{"id":1035,"date":"2012-02-03T16:47:59","date_gmt":"2012-02-03T23:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1035"},"modified":"2013-06-26T12:30:35","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T18:30:35","slug":"educating-for-urban-sustainability-and-remembering-doug-darden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1035","title":{"rendered":"Educating for Urban Sustainability…And Remembering Doug Darden"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/a><\/em>, to which I\u2019m a long-time subscriber, channeled its inner urbanist last week with three city-related articles in the January 27 edition.<\/p>\n

Scott Carlson wrote about \u201cAmerica\u2019s Health Threat: Poor Urban Design<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 He featured the work of\u00a0 Richard J. Jackson, former head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control.\u00a0 In print and on public television Dr. Jackson has alerted citizens and policy-makers to how the American built environment is making us fat and killing us–literally. Dr. Jackson\u2019s prescription going forward is to build for better social connectivity and in ways that encourage physical activity.\u00a0 New Urbanism is mentioned as one viable approach for filling this prescription.<\/p>\n

Nigel Thrift, \u00a0Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick in England, contributed an opinion piece called \u201cThe Pull of Cities<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 He suggests that we need a sea change in the way we think about cities now that over half the world\u2019s population lives in them.\u00a0 Dr. Thrift sees cities as \u201cincreasingly both networked and perforated by information technology in ways which are bringing them together as actual forceful entities rather than as simply conglomerations.\u201d He urges us to “grow a distinctive urban science\u201d oriented around information technology that reunites the technological and the social. \u00a0This will involve changing the university\u2019s curriculum to better integrate the natural sciences with the social sciences and arts and humanities, and perhaps changing the university itself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dave Plunkert for The Chronicle Review<\/p><\/div>\n

Finally, Jon Christensen, Robert McDonald, and Carrie Denning build upon the education theme by calling for an \u201cEcological Urbanism for the 21st<\/sup> Century<\/a>.\u201d The key takeaway message is to do more integrative, interdisciplinary work, as Dr. Thrift suggests. Minimally, there’s a need to integrate urban planning with ecology and conservation science.\u00a0 But there’s also a need to go beyond. Margaret O\u2019Mara, co-organizer of the \u201cNow Urbanism<\/a>\u201d seminar at the University of Washington, suggests that both urbanists and scientists \u201cpay too little attention to politics, economics, and history\u201d in designing cities.\u00a0 I\u2019d add that they also pay too little attention to culture. <\/em>Attending to all of these variables is critical\u00a0if urbanists are to better root their dreams and plans for re-making \u00a0neighborhoods in what O\u2019Mara describes as \u201cwhat is already there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last time The Chronicle<\/em> prominently featured architectural design and training in such a way was with a long article by Sarah Williams Goldhagen nearly 10 years ago called \u201cOur Degraded Public Realm: The Multiple Failures of Architecture Education<\/a>\u201d (but see also this piece by David Orr<\/a>). \u00a0Goldhagen hit some of the same notes about form, context, and curriculum as Thrift and Christensen et al., including this key money quote:<\/p>\n

What do graduate programs in urban design, and especially in architecture, teach? Although they vary from institution to institution, certain commonalities exist. One is that such programs generally give short shrift to the study of sociology of urban and suburban life, leaving students without the knowledge or tools to understand the environments for which they design. As a result, students tend to focus their ideas overwhelmingly on forms, with little informed awareness of how their buildings will contribute to a larger urban composition and to the social existence of communities.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Goldhagen called for more training in the pragmatic aspects of design, she also implicated the need for more interdisciplinary work. \u00a0It\u2019s interesting that her recent piece in The New York Times<\/em><\/a> linking architectural form to the visual metaphor of the tree as shelter walks that talk. \u00a0Goldhagen calls for an engagement between design disciplines and the revolution in cognitive neuroscience; that is, for re-conceptualizing the built environment around the fundamental workings of the human mind. I suspect that Nigel Thrift would approve.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Douglas Darden (Ben Ledbetter)<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve had my own brush with the issues at stake in these various essays.\u00a0 In 1994 I gained some experience jurying student architectural projects at the University of Colorado-Denver\u2019s College of Architecture and Planning<\/a>.\u00a0 The design studio was taught by a Special Lecturer in Architecture and Fellow of the American Academy in Rome named Douglas Darden.\u00a0 Doug died prematurely from leukemia in 1996, at age 44. \u00a0At the time Doug was known to be a very \u00a0creative thinker and inspiring teacher.\u00a0 I met Doug through my girlfriend Martha Rooney (now Martha Rooney-Saitta) who had taken a studio with him.\u00a0 \u00a0Doug\u2014open-minded thinker that he was\u2014thought it would be interesting to have an anthropologist on the jury in order to balance, complement or\u2014perhaps ideally\u2014contradict the opinions of the practicing architects and professors of architecture.<\/p>\n

