CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE

UNIT-1 M T V REDDY

 Challenging CIAM declaration

 Team X and Brutalism
 Writings of jane Jacobs
 Robert venturi
 Christopher alexander

CIAM’s Declaration (1928)

Translated by Michael Bullock.

th
From Programs and Manifestoes on 20 -Century Architecture.

(The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 1971).

The undersigned architects, representing the national groups of modern architects, affirm their unity of
viewpoint regarding the fundamental conceptions of architecture and their professional obligations towards
society.

They insist particularly on the fact that “building” is an elementary activity of man intimately linked with
evolution and the development of human life. The destiny of architecture is to express the orientation of the
age. Works of architecture can spring only from the present time.

They therefore refuse categorically to apply in their working methods means that may have been able to
illustrate past societies; they affirm today the need for a new conception of architecture that satisfies the
spiritual, intellectual, and material demands of present-day life. Conscious of the deep disturbances of the
social structure brought about by machines, they recognize that the transformation of the economic order and
of social life inescapably brings with it a corresponding transformation of the architectural phenomenon.

The intention that brings them together here is to attain the indispensable and urgent harmonization of the
elements involved by replacing architecture on its true plane, the economic, and sociological plane. Thus
architecture must be set free from the sterilizing grip of the academies that are concerned with preserving the
formulas of the past.

Animated by this conviction, they declare themselves members of an association and will give each other
mutual support on the international plane with a view to realizing their aspirations morally and materially.

I. General Economic System

1. The idea of modern architecture includes the link between the phenomenon of architecture and that of the
general economic system.

2. The idea of “economic efficiency” does not imply production furnishing maximum commercial profit, but
production demanding a minimum working effort.

3. The need for maximum economic efficiency is the inevitable result of the impoverished state of the general
economy.
4. The most efficient method of production is that which arises from rationalization and standardization.
Rationalization and standardization act directly on working methods both in modern architecture (conception)
and in the building industry (realization).

5. Rationalization and standardization react in a threefold manner:

(a) they demand of architecture conceptions leading to simplification of working methods on the site and in the
factory;

(b) they mean for building firms a reduction in the skilled labor force; they lead to the employment of less
specialized labor working under the direction of highly skilled technicians;

(c) they expect from the consumer (that is to say the customer who orders the house in which he will live) a
revision of his demands in the direction of a readjustment to the new conditions of social life. Such a revision
will be manifested in the reduction of certain individual needs henceforth devoid of real justification; the
benefits of this reduction will foster the maximum satisfaction of the needs of the greatest number, which are
at present restricted.

6. Following the dissolution of the guilds, the collapse of the class of skilled craftsmen is an accomplished
fact. The inescapable consequence of the development of the machine has led to industrial methods of
production different from and often opposed to those of the craftsmen. Until recently, thanks to the teaching
of the academies, the architectural conception has been inspired chiefly by the methods of craftsmen and not
by the new industrial methods. This contradiction explains the profound disorganization of the art of building.

7. It is urgently necessary for architecture, abandoning the outmoded conceptions connected with the class of
craftsmen, henceforth to rely upon the present realities of industrial technology, even though such an attitude
must perforce lead to products fundamentally different from those of past epochs.

II. Town Planning

1. Town planning is the organization of the functions of collective life; it extends both the urban
agglomerations and the countryside. Town planning is the organization of life in all regions.

Urbanization cannot be conditioned by the claims of pre-existent aestheticism: its essence is of a functional
order.

2. This order includes three functions: (a) dwelling, (b) producing, (c) relaxation (the maintenance of the
species).

Its essential objects are: (a) division of the soil, (b) organization of traffic, (c) legislation.

3. The relationships between the inhabited areas, the cultivated areas (including sports) and the traffic areas
are dictated by the economic and social environment. The fixing of population densities establishes the
indispensable classification.

The chaotic division of land, resulting from sales, speculations, inheritances, must be abolished by a collective
and methodical land policy.

The redistribution of the land, the indispensable preliminary basis for any town planning, must include the just
division between the owners and the community of the unearned increment resulting from works of joint
interest.

4. Traffic control must take in all the functions of collective life. The growing intensity of these vital functions,
always checked against a reading of statistics, demonstrates the supreme importance of the traffic
phenomenon.

5. Present-day technical facilities, which are constantly growing, are the very key to town planning. They
imply and offer a total transformation of existing legislation; this transformation must run parallel with technical
progress.
III. Architecture and Public Opinion

1. It is essential today for architects to exercise an influence on public opinion by informing the public of the
fundamentals of the new architecture. Through the baneful effects of academic teaching, opinion has strayed
into an erroneous conception of the dwelling. The true problems of the dwelling have been pushed back
behind entirely artificial sentimental conceptions. The problem of the house is not posed.

Clients, whose demands are motivated by numerous factors that have nothing to do with the real problem of
housing, are generally very bad at formulating their wishes. Opinion has gone astray. Thus the architect
satisfies the normal prerequisites of housing only poorly. This inefficiency involves the country in an immense
expense that is a total loss. The tradition is created of the expensive house, the building of which deprives a
large part of the population of healthy living quarters.

Through educational work carried out in schools, a body of fundamental truths could be established forming
the basis for a domestic science (for example: the general economy of the dwelling, the principles of property
and its moral significance, the effects of sunlight, the ill effects of darkness, essential hygiene, rationalization
of household economics, the use of mechanical devices in domestic life, etc.).

3. The effect of such an education would be to bring up generations with a healthy and rational conception of
the house. These generations (the [112] architect’s future clients) would be capable of correctly stating the
problem of housing.

IV. Architecture and Its Relations with the State

1. Modern architects having the firm intention of working according to the new principles can only regard the
official academies and their methods tending towards aestheticism and formalism as institutions standing in
the way of progress.

2. These academies, by definition and by function, are the guardians of the past. They have established
dogmas of architecture based on the practical and aesthetic methods of historical periods. Academies vitiate
the architect’s vocation at its very origin.

3. In order to guarantee the country’s prosperity, therefore, States must tear the teaching of architecture out of
the grip of the academies. The past teaches us precisely that nothing remains, that everything evolves, and
that progress constantly advances.

4. States, henceforth withdrawing their confidence from the academies, must revise the methods of teaching
architecture and concern themselves with all those questions whose object is to endow the country with the
most productive and most advanced system of organization.

5. Academicism causes States to spend considerable sums on the erection of monumental buildings, contrary
to the efficient utilization of resources, making a display of outmoded luxury at the expense of the most urgent
tasks of town planning and housing.

