of the particular cities and
societies where they worked. How did
earlier architects and planners (an
anachronism,of course, by which Imean
all those involved in policy decisions)
choose their references from the past?
How did they respond to the pressures
of clients and public groups? How did
they affect cities, knowingly and
unknowingly?What led them to expand
their formal and social horizons to look
at problems in new ways? The constraintsof modern practice do not seem
undulylimitingfrom such a perspective.
Urban history must, of course, encompass a repertoire of forms and spaces,
just as architectural history must cover
certain key monuments. But the field
should involve techniques for analysis,
ratherthan simply a Sweet's Catalog of
great spaces one can replicate. Today's
design professionals have to see history
as more than a canon of precedents or
a chronicle of progress. It is a complex
and ongoing enterprise, always raising
new questions and a multiplicityof alternative images about the past and the
present.
All of us concerned with cities in the past
and the present should take intoaccount
"ordinary"as well as "good" architecture, "boring" as well as grand spaces,
"muddled" as well as elegant designs.
Unplanned settings, rather than carefullyplannedurbandesign, make up most
partsof most cities, so we mustthinkhow
such areas work-whether the goal is
understandingtheir form in the past or
interveningin the present. There is simply no way to do this withouttaking the
culturaldomain into account. Forexample, the significance of the grid varied
considerably, as did its proportionsand
its focus, when it was used by Greek or
Roman colonists, by Spanish imperialists, or by American surveyors. (Figs. 13) The Piazza San Marco and the Washington Mall have evolved over time, in
part shaped by aesthetic concerns, in
part to function as spaces for political

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2 Cholula (Mexico), as represented in a drawing of 1580,

shows the design principlesrecentlycodifiedas the Lawsof
the Indies, especially in the public buildings facing the
arcaded plaza. LeonardoBenevolo,Storiadell'architettura
del Rinascimento(Bari,1973)

ritual. Less stately settings as well-for

example European Jewish ghettos,
American commercial strips, or ethnic
neighborhoodsin any large city-should
also be studied as culturalartifactswith
both formal and social elements.
No Zeitgeist rule can describe how culture and aesthetics interrelatein all circumstances, not even for one time and
place. Yetthese two analytical poles are
always at work together in urban history. In fact, even a "purely formal"
solution, such as Cataneo's ideal towns
of the Renaissance or L'Enfant'sWashington,D.C., suggests the unusualpower
and abstractionof architectand client in
thattime and place. And, once the space
began to be used, the culturalrealm of
course further complicates our full
understandingof the forms.

Theurbanhistorianmust,therefore,show
how certainkindsof buildingsand spaces
came to be built and to gain preeminence, while others remained thwarted
projects or secret personal visions. This,
notincidentally,entailsconsideringwhich
formsgained favor among architectsand
which-whether the same or differentappealed to more speculative builders
and clients. Fortoo long we have studied
the historyof what architects drew as if
it were necessarily the history of how
cities looked. We mustalso considerhow
the more familiar prototypes relate to
less well-known variations or even antithetical images. After all, the influence
of a form or style by no means simply
filtersdown throughthe social structure,
nor is it mere backwardness not to copy
what is fashionable. Formalchoices and
cultural priorities were at stake when
provincial cities like Boston or Edin-

Spring 1988 JAE 41/3

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The challenge of doing urban history

today lies in being able to conceive of
one's work as a synthesis, not just of
priorities and even disciplinary techniques, but also of experiences in and
visions of a place. To speak of synthesis
is not to call for a sweeping portraitof
supposedly quintessential elements of
urban life or form, but rather to find
comprehensible ways to juxtapose the
many different approaches to and realities of the city. I stress comprehensible
because there is always the risk of simply reeling off facts, stories, and images.
This profusion can obviously be overwhelming, and a chaos of pictures,
events, and data-while resonant with
one definition of urban life-has little
intellectualvalue.

