WHAT SHE SAID

The way it works, she said, is a matter of science.  She had been trained as a microbiologist but felt too removed from microbial interactions to actually care about their result.  It was simply a matter of scale.  Which is how she began to see humans as macrobes, which, like microbes, were constantly embroiled in complex interactions but that produced more significant by-products, things like music and art and babies and war.

She said, “Culture is an infection spread through macrobial interaction.”

By adulthood, macrobes are infected with multiple cultures which have a varied and unpredictable affect on one other.  Let’s take an individual macrobe, she said, to illustrate this point.  A boy, brought up, say, in the Catholic church, embodies that culture, as well as the culture of his parents and siblings; as he grows up he is infected with the culture of his peers, of his coaches, and teachers; let’s imagine he goes to architecture school, where he is exposed to a variety of cultures, some of which he immune to, but some which infect him nonetheless, a pair of teachers, say, stricken with deconstructivism, pass that onto him, which is made stronger by later work experiences, so that by the time he is out on his own, the architect is product of a succession of cultures and carries remnants of all of them in a complex egosystem in which one or more of these cultures is dominant.

This is important for cities, she said, because building of a structure is a sort of fermentation or metabolism, an interaction between several macrobe cultures that must be present for the process to take place.  The first culture that must be there is the will of the larger community, represented in the planning and/or building department, the entity that lays the ground rules for what is acceptable within a particular jurisdiction.  The second culture that must be present is the developer, who seeks to build the structure in order to gain more nutrients (money) for himself; but it is also he who provides nutrients for the fermentations.  The third culture that is required is the contractor, who takes the nutrients provided by the developer and works within the conditions imposed by the city to construct the building.  The culture that is not absolutely required, but which often adds complexity – if that’s what the developer wants for his building – is the architect.

She likens the making of a building to the making of wine: is a succession of biological onslaughts, macrobial instead of microbial, starting with the fermentation of the developer culture with the architect culture, the primary fermentation producing a design, which can then be processed by the city through the metabolism of permitting.  The secondary fermentation – the interaction between several cultures, primarily the developer and the contractor – occurs once the building permit has been granted and the construction begins.   Sometimes these fermentations occur simultaneously, but usually they are serial in nature, each one providing nutrients specific to the subsequent fermentations.  If deeper complexity is the goal then the presence of other macrobes is encouraged; however, due to the often-negative effects of unsolicited macrobial opinions, most projects attempt to proceed without such input.  She said that the influence of unwanted macrobes leads to unpredictable results, often inviting unsavory characters to the project.

The by-product of an architectural fermentation is a building, the species of which is a result of that specific fermentation.  A new building species is formed when the fermentation changes, usually occurring when one or more of the fermenting agents is altered.  For instance, if the planning department changes the zoning, or a developer who sees a new opportunity brought about by a changing economy, or an architect who wants to test a new design concept, the fermentation takes a different course, which could result in a new building species. 

Thus succession of interactions, she said, is the mechanism that produces the succession of building species through which a city evolves, one building at a time.  She said the process can be controlled, if you know what you’re doing.  Which is why she became an expediter.

ADAPTATION, MUTATION, AND SPECIATION IN CHICAGO

The evolution of cities occurs at all scales, from the tiniest urban gesture to the grandest of plans.   Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chicago.

After the Chicago Fire of 1871, when the first-growth city was destroyed, the city reacted to the trauma with a burst of creativity that virtually invented modern America.  New building species emerged, most notably the skyscraper, which was pioneered there during a building boom that coincided with the arrival of steel construction and the invention of the elevator and the telephone.  While the skyscraper genus quickly spread to New York, it underwent an intriguing evolution in Chicago with architects attempting to render it the various styles of the day.  Thus from the Tacoma Building to the Reliance Building to the Guarantee to Carson Pirie Scott, and to the Chicago Board of Trade, the skyscraper tried on a succession of eclectic styles, from Richardsonian Romanesque, to Gothic, to Beaux Arts classical, to the iconoclasm of Louis Sullivan, settling comfortably on Art Deco as what, for me, is its defining style.  That is, until Mies came along and reinvented it once again, initiating a wave of skyscraper cultivars that continues to this day.

But Chicago is also known for the efforts to plan the city.  Since the Great Fire, Chicago has never stopped reimagining itself with a series of grand schemes, the most famous, of course, from Burnham and Bennett, whose plan for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was the one plan of so many proposed following the Chicago Fire to be realized.  The more recent Millennium Park comes out of this tradition.  A public/private partnership, it took longer and cost far more than had been anticipated, yet it has drawn an unprecedented amount of tourists and, with art and architecture by Anish Kapoor, Renzo Piano, and Frank Gehry, has cemented Chicago’s already solid reputation as a cultural capital.  

Of course, it was Daniel Burnham, whose handiwork can bee seen everywhere in Chicago, who famously declared, “make no small plans.”  But it is precisely in these smaller plans that Chicago is readying for the future.  “Cities adapt or they go away,” is what Aaron Durnbaugh, deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment said in a recent New York Times article describing plans for the city to adjust to the inevitable climate change on the horizon.  The city is taking steps to prepare for hotter, wetter weather.  That means devising ways to deal with stormwater with permeable paving and changing the urban plant palette toward more heat tolerant varieties.  This also means taking the city in a more sustainable direction, working on an electric car infrastructure, a network of bike paths, reduction of paved areas to reduce the heat-island effect, and moving the city to zero waste through aggressive recycling.  Such measures are part of a strategy of urban adaptation that Suzanne Malec-McKenna, commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment describes in the same New York Times article as “a constant ongoing process to make sure we are as resilient as we can be in facing the future.”

New York Times article

This is how the evolution of cities proceeds: not through the simple mechanics of Darwinian capitalism naturally selecting certain forms, nor merely the result of good planning, but an interaction of these and other less-obvious forces.  Cities like Chicago constantly reshape themselves – from a treasured landmark adapting to a new use, to the mutation of known building species in reaction to altered conditions; from the birth of a totally new building genus that forever transforms the city, to a simple change in paving.  Urban Successionism is the endless struggle to remain vital in an increasingly competitive global economy.

BEYOND URBAN SUCCESSIONISM

Classification of building species proceeds much in the same way as it does for plants or animals.  Differentiation between the species must be definite, yet must be open enough to allow for a degree of variation within the species.  If all dogs are the same species, for example, how are the different breeds distinguished from one another.  The use of a simple differentia following the genus and species name could solve this:

A Proposed Taxonomy for Building Species:

KINGDOM
        Plants
        Animals
        Matter           

PHYLUM                                                           

        Gas

        Liquid

        Solid

CLASS
        Natural

        Manmade

ORDER
        Infrastructure
        Architecture
        Objects

FAMILY
        Residential

        Retail

        Office

        Institutional

        Civic

        Cultural

        Educational

        Recreational

        Health Care

GENUS

        Domus

SPECIES
        casestudiana

DIFFERENTIA

        “Craig Ellwood”

                                                                                      

Thus the house pictured above, Case Study House #16 by Craig Ellwood, could be called:

Domus casestudiana "Craig Ellwood"

The task of identifying and naming the various native and non-native building species in a  city like Los Angeles is fairly daunting.   Yet when approached from the perspective of Urban Successionism as outlined in my previous post, such an effort could result in a history of the city told in its buildings, making it visceral, alive, relevant.

Coming Soon:

A FIELD GUIDE TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF LOS ANGELES (www.afgala.org)