6. Within the same order of ideas, all the prescriptions of the State which, in one form or another, tend to
influence architecture by giving it a purely aesthetic direction are an obstacle to its development and must be
vigorously combated.

7. Architecture’s new attitude, according to which it aims of its own volition to re-situate itself within economic
reality, renders all claims to official patronage superfluous.

8. If States were to adopt an attitude opposite to their present one they would bring about a veritable
architectural renaissance that would take place quite naturally within the general orientation of the country’s
economic and social development.

th
June 28 , 1928

The Declaration was signed by the following architects:

H.P. Berlage

Victor Bourgeois

Pierre Chareau

Josef Frank

Gabriel Guévrékian

Max Ernst Haefeli

Hugo Häring

Arnold Höchel

Huib Hoste

Pierre Jeanneret

Le Corbusier

André Lurçat

Sven Markelius

Ernst May

Fernando García Mercadal

Hannes Meyer

Werner Max Moser

Carlo Enrico Rava

Gerrit Rietveld

Alberto Sartoris

Hans Schmidt

Mart Stam

Rudolf Steiger

Szymon Syrkus

Henri-Robert von der Mühll

Juan de Zavala

TEAM 10 MEETINGS
L i s t o f C I AM c o n g r e s s e s ( 1 9 4 7 - 1 9 5 9 )
and Team 10 meetings (1960-1981)

1. Introduction
2. Periodization
3. The Emergence of Team 10 within CIAM (1953-1959)
4. The 1960s
5. The 1970s
6. Sources

Introduction

The following documentation of the Team 10 meetings provides a chronological overview during the period
from 1947 to 1981, covering the post-war years of CIAM (1947-1959) and the years when Team 10 organized
its own meetings after abandoning the CIAM organization (1960-1981). The review of each meeting or event
is accompanied by the names of participants. A distinction has been made between gatherings within CIAM
and meetings following the dissolution of CIAM. In the case of the earlier CIAM gatherings, attended by large
numbers of people, the chronology names only those participants who would later be part of Team 10 or
played a role in the formation of the group; reviews of the later meetings are accompanied by the names of all
persons present as far as could be ascertained from our comparative study of source material.

Team 10 in the garden of Van Eyck's home at Loenen, 1974

The meetings were quite different in character. Some had a theme clearly set out in advance, for example the
meetings in Royaumont (1962), in Toulouse (1971), and in Berlin (1973), whereas others were rather informal,
such as the ones in Berlin (1965) and in Toulouse (1977). Often the completion of one of the designs by Team
10 protagonists led to the organization of a meeting at the site itself, most notably Bagnols-sur-Cèze (1960)
organized by Candilis-Josic-Woods, the Urbino Collegio del Colle (1966) by De Carlo, Toulouse-Le Mirail
(1971) by Candilis, the Berlin Free University (1973) by Woods and Schiedhelm; the Terneuzen town hall and
Van Eyck’s Pastoor Van Ars church led to the Rotterdam meeting (1974) organized by Bakema, and the
Matteotti housing project to the Spoleto meeting (1976) by De Carlo. At times the inner circle of Team 10
convened to reach an understanding on one subject or another, to plan publicity-related activities or to
organize future meetings.
In addition to the meetings, the reader will find a number of instances in which Team 10 members expressed
their ideas, both communally and individually, through publications, exhibitions and education.

Pe rio d iz ati o n : T e a m 1 0 f rom b eg i n n i ng to en d

Because Team 10 originated within CIAM, several CIAM congresses have been included in this overview,
beginning with the sixth CIAM congress in Bridgwater (1947), the so-called reunion congress. In the
historiography of Team 10 the ninth CIAM congress in Aix-en-Provence (1953) is generally viewed as the
event which marked the rise of a younger generation of modern architects. It was also the first time that most
of the core members of the future Team 10 attended CIAM in an official capacity, namely Shadrach Woods,
Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, Georges Candilis and Jaap Bakema — as well as John Voelcker,
who was to play a major role in the early years of Team 10. Giancarlo De Carlo would not be present at any
meetings until 1955, when he attended the CIAM Council meeting in La Sarraz. Participants at the meeting in
Aix still represented the various national and local CIAM groups. Among those groups were MARS (Modern
Architectural Research Group); the Dutch groups ‘de 8’ and ‘Opbouw’; Le Corbusier’s ASCORAL (Assemblée
de constructeurs pour une rénovation architecturale); from the French colonies GAMMA (Groupe
d’Architectes Modernes Marocains) and Algeria’s CIAM Alger; and the Italian Group.

In Aix the future Team 10 participants discovered a sense of affinity and learned to know and appreciate one
another, both personally and professionally. Their presentations, given at that time within the framework of
CIAM’s country-related delegations, played a decisive role in their compatibility. Presentations in Aix were
given in the form of a so-called grid, a series of panels that had to comply with general guidelines formulated
by CIAM. It was the content and design of these grids, in particular, that drew attention to the younger
generation, whose members not only distinguished themselves through their grids but also recognized their
own ideas in the contributions of their peers. The official CIAM grid was developed in 1947 by the French
group ASCORAL, under the supervision of Le Corbusier. At CIAM VII in Bergamo in 1949, the grid was
presented as an analytical method for comparing the various subjects and designs discussed at CIAM
congresses. Although accepted by CIAM, the new means of presentation was criticized from the start, also
within the CIAM organization itself. The grid and the debates surrounding its validation, was characteristic of
the postwar CIAM climate with much emphasis on official and bureaucratic procedures. Eventually, this
climate would instigate the younger generation to abandon the CIAM organization altogether.

The Team 10 history ends in 1981 with the death of Jaap Bakema, who was seen by those involved as the
driving and binding force of Team 10. Bakema was the only participant to attend all of the Team 10 meetings,
even in the late 1970s when his health was deteriorating. As a result of his death, gatherings referred to as
‘Team 10 meetings’ were no longer held. Nonetheless, members of the group continued to maintain individual
contacts, both personally and within organized forms of collaboration and assembly, particularly education.
The use of these various channels enabled Team 10’s body of ideas to be passed on and assimilated by new
generations. Obviously, education was a vital part of this conveyance of knowledge; members of Team 10
were active in education into the 1990s in both Europe and the United States, as well as in India, for example,
a country visited by various members at the invitation of Balkrishna Doshi. The ILAUD workshops, which De
Carlo began organizing in 1976, were a particularly important new platform for exchanging ideas.