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3 Chicago, Illinois, expanding along the lake and river in

1855, had only recently become a commercial entrepot for
the Midwest. Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago, 1969)

burgh introducedvariations on the patterns of London.Contemporaryregionhepigshp

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Thisapproach does not mean thatsocial

considerations should usurp the role of
formal analysis, but rather that the two
must be integrated. Neither society nor
form is the passive mirrorof the otherwhich should make us suspicious of
overly simplistic,static notions of architecture either "reflecting"social forces
or "representing" a fixed power relationship to all observers. Botharchitecture and society are formative, each
helping shape the other, and nowhere is
this more true than in any kind of urban
building.

There is no standard

formula

for connecting the two realms of inquiry;

sometimes architecture does respond
primarilyto the aesthetic concerns of the
profession, while society can move in

new directions without generating

architecturalor urbanistictestaments to
that change. The shifting influencesand
responses between these two kinds of
reality, the formal and the social, is the
very essence of urban history.
This analytic process obviously draws
from several disciplines, and even several kinds of history: cultural, social,
economic, political and intellectual, as
well as architectural. Urban history
should ideally juxtapose many perspectives about how cities functionand what
makes certain places effective, whether
in formal, functional, or culturalterms.
Only in this way is it possible to take
account of the manydifferent"filters"to use CarloGinzburg'sphrase-through
whichdifferentgroups of people see and
use the city.8

The urban historianmusttherefore have

a clear goal. Inthe most general terms,
this firstentails choosing whether one is
seeking to explainthe forms more clearly
and fully, or to understand the society
through this new prism. Michael Baxandall, who provided one of the most
compelling examples of culturalhistory
in his work on Renaissance painting,
rightlystresses that one must not simplisticallyattemptto fuse art and society.9
Yetculture,he continues,does not falsely
modulate between the two, so long as it
is taken in its classical sense, as the skills,
values, knowledge, and means of
expression within a society. It is in this
sense that urban historiansmustventure
into the cultural domain, seeking the
meaningsof a varietyof formsand formgivers.
The goal of synthesis in urban historyis,
therefore, that of bringing together the
myriadexperiences, intentions,and settings of urban places at a given timewithout producing a cacophony that is
too loud to appreciate. Informal terms,
one mustconsider both monumentsand
the spaces around them, the ordinary
buildings and the pattern of streets and
open space, the effect of this composite
in the past and changes made over time.
One mustalso distillthe distinctivevoices
of architects and clients, of elite and
ordinary citizens. Focusing on the par-

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U
ticularities of such groups, and even
possible conflicts between them, checks
the tendency to subsume real differences under some rubricof a common
or universal response to cities and their
buildings. No single voice can predominate absolutely. The aesthetic and
urbanisticstrengthsof Daniel Burnham's
1909 Chicago Plan deserve our appreciation, but the historical account must
also acknowledge its benefitsto the city's
industrialistsand the critiques of Jane
Addams and other reformers who
charged that he paid virtuallyno attention to Chicago's crowded immigrant
neighborhoods.
These distinctionsare criticalfor understanding how cities took the form they
did and how people experienced them.
Even architects and planners, builders
and politicians cannot be lumped
together as if they viewed the city in the
same way because they all have the
power to intervene. Most architects see
a streetscape in terms of its individual
buildings,while builders see it as a unit,
based ultimatelyon the overall development potential, and planners see the
same place as a map of legal codesor social inequities.Otherkindsof groups
are even more wide-ranging in their
reactions to the city. By class, ethnicity,
age, and gender people relate quite differentlyto parks and departmentstores,
for example, or to city halls and civic
monuments.Moreover, especially in the
modernworld, all people experience the
city in multiple roles-for example, as
residentsof a neighborhood, employees
in a certain milieu, as members of a
politicalfaction or a religioussect. These
shiftingperspectives,too, affect how they
use and relate to cities.
Therecognitionof suchdivergencesis not
merelya populiststance. Indeed, it suggests the necessary, if difficult,responsibilityof the historianto explain not only
what happened, butalso what it meantat
the time and what that legacy means to
us today-in both our separate identities
and our unityas a professionor a nation.
Itis no longersufficientto posita historical