The jury I sat on was for a project that Doug called \u201cGhosts.\u201d\u00a0 I regret that I can\u2019t remember the specific design challenge that Doug set for his students, but the students produced work ranging from a neo-modernist development that riffed on an Ancient Pueblo Indian<\/a> theme (which pleased me greatly given that my academic reputation, in an earlier life, was gained as a North American archaeologist<\/a>) to a modernist high rise with a huge, retractable mechanical claw that emerged from its middle stories.\u00a0 I remember interpreting the latter as a philosophical critique of the modernist project\u2014an observation that escaped the professionals on the jury but that the student designer confirmed was his primary intention.\u00a0 In fact, in this student\u2019s view the anthropologist was the only juror who \u201cgot it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jurying was great fun and also confirmed that anthropologists (and other students of culture) can make distinctive contributions to the design professions. \u00a0Nonetheless, I came away with the distinct impression that for students and professionals alike architecture was– as Goldhagen would note nearly 10 years later and Thrift nearly 10 years after that– largely about technical form and not so much about social context; that it was largely perceived as a technical challenge <\/em><\/strong>rather than a social opportunity<\/em><\/strong>. \u00a0That experience has always stayed with me and continues to be the touchstone against which I evaluate proposals for remaking the human built environment.<\/p>\n

After reading the Chronicle<\/em> articles I googled Douglas Darden.\u00a0 I was happy to find a 1998 article by Jean LaMarche in Utopian Studies<\/em> called \u201cThe Life and Work of Douglas Darden: A Brief Encomium<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 The article focuses on the contents of Doug\u2019s 1993 book\u00a0 Condemned Building: An Architect\u2019s Pre-Text<\/a><\/em>. \u00a0The book contains 10 imaginary projects dealing in \u201cunfulfilled desire\u201d as well as death (Doug\u2019s own was not far off), which perhaps explains the \u201cGhost\u201d theme of the studio that I juried. \u00a0The most critically acclaimed project in the book is Oxygen House. \u00a0This is a house designed\u00a0 for a person Darden calls Burnden Abraham (based on a character in Faulkner\u2019s As I Lay Dying<\/a><\/em>), an invalid who needed to be housed in an oxygen tent. \u00a0Like his students Darden sought to interrogate the modernist project, in this instance turning modernism on its head by casting architecture not as \u201cmachine for living\u201d but as a \u201cmachine for dying.\u201d\u00a0 In so doing Doug provides a useful counterpoint to the kind of designs for urban health championed by Dr. Jackson.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Oxygen House (Douglas Darden)<\/p><\/div>\n

LaMarche\u2019s characterizations of Doug\u2019s work (three of which I excerpt below) helped me better understand why I liked Doug and found his studio so energizing.\u00a0 And, more importantly, why I believe that good urbanism should incorporate an architecture of possibility that\u2019s informed by culture, history, mortality, and the many other dimensions of human social life. LaMarche writes:<\/p>\n

[for Darden] architecture is fundamentally connected to all other human endeavors, all other forms of cultural production. Thus, all human undertakings can be explored as part of it and architecture, in turn, can be examined to shed light on these as well: in all forms of making we reveal some of the most important and at times intransigent questions that humans continue to deliberate. More importantly, we reveal the constant struggle with what is not there and thus, our constant utopian desire or yearning.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And:<\/p>\n

Darden had that poetic urge to explore his own demons and, more importantly, to engage in an architecture that did not exclude the other conditions of being human\u2014our fears, our hopes, our dreams, and the necessity for resolve\u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And finally:<\/p>\n

In the end, Darden extends architecture, makes it larger than it was before him. He does so by demonstrating how architects can successfully draw on a much wider array of artifacts for inspiration and guidance <\/em>[perhaps like the student who channeled the ancient Pueblo Indians in her final project for \u201cGhosts\u201d] in the design and production of the material world.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chronicle of Higher Education, to which I\u2019m a long-time subscriber, channeled its inner urbanist last week with three city-related articles in the January 27 edition. Scott Carlson wrote about \u201cAmerica\u2019s Health Threat: Poor Urban Design.\u201d\u00a0 He featured the work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4,5,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-books","category-sustainability","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-gH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1035"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2990,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions\/2990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}