Within the period 1953-1981 three main periods can be distinguished: the emergence of Team 10 within CIAM
(1953-1959), the 1960s (1960-1968) and the 1970s (1969-1981).

T h e em e rgen c e o f T eam 1 0 w i th i n CI AM ( 1 95 3- 19 5 9)

Team 10 was named after the CIAM committee responsible for planning the tenth congress: the CIAM X
Committee. The tenth congress took place in Dubrovnik in 1956. Initially, the committee consisted of Jaap
Bakema (the Netherlands), George Candilis (France), Rolf Gutmann (Switzerland) and Peter Smithson
(United Kingdom). They represented the countries most active and dominant within CIAM at the time. The
original four members of the CIAM X Committee were soon joined by a number of kindred spirits, among
whom Van Eyck, Bill and Gill Howell, Alison Smithson, John Voelcker and Shadrach Woods. Together they
prepared an agenda for the future of CIAM.

The period in question, which more or less coincided with the post-war reconstruction of Europe after the
Second World War, came to a close in Otterlo with the final CIAM meeting, referred to in the history books as
CIAM ’59. This congress was organized not by Team 10, but by an ad hoc group consisting of several Team
10 members (Bakema, Candilis and Voelcker) in collaboration with the Italian Ernesto Rogers, the Swiss
Alfred Roth, and the Frenchman André Wogenscky. Rogers deserves a special mention because he
introduced his protégé De Carlo to CIAM, thus bringing him into contact with Team 10. Apparently, Roth
replaced Gutmann, who was highly regarded by the core group of Team 10, but with whom contact was lost
 after the tenth congress.
As a result of a decision taken at the Dubrovnik congress in 1956, participants were invited to the Otterlo
congress on an individual basis rather than as representatives of national, or local CIAM groups. Some of
these groups, including MARS, had already dissolved themselves. At Otterlo nearly all participants were
European. As the standard method of presentation had been completely eliminated, participants employed
diverse forms of presentation, each geared to the nature of the design shown. The Otterlo congress had
neither chairman nor separate committee meetings; plenary discussions were held sitting in a circle around
drawings pinned to the wall. During intervals, individuals or participants in small groups viewed the various
projects.

 1947, 7-14 September, Bridgwater (UK) CIAM VI

Reunion congress
 1949, 22-31 July, Bergamo (Italy) CIAM VII
The Athens Charter into practice
 1951, 7-14 July, Hoddesdon (UK) CIAM VIII
The Heart of the City; junior memberships established
 1952, 25-30 June, Sigtuna (Sweden) CIAM council meeting
Habitat; the future of CIAM
 1953, 19-26 July, Aix en Provence (France) CIAM IX
Habitat charter
 1954-1955 Preparing CIAM X
- 1954, 29-31 January, Doorn (The Netherlands), Doorn statement
- 1954, 30 June, Paris (France) CIAM council, appointment of CIAM X Committee (CIAX)
- 1954, 29 July, London (UK) CIAX meeting
- 1954, 28-29 August, London (UK) CIAX meeting, Draft Framework 3 / Instruction to Groups
- 1954, 14 September, Paris (France) CIAX meeting, Draft Framework 3 discussed (first reference to ‘Team
X / Team 10’)
- 1955, April 1955, Paris (France) ‘Team 10’ , first meeting of future Team 10 members
- 1955, 4 July, Paris (France) CIAM council meeting
- 1955, 8-19 September, La Sarraz (France) CIAM council and delegates
 1956, 3-13 August, Dubrovnik (Jugoslavia) CIAM X
 1957, 1-2 September, La Sarraz (France) CIAM council and committee of reorganization
Declaration of La Sarraz
CIAM renamed: Research Group for Social and Visual Relationships
 1959, September, Otterlo (the Netherlands) CIAM ’59
The end of CIAM

The 1960s (1960-1968)

 `
Team 10 at Royaumont, France, 1962. Photograph by George Kasabov.

While looking for new participants to vitalize the larger meetings — Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Royaumont, Berlin
and Urbino — differences of opinion surfaced within the inner circle with respect to the size of the group,
the nature of the meeting and, finally, the people to be invited. One example is the Smithsons’ strong
opposition to the presence of James Stirling. Alison Smithson denied him a part in the Team 10 history
simply by omitting any mention of him in her retrospective publication Team 10 Meetings, despite Stirling’s
contribution to the Royaumont meeting. In the end, such differences precipitated a crisis that threatened the
continuing existence of Team 10, particularly around the meeting in Urbino, an event organized by
newcomer De Carlo in 1966.
This identity crisis in the latter half of the 1960s was not only internal in nature; it was also influenced by
external factors, such as democratization movements launched by residents and students, protests that
also questioned the work of Team 10 architects. A concrete example was the 1968 Triennale in Milan,
organized by De Carlo and taken over by artists and students on its opening day.

 1960, 25-30 July, Bagnols-sur-Cèze (France) Team 10 meeting

 1961, 4-5 January, Paris (France) Team 10 meeting
Team X statement.
Decision to prepare ‘Team 10 Primer’
 1961, 2-4 July, London (UK) Team 10 meeting
Concept of ‘Team 10 Primer’
 1962, January, Drottningholm (Sweden) Team 10 meeting
Concept of ‘Team 10 Primer’
Preparations for Royaumont meeting
 1962 ‘Team 10 Primer’ 1953-62 published in Architectural Design, December 1962
 1962, 12-16 September, Royaumont (France) Team 10 meeting
Urban infrastructure and building-group concept
 1963, December, Paris (France) Team 10 meeting
Discussion about Royaumont Meeting and publication of Royaumont Meeting
 1964, Spring, Delft (the Netherlands) InDeSem workshop Faculty of Architecture TH Delft
 1965, 25-29 September, Berlin (Germany) Team 10 meeting
 1966, 7-13 September, Urbino (Italy) Team 10 meeting
the motorcar intervention into architecture
the relationship of ‘to move’ and ‘to stay’
 1967, February, Paris (France) Team 10 meeting
Restatement of convictions
 1968 Alison Smithson (ed):' Team 10 Primer', revised edition published with MIT Press
 1968, 30 May - 10 July, Milan Triennale (Italy)
The greater number / il grande numero

The 1970s (1969-1981)

During this period, which loosely covers the time between 1969 and the last meeting in 1977, a
number of developments were going on at the same time.
Following the crisis in Urbino, a definitive shift saw Team 10 meetings take on the character of ‘family
meetings’. Members retreated into a tight circle. A small group augmented by only a few outsiders, so to
speak, would regularly meet from 1971 on-wards, the year in which Candilis organized a meeting to
acknowledge the completion of the first phase of Toulouse-Le Mirail. Meetings in Berlin in 1973 and in
Rotterdam in 1974 were also occasions organized primarily to visit realized work.