narrativethat explains urban changenew styles, buildingtypes, technologies,

and images for cities-by pointing only
to the majorfigureswho espoused these
innovations.Neitherarchitectsnor political leaderscan necessarilyguaranteethat
certain innovationswill come to be generallyaccepted, pervadingall levels of a
cityand spreadingbeyond itsboundaries.
Forexample, the simplificationof housing design in the UnitedStates at the turn
of the last centuryhas by and large been
explained as the effect of key architectural innovators, notably Frank Lloyd
Wright.Byfocusing on Chicago, the city
where Wright practiced during these
years, it is possible to situate him more
accurately. It is not that Wright'swork
did not impress other architects, even
builders, carpenters, and the general
public. Butthey had very different reasons for promoting a turn toward simpler, more standardized dwellings. And
the city itself was an embattled arena
where each of these groups was trying
to seize the right to define what good
housing should be. Simply to describe
the formal changes would miss the fascinating complexity of attitudes and
conflicts which underlay how these
architecturalformswere seen, wherethey
were built,and how they were used.10
Understandingwhat people were trying
to do witharchitectureand urbandesign
at particularmoments in the past is one
aspect of recovering the meanings of a
place. One musttake full account of the
designer'saestheticgoals and the client's
symbolic intentions,no matterwhat their
status; one must bear in mind the constraintsof laws, economy, tradition,and
fashion, as well as searching for innovations. The various public responses to
a design and the changes or compromises they elicit mustbe taken seriously
in their own right,ratherthan dismissed
as philistine efforts to undermine the
integrityof the designer. Formalanalysis in urban history should not be isolated from such culturalissues, but neither should it be downplayed as incidental. Only in this way can we grasp
the full implicationsof urban places.

Urban history then is both an act of

recovery and a creative gesture toward
the future, a way to comprehend and
buildupon places and culturesover time.
Architecturaldesign becomes an element in a complex process that creates
and transformsplace; it is at once memory and vision, problem and resolution,
individualand collective expression.The
goal, in part, is to be able to orient ourselves-as architectsand planners, historiansand citizens-to the intricatewebs
of power and meaning that are thus
elaborated, in the past and present,
through architectural space. To write
urbanhistoryis to give narrativeformto
this process; to design with history in
mindis to acknowledge the multipleculturaluses and meaningsplaces can have,
in modern society as in the past.
Notes
1 Huizinga,JohannTheWaningof the MiddleAges: A Study
of the Formsof Life,Thoughtand Art in Franceand the
NetherlandsintheXlVthand XVthCenturiesEdwardArnold
(London)1924, p.1
2 White,E. B. Here Is New YorkHarper & Brothers(New
York)1949, p. 10
3 Schorske,Carl E. Fin-de-SiecleViennaAlfred A. Knopf
(NewYork)1980and "Scienceas VocationinBurckhardt's
Basel,"in TheUniversityand TheCityfromMedieval Origins to the Present(ThomasBender,ed.) OxfordUniversity
Press(New York)forthcoming
4 Goldthwaite,RichardThe Buildingof Renaissance Florence Johns HopkinsUniversityPress (Baltimoreand London) 1980
5 Seigel, JerroldBohemianParis:Culture,Politics,and the
Boundariesof BourgeoisLife,1830-1930Viking/Elizabeth
SiftonBook (New York)1986
6 Merriman,John The Red City: Limoges and the French
NineteenthCenturyOxford UniversityPress (New York)
1985
7 Bender,ThomasNew YorkIntellect:A Historyof Intellectual Lifein New YorkCity,from1750 to the Beginningsof
OurOwn TimeAlfredA. Knopf(New York)1987
8 Ginzburg,Carlo TheCheese and the Worms:TheCosmos
of a Sixteenth-Century
Miller (Johnand Anne Tedeschi,
trans.)JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress(Baltimoreand London) 1980
9 Baxandall,Michael "Art,Society, and the BouguerPrinciple," Representations12 (Fall1985) pp. 32-43
10 Wright, Gwendolyn Moralism and the Model Home:
Domestic Architectureand CulturalConflictin Chicago,
1873-1913Universityof ChicagoPress(Chicago)1980and
"Architectural
Practiceand Social Visionin Wright'sEarly
Designs," in Nature in the Workof FrankLloydWright
(VincentScully,ed.) Universityof ChicagoPress(Chicago)
1988

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