In terms of content, these meetings allowed members to review their professional roles and to
reconsider the ideal of the welfare state. The immediate cause for this reflection was a series of large
building projects completed during these years, all of which were realized within the framework of the
welfare state. Besides evaluating personal work and positions, various Team 10 participants — namely De
Carlo and Van Eyck, but also Bakema and Erskine — became involved in new phenomena such as
residents’ participation and the controversy surrounding urban renewal.

Team 10 in Spoleto, Italy, 1976. From left to right: De Carlo, Peter Smithson, Van Eyck, Richards, Guedes,
Alison Smithson, Coderch. Photograph by Sandra Lousada.

The rise of postmodernism was reason for new divisive actions in the group. A major example is the dispute
with Ungers, who was a frequent participant of Team 10 meetings, and who organized a rather
extraordinary Team 10 seminar at Cornell University. Van Eyck wrote an open letter to Ungers expressing
his fury at the way the latter was treating history, and submitting that he had placed himself outside the
‘orbit’ of Team 10. Van Eyck ended the letter by saying: ‘Just a closing word about Team X. It has no
members, nor has it ever had. Membership was never our line. Does that ring a bell! Anyway there is no
need to worry: a latecomer like yourself may yet turn out to be the first, last and only member of Team X.’
 The issue of postmodernism also led to the desire to appear once more in public as a group. A particular
emphasis on this subject emerged in Bonnieux in 1977. Among other ideas put forward was a suggestion
that they participate in IBA Berlin (Internationale Bau Ausstellung). Nothing ever came of this idea,
however. Communicating Team 10 ideas continued for the most part through education and in several
magazines. Especially instrumental in this attempt were the platforms that De Carlo established in the latter
half of the 1970s: the ILAUD summer schools and the magazine Spazio e Societá.

 1971, 9-12 April, Toulouse-Le Mirail (France) Team 10 meeting

Repetition
Our position towards changing political conditions
 1972 Death of John Voelcker
 1971-1972 Team 10 at Cornell University (USA)
 1973, 2-4 April, Berlin (Germany) Team 10 meeting
The matrix meeting
 1973 Death of Shadrach Woods
 1974, 4-11 April, Rotterdam (the Netherlands) Team 10 meeting
Architectural responsibility
 1974-2004 Urbino, Siena, San Marino and Venice
ILAUD
 1976, 2-6 June, Spoleto (Italy) Team 10 meeting
Participation and the meaning of the past
 1977, 9-12 June, Bonnieux (France) Team 10 meeting
The future of Team 10;
Proposals to participate in Architecture Biennale Venice and IBA Berlin
 1981 Death of Jaap Bakema

So u rce s

The gathered data of the meetings and Team 10 participants are based on a comparative study of source
material. Given that documentation of the various Team 10 meetings is far from complete and unequivocal, a
certain amount of prudence has been called for in the presentation of this summary.

The most important Team 10 documents consulted while compiling the list are kept in the Bakema archive
and the Smithsons archive at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) in Rotterdam; and in the De Carlo
archive at the University of Venice (IUAV). John Voelcker’s archive, maintained by his family, provided
additional information on the early years. Extra data on activities in the 1970s came largely from the archive of
Manfred Schiedhelm. Owing to the dissolution of Candilis-Josic-Woods and the premature death of Shadrach
Woods, the firm’s files have been dispersed and, even more unfortunately, have partly disappeared. Thanks
in part to our work on this project, the Woods archive, previously maintained by Val Woods, has found a
permanent home at Columbia University. To date, however, no material on Team 10 meetings organized by
Candilis-Josic-Woods has been discovered; commentary on these meetings is based on articles published in
magazines (such as Le Carré Bleu) and on relevant photographs culled from other archives. An exception is
the meeting in Royaumont; transcriptions of tape recordings made at this meeting are at the NAi.

Generally speaking, we reconstructed the various meetings with the use of photos, letters, invitations, and
such. Other material consisted of lists of those invited (often inconsistent), published presentations, and
diverse articles published after meetings had taken place. We are also grateful for the use of material from
previous studies of CIAM and Team 10 carried out by a number of colleagues; deserving of special mention
are Jos Bosman, Eric Mumford, Annie Pedret and Francis Strauven.

Wherever possible and wherever applicable, the data include the following information:
— Date and place of the meeting
— Initiator or chief organizer of the meeting
— Predetermined theme
— Participants
— Persons invited who did not attend
— Participants regarded at the time as members of Team 10 (as indicated in the Team 10 Primer, for
example, or on address lists)
— Projects presented or visited (a list that is far fro
from complete)

We have treated as three separate matters the period in which Team 10 was still part of CIAM, the final CIAM
congress in Otterlo in 1959, and Team 10 meetings. In reporting on meetings within CIAM, we have not
included an exhaustive list of participants,
ticipants, which would be not only nearly impossible — some 3000 people
attended the congress in Aix-en-Provence
Provence — but also unnecessary. Accompanying the reviews of these CIAM
meetings are only the names of people who played a role in the formation of Team 10. In the case of later
meetings, we have provided a list of all known participants, with the exception of guests such as family
members and employees.

Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel

BRUTALISM

The term "brutalism"

Trellick Tower, London, 1966-1972,

1972, designed by Ernő Goldfinger. It is Grade II*listed.

The Interior of the Phillips Exeter Academy Library,

Library 1965-1971, by Louis Kahn.
The Buffalo City Court Building in Buffalo, NY.
NY

All stations of the Washington Metrosystem

system display Brutalist characteristics

National Assembly Building of Bangladesh

Bangladesh, 1961-1981, by Louis Kahn.
The Habitat 67 in Montreal, Quebec,, Canada

The British architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term in 1953, from the French béton brut, or "raw
concrete", a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the poured board-marked marked concrete with which he
constructed many of his post-World
World War II buildings. The term gained wide currency when the British
architectural critic Reyner Banham used it in the title of his 1966 book, The New Brutalism: Ethic or
Aesthetic?,, to characterize a somewhat recently established cluster of architectural approaches, particularly in
[1]
Europe.
The architectural style known as Brutalism and the architectural and urban theory known as New
Brutalism may be regarded as two different movements, although the terms are often used interchangeably.
The New Brutalism of the British members of Team 10,, Alison and Peter Smithson, is more related to the
theoretical reform of the CIAM (in architecture and urbanism) than to "béton brut". Reyner Banham formulated
this difference in the title of his book: The New Brutalism - Ethic or Aesthetic?
[edit]Characteristics

J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.

The University of California, San Diego'sGeisel

Diego Library is one of the most famous examples of Brutalist
architecture, and has been featured in a number of science fiction
fictio movies.

Brutalist buildings usually are formed with striking repetitive angular geometries, and, where concrete is used,
often revealing the texture of the wooden forms used for the in-situ casting. Although concrete is the material
most widely associated with Brutalist architecture, not all Brutalist buildings are formed from concrete. Instead,
a building may achieve its Brutalist quality through a rough, blocky appearance, and the expression of its
[citation needed]
structural materials, forms, and (in some cases) services on its exterior. For example, many of
Alison and Peter Smithson's private houses are built from brick. Brutalist building materials also include brick,
[citation needed]
glass, steel, rough-hewn stone, and gabion (also known as trapion). Conversely, not all buildings
exhibiting an exposed
osed concrete exterior can be considered Brutalist, and may belong to one of a range of
architectural styles including Constructivism,
Constructivism International Style, Expressionism,
Expressionism Postmodernism,
and Deconstructivism.
Another common theme in Brutalist designs is the exposure
exposur of the building's functions— —ranging from their
structure and services to their human use—in
use the exterior of the building. In the Boston City Hall (illustration
right), designed in 1962, the strikingly different and projected portions of the building indicate the special
nature of the rooms behind those walls, such as the mayor's office or the city council chambers. From another
perspective, the design of the Hunstanton School included placing the facility's water tank, normally a hidden
service feature, in a prominent, visible tower.
Brutalism as an architectural philosophy, rather than a style, was often also associated with a
socialist utopian ideology, which tended to be supported by its designers, especially Alison and Peter
Smithson, near the height of the style. Critics argue
argue that this abstract nature of Brutalism makes the style
unfriendly and uncommunicative, instead of being integrating and protective, as its proponents intended.
Brutalism also is criticised as disregarding the social, historic, and architectural enviro
environment of its
surroundings, making the introduction of such structures in existing developed areas appear The best known
early Brutalist architecture is the work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier,, in particular his Unité
d'Habitation (1952) and the 1953 Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India.

Park Hill (detail), Sheffield. Lynn, Smith 1961

Brutalism gained considerable momentum in the United Kingdom during the mid twentieth century, as
economically depressed (and World War II-ravaged)
II ravaged) communities sought inexpensive construction and design
methods for low-cost
cost housing, shopping centres, and government buildings. Nonetheless, many architects
chose the Brutalist style even when they had large budgets, as they appreciated the 'honesty', the sculptural
qualities, and perhaps, the uncompromising, anti-bourgeois,
ant nature of the style.
[edit]Figures

Combined with the socially progressive intentions behind Brutalist streets in the sky housings such as
Corbusier's Unité, Brutalism
rutalism was promoted as a positive option for forward-moving,
forward moving, modern urban housing. In
practice, however, many of the buildings built in this style lacked many of the community-
community-serving features of
Corbusier's vision, and instead, developed into claustrophobic,
claustroph crime-ridden
ridden tenements. Robin Hood
Gardens is a particularly notorious example, although the worst of its problems have been overcome in recent
years. Some such buildings
ldings took decades to develop into positive communities. The rough coolness of
concrete lost its appeal under a damp and gray northern sky, and its fortress-like
fortress like material, touted as vandal-
vandal
proof, soon proved vulnerable to spray-can
can graffiti.
In the United Kingdom, Architects associated with the Brutalist style include Ernő Goldfinger
Goldfinger, wife-and-
husband pairing Alison and Peter Smithson,
Smithson Richard Seifert, Basil Spence, John Bancroft and, to a lesser
extent perhaps, Sir Denys Lasdun.. In Australia, three examples of the Brutalist style described as the
country's finest are Robin Gibson's Queensland Art Gallery, Ken Woolley's Fisher Library at the University of
Sydney (his State Office ffice Block is another) and the High Court of Australia by Colin
[2]
Madigan in Canberra. John Andrews's 's government and institutional structures in Australia also exhibit the
style. In Asia there are government buildings by Louis Kahn. Paul Rudolph and Ralph Rapson Rapson, from the
United States are both noted Brutalists. Walter Netsch is known for his Brutalist academic buildings (see
above). Marcel Breuer was known for his "soft" approach to the style, often using curv curves rather than
corners. Clorindo Testa in Argentina created the Bank of London and South America,, one of the best
examples of the fifties. More recent Modernists such as I.M. Pei and Tadao Ando also have designed notable
Brutalist works. In Brazil, the style is associated with the Paulista School and is evident in the works
of Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning
ing architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha (2006). In the Philippines, Leandro
Locsin designed d the massive brutalist structures, theCultural
the Center of the Philippines and the Philippine
International Convention Center.. In New Zealand, Sir Miles Warren and his practice Warren rren & Mahoney led
the development of the so-called
called "Christchurch School" of architecture, which fused Brutalist architectural
style with Scandinavian and Japanese values of straightforwardness. Warren's buildings have had a
significant effect on New Zealand's
nd's public architecture.
Robert Venturi
Robert Charles Venturi, Jr. (born June 25, 1925 in Philadelphia) is an American architect, founding principal of the
firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major figures in the architecture of the twentieth century.
Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped to shape the way that architects, planners and
students experience and think about architecture and the American built environment. Their buildings, planning,
theoretical writings and teaching have contributed to the expansion of discourse. Venturi was awarded the Pritzker
Prize in Architecture in 1991.[1] He is also known for coining the maxim "Less is a bore" a postmodern antidote
to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more". Venturi lives in Philadelphia with Denise Scott
Brown. They have a son, James Venturi.

Education and teaching

Venturi attended school at the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania.[2] He graduated summa cum
laude from Princeton University in 1947 and received his M.F.A. there in 1950. The educational program at
Princeton in these years was a key factor in Venturi's development of an approach to architectural theory and
design that drew from architectural history in analytical, as opposed to stylistic, terms.[3] In 1951 he briefly worked
under Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and later for Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. He was awarded the
Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1954, where he studied and toured Europe for two
years.

From 1954 to 1965, Venturi held teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as Kahn's
teaching assistant, an instructor, and later, as associate professor. It was there, in 1960, that he met fellow faculty
member, architect and planner Denise Scott Brown. Venturi taught later at the Yale School of Architecture and was
a visiting lecturer with Scott Brown in 2003 at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.

Writings

A controversial critic of the blithely functionalist and symbolically vacuous architecture of corporate modernism
during the 1950s, Venturi has been considered a counterrevolutionary. He published his "gentle
manifesto," Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966, described in the introduction by Vincent Scully to
be "probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's 'Vers Une Architecture',
of 1923." Derived from course lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, Venturi received a grant from the Graham
Foundation in 1965 to aid in its completion. The book demonstrated, through countless examples, an approach to
understanding architectural composition and complexity, and the resulting richness and interest. Drawing from both
vernacular and high-style sources, Venturi introduced new lessons from the buildings of architects both familiar
(Michelangelo, Alvar Aalto) and then forgotten (Frank Furness, Edwin Lutyens). He made a case for "the difficult
whole" rather than the diagrammatic forms popular at the time, and included examples—both built and unrealized—
of his own work to demonstrate the possible application of the techniques illustrated within. The book has been
translated and published in 18 languages.

Immediately hailed as a theorist and designer with radical ideas, Venturi went to teach a series of studios at
the Yale School of Architecture in the mid-1960s. The most famous of these was a studio in 1968 in which Venturi
and Scott Brown, together with Steven Izenour, led a team of students to document and analyze the Las Vegas
Strip, perhaps the least likely subject for a serious research project imaginable. In 1972, Venturi, Scott Brown and
Izenour published the folio, A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas later revised in 1977
as Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form using the student work as a foil for
new theory. This second manifesto was an even more stinging rebuke to orthodox modernism and elite architectural
tastes. The book coined the terms "Duck" and "Decorated Shed"--descriptions of the two predominant ways of
embodying iconography in buildings. The work of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown adopted the latter strategy,
producing formally simple "decorated sheds" with rich, complex and often shocking ornamental flourishes. Though
he and his wife co-authored several additional books at the end of the century, these two have proved most
influential.[4]

Architecture

The architecture of Robert Venturi, although perhaps not as familiar today as his books, helped redirect American
architecture away from a widely practiced, often banal, modernism in the 1960s to a more exploratory, and
ultimately eclectic, design approach that openly drew lessons from historic architecture and responded to the
everyday context of the American city.[5] Venturi's buildings typically juxtapose architectural systems, elements and
aims, to acknowledge the conflicts often inherent in a project or site. This "inclusive" approach contrasted with the
typical modernist effort to resolve and unify all factors in a complete and rigidly structured—and possibly less
functional and simplistic—work of art. The diverse range of buildings of Venturi's early career offered surprising
alternatives to then current architectural practice, with "impure" forms (such as the North Penn Visiting Nurses
Headquarters), apparently casual asymmetries (as at the Vanna Venturi House), and pop-style supergraphics and
geometries (for instance, the Lieb House).

Venturi created the firm Venturi and Short with William Short in 1960. After John Rauch replaced Short as partner in
1964, The firm's name changed to Venturi and Rauch. Venturi married Denise Scott Brown on July 23, 1967
in Santa Monica, California, and in 1969, Scott Brown joined the firm as partner in charge of planning. In 1980, The
firm's name became Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, and after Rauch's resignation in 1989, Venturi, Scott Brown
and Associates. The firm, based in Philadelphia, was awarded the Architecture Firm Award by theAmerican Institute
of Architects in 1985. Recent work has included many commissions from academic institutions, including campus
planning and university buildings, and civic buildings in London, Toulouse and Japan.

Venturi's architecture has had world-wide influence, beginning in the 1960s with the dissemination of the broken-
gable roof of the Vanna Venturi House and the segmentally arched window and interrupted string courses of Guild
House. The playful variations on vernacular house types seen in the Trubeck and Wislocki Houses offered a new
way to embrace, but transform, familiar forms. The facade patterning of the Oberlin Art Museum and the laboratory
buildings demonstrated a treatment of the vertical surfaces of buildings that is both decorative and abstract, or both
vernacular and modern. Venturi's work arguably provided a key influence at important times in the careers of
architects Robert A. M. Stern,Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Graham Gund and James Stirling, among others.

Venturi is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, the American Institute of Architects, The American Academy
of Arts and Letters and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Wolfgang Alexander (born October 4, 1936 in Vienna, Austria) is a registered architect noted for his
theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects in California, Japan, Mexico and around the world.
Reasoning that users know more about the buildings they need than any architect could, he produced and validated
(in collaboration with Sarah Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein) a "pattern language" designed to empower anyone to
design and build at any scale. Alexander is often overlooked by texts in the history and theory of Architecture
because his work intentionally disregarded contemporary Architecture discourse, appealing more through methods
consistent with his theories than through established practices.[1] As such, Alexander is widely considered to occupy
a place outside the discipline, the discourse, and the practice of Architecture. In 1958 he moved from England to
the United States, living and teaching inBerkeley, California from 1963. He is professor emeritus at the University of
California, Berkeley. Now retired (though still active), he is based in Arundel, Sussex, UK.

]Education

Alexander grew up in England and started his education in sciences. In 1954, he was awarded the top open
scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge University in chemistry and physics, and went on to read mathematics.
He earned a Bachelor's degree in Architecture and a Master's degree in Mathematics. He took his doctorate at
Harvard (the first Ph.D. in Architecture ever awarded at Harvard University), and was elected fellow at Harvard.
During the same period he worked at MIT in transportation theory and in computer science, and worked at Harvard
in cognition and cognitive studies.

Honors
Alexander was awarded the First Gold Medal for Research by the American Institute of Architects in 1972. The
ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) honored Alexander with the ACSA Distinguished
Professor Award in 1986-87.[2] He was awarded the Seaside Prize in 1994. He was elected a Fellow of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.[3] In 2006 he was one of the two inaugural recipients of the
Athena Award, given by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). On 5 November 2009, at a ceremony in
Washington D.C., he was awarded (in absentia) the Vincent Scully Prize by the National Building Museum. In 2011
he was awarded the lifetime achievement award by the Urban Design Group.

Career

[edit]Writings

The Timeless Way of Building (1979) described the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire:

There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great
traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been
made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great
towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.
And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their
form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977) described a practical architectural system in a form that
a theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call agenerative grammar.

The work originated from an observation that many medieval cities are attractive and harmonious. The authors said
that this occurs because they were built to local regulations that required specific features, but freed the architect to
adapt them to particular situations.

The book provides rules and pictures, and leaves decisions to be taken from the precise environment of the project.
It describes exact methods for constructing practical, safe and attractive designs at every scale, from entire regions,
through cities, neighborhoods, gardens, buildings, rooms, built-in furniture, and fixtures down to the level of
doorknobs.

A notable value is that the architectural system consists only of classic patterns tested in the real world and
reviewed by multiple architects for beauty and practicality.

The book includes all needed surveying and structural calculations, and a novel simplified building system that
copes with regional shortages of wood and steel, uses easily-stored inexpensive materials, and produces long-
lasting classic buildings with small amounts of materials, design and labor. It first has users prototype a structure
on-site in temporary materials. Once accepted, these are finished by filling them with very-low-density concrete. It
uses vaulted construction to build as high as three stories, permitting very high densities.

This book's method was adopted by the University of Oregon, as described in The Oregon Experiment (1975), and
remains the official planning instrument. It has also been adopted in part by some cities as a building code.
The idea of a pattern language appears to apply to any complex engineering task, and has been applied to some of
them. It has been especially influential in software engineering wherepatterns have been used to document
collective knowledge in the field.

A New Theory of Urban Design (1987) coincided with a renewal of interest in urbanism among architects, but stood
apart from most other expressions of this by assuming a distinctly anti-masterplanning stance. An account of a
design studio conducted with Berkeley students, it shows how convincing urban networks can be generated by
requiring individual actors to respect only local rules, in relation to neighbours. A vastly undervalued part of the
Alexander canon, A New Theory is important in understanding the generative processes which give rise to
the shanty towns latterly championed by Stewart Brand,[4] Robert Neuwirth,[5] and the Prince of Wales.[6]

The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (2003-4), which includes
The Phenomenon of Life, The Process of Creating Life, A Vision of a Living World and The Luminous Ground, is
Alexander's latest, and most comprehensive and elaborate work. In it, he puts forth a new theory about the nature
of space and describes how this theory influences thinking about architecture, building, planning, and the way in
which we view the world in general. The mostly static patterns from A Pattern Language have been amended
by more dynamic sequences, which describe how to work towards patterns (which can roughly be seen as the end
result of sequences). Sequences, like patterns, promise to be tools of wider scope than building (just as his theory
of space goes beyond architecture).

The online publication "Katarxis 3" (September 2004) includes several essays by Christopher Alexander, as well as
the legendary debate between Alexander and Peter Eisenmanfrom 1982.

Buildings

Among Alexander's most notable built works are the Eishin Campus near Tokyo (the building process of which is
soon to be outlined in his forthcoming book Battle); the West Dean Visitors Centre [7] in West Sussex, England; the
Julian Street Inn (a homeless shelter) in San Jose, California (both described in Nature of Order); the Martinez
House (an experimental house in Martinez, California made of lightweight concrete); the low-cost housing
in Mexicali, Mexico (described in The Production of Houses); and several private houses (described and illustrated
in "The Nature of Order"). Alexander's built work is characterized by a special quality (which he calls "the quality
without a name") that relates to human beings and induces feelings of belonging to the place and structure. This
quality is found in the most loved traditional and historic buildings and urban spaces, and is precisely what
Alexander has tried to capture with his sophisticated mathematical design theories. Paradoxically, achieving this
connective human quality has also moved his buildings away from the abstract imageability valued in contemporary
architecture, and this is one reason why his buildings are under-appreciated at present.[1]

Michael Mehaffy wrote an introductory essay on Christopher Alexander's built work in the online
publication "Katarxis 3", which includes a gallery of Alexander's major built projects to date (September 2004).

JANE JACOBS’S MORAL EXPLORATIONS

 Abstract: This essay reviews Jane Jacobs’s three major books: The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, and The Nature of Economies. It traces her development of
a hierarchy of places from neighborhoods to city regions to nations and the earth. All her places are defined
by their predominant social activities, not by geographical boundaries. The themes of diversity,
experimentation, adaptability, and democracy inform all her writings and form the basis of her moral analysis.
Jacobs’s methods are contrasted to those of Lewis Mumford and the similarities of their moral concerns
noted. Her latest book, a review of the basic hypotheses of ecology, successfully presents the idea that
through self-correction, differentiation, and diversification, humans and their fellow organisms can best find
sustainability.

Some decades ago when I was a graduate student in an American History department I found my calling by
following the then-new path of urban history. I found this specialty through reading Lewis
Mumford’s The Culture of Cities.1 Later, as I was working on my dissertation,2 Jane Jacobs thrust herself
upon my consciousness with her chapter “Downtowns Are for People” in Holly (Wm. H.) Whyte’s The
Exploding Metropolis.3 Three years later she brought out her wonderful book, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities.4 Since then Ms. Jacobs has nourished my career as a historian by means of her subsequent
urban explorations.

At the outset let me say that I think there is currently a good deal of loose talk about Ms. Jacobs. Because of
today’s conservative mood she has been labeled as an apologist for nineteenth century economics and as the
scourge of the art of city planning. To me she is an iconoclast, a wise teacher, and a person who has been
using her concern for cities as a device to discover a moral base for modern society. In her three books that I
want to discuss, she attacks city officials and planners for being ignorant of their cities5 and she reviews the
state of macroeconomics to conclude, “economics is no use to us.”6 She views the New Deal as the starting
point of stagflation in the American economy;7 she attacks our foreign aid policies as a misreading of the
Marshall Plan lesson, and she views with alarm the destructive nature of nations and empires who fritter away
their own productivity with military adventures and subsidies to quiet disaffected regions and peoples.8 To me
this is an impressive blast of intellectual fresh air.

The Death and Life is her best teaching book. In my years as a professor it never failed to give students a
fresh outlook. I have assigned it to seventeen-year-old suburban freshmen, to adults in high school
equivalency programs, and to graduate students in urban history. As I did so, I accompanied my assignments
with the admonition to the students to get out, to look around, whether their home place was rural, suburban,
or urban. No student who both read and looked ever returned without a fresh and enlivened curiosity. Death
and Life is a wonderfully stimulating mirror that Jane Jacobs has held up to us all.

I think the success of that book rests upon Jacobs’s method of study. She is not an academic, and therefore
she does not think she must begin her work by a search of the literature in the hope of discovering some topic
that might attract the attention of other academics. Instead, she looks about her, takes note of what the city
presents to public view, and thereby finds her topics. Observation leads to the library, but the library is neither
the beginning nor the end of her tasks. This method was Lewis Mumford’s also. He was an inveterate city
walker. He was not a professor either.

For this symposium I returned to Mumford’s severe 1962 attack on Death and Life because I wished to
reconcile my two intellectual heroes.9 My sense is that in Mumford’s disagreements can be found the secret
to Jane Jacobs’s moral explorations. Mumford was at his best as a speculative historian. He had a
wonderfully imaginative eye for material culture and its symbolic meanings. Like Jane Jacobs, he [*PG611]did
not confuse change with progress. He recorded much destructive change, abbau, or unbuilding as he called it.
These were his moral equivalents to Jacobs’s federal slum construction and highway disasters. Mumford was
no admirer of militaristic nations and empires either. In his later years the great question for him became the
intermeshing of business corporations and the military to destroy democracy.10 I think Jane Jacobs has
arrived at this point too, but by a very different path than Mumford’s.

Mumford’s group—Patrick Geddes the biologist and planner, Benton MacKaye the regionalist, and Clarence
Stein the wonderful architect—together suffered from an over-specificity of architectural remedies to urban
problems.11 Their regional plans, new towns, residential super blocks, and neighborhood units pinned them
down. The defense of these particulars animated Mumford’s hostility in his New Yorker review, “Mother
Jacobs’ Home Remedies for Urban Cancer.”12

In The Death and Life, Jacobs does not specify the remedies. Rather, she argues for standards, sets goals,
and then criticizes from that platform. Her material is gathered from a very careful observation of the details of
the city. She ends the book with a speculation about “The Kind of Problem the City Is.”13 It is this open
question that led to her subsequent explorations.

Let me now pick up her work twenty-three years later with Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of
Economic Life.14 Pervasive stagflation in the United States and Europe gave rise to this study of economies
and their relationships to cities, regions, and nations. In her analysis she did not believe that economies were
predictable: when you see a successful one, you can comprehend its workings, but you cannot know if
success will continue. The future for both man and nature is indeterminate.

In this book Jacobs perfected her list of places. Each one differs from the next according to the social activity
that takes place there. The significant places are the streets, the neighborhoods, the city dis[*PG612]tricts,
and the center cities of her first book, to which she added city regions, nations and empires. These places are
not strictly defined. Jane Jacobs is not interested in drawing boundaries and defining municipal units of
government. Rather, she distinguishes her areas by their predominant functions.

Her neighborhoods are not the areas on street maps that city planners have been forced to create in order to
delineate the boundaries for formal neighborhood consultation. For her the neighborhood is a place of
overlapping networks created by the habits of nearby residents. Some residents range at some distance,
theirs is a large embrace, others move just along a single street. The residents’ sense of neighborhood is thus
an ever-shifting definition.

The city district is also an amorphous area, something less than a municipality, larger than a neighborhood.
She imagines it as an area where some politician takes on the role of advocate and deal-maker, someone
who can get essential tasks done that the municipal bureaucracy is either not doing, or doing poorly.

The center city municipality, again, is of no specified size. It may be a small fraction of the surrounding urban
agglomeration, like Boston, or it may embrace much of it, like Indianapolis. Its distinction lies in its being the
social and economic center of its surrounding area.15

These less than national, mostly non-governmental categories, are her units for social and economic analysis.
Any subsequent researcher is free to follow her suggestions by setting the geographic boundaries that might
be appropriate to the research question at hand. I am particularly grateful for her concept of the city region. I
have used it three times in my books, each time with somewhat different boundaries.16 In my forthcoming
book, Greater Boston, the Boston city region encompasses all of eastern Massachusetts and the southern tier
of New Hampshire towns.17

The city region, the centered and polynucleated regions of urban and rural living, are Jane Jacobs’s most
valued social places. She prizes them because in such a setting it is possible for the residents to become “the
primary developers and primary expanders of economic [*PG613]life.”18 In her city region analysis, she alters
the conventional measures of economic growth from the usual summing of goods and services. For her,
human insight, imagination, and adaptive imitations are the keys to a prosperous society. The city region with
its many different complementary urban and rural settings is the spatial arrangement that best fosters such
well being and that makes a flourishing culture possible.

In her latest book, The Nature of Economies, Jacobs has added the issue of our relations to non-human
natural environments to her urban studies.19 Here, I think, she is seeking a secular moral platform upon
which we might all stand. In this book she is trying to balance two contradictory characteristics basic to the
processes of nature. The first characteristic is the opposition between competition and cooperation. The
second characteristic is the contradiction of purposeful activities planned for the future which go forward within
the realm of universal unpredictability. Here she draws on her earlier work on cities to celebrate the processes
of differentiation and inventiveness of natural processes. “The practical link between economic development
and economic expansion . . . is economic diversity. Here’s the principal that applies to both ecosystems and
the economies of settlements: Diverse ensembles expand in a rich environment which is created by the
diverse use and reuse of received energy.”20 Nature, she wisely observes, abhors both monocultures and
monopolies.21

Although nature is unpredictable: “In any ecosystem,” she writes, “plants and animals pursue what amounts to
plans for the future. . . . They construct nests, put down roots, germinate fruits.”22 In thinking through this
certitude of uncertainty, she offers a very attractive analogy between natural processes and human
language.23Language, like human economic life, continues in a state of ceaseless invention. It is not a game
without rules, but its speakers continually make changes. No one in Shakespeare’s time could have imagined
the English we speak today, nor could the nineteenth century compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary. We
are a chatting organism who only finds stability [*PG614]in ceaseless change. Like language, she says,
“economic life permits us to develop cultures and multitudes of purposes.”24

For a time like ours when we are fascinated by genetics and natural selection, Jacobs canvasses the
attributes of the human animal in a search for what might assure us of sustainable relations to the planet. Her
list includes the universal human habit of aesthetic appreciation of nature, our superstition, and our sense of
awe. We are, as well, a curious and tinkering species, and these habits help us to learn of the consequences
of our actions. Perhaps most important of all, we are chatty animals, and this propensity to talk and to
socialize may be our best defense against our prevalent destructive ways.25

On the dangerous side, we humans are given to crime of all kinds, and especially to “ruthless and exploitive
governments . . . the horrors of which they’re capable could be expanded indefinitely: deadly weapons, germ
warfare, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and campaigns to mobilize hysteria and hatreds that make the other
horrors practically possible.”26

She concludes her latest book with the idea that through self-correction, differentiation, and diversification,
humans and their fellow organisms can best find sustainability.27

Let me close with an admonition: Jane Jacobs’s books are not prescriptions for particular economic measures
or specified planning practices. They are an inductive way to arrive at goal statements. Jacobs leaves to us all
the discovery of the means that might best help us toward those goals.