Innovation through Architecture

With so much attention on growing our economy through entrepreneurial innovation, I decided to explore how people of influence - venture capitalists seeking start-ups, for instance - define innovation.

This Fall I enrolled in a MOOC (massive open online course) run by edX called "Innovation and Commercialization" and taught through MITx with two MIT professors in their business school.  At first it was difficult to understand though incredibly fascinating, exploring the fundamental mechanics of the innovation process.  But as time passed, it dawned on me:  I already knew this stuff.  This is what we as architects do on every single project.

The mechanics are based on the iterative process - that the innovator has an idea, which is then fine tuned through a very specific and precise dynamic, iteration upon iteration, until the final product is realized.  For the MITx professors, it came down to three parties in the iterative process: technology - the bright idea; the market - how can we sell it?; and implementation - how do we make it happen.  According to the MITx guys, the iterative process begins with one of these which is then tested against the others, fine tuned, and then tested again.

If it begins with technology, it's perhaps some sort of scientific idea that is breakthrough, but whose market or implementation possibilities are sketchy; or an idea generated by the market for which the technology and the implementation have not not been developed; or by an implementation technique that is discovered, but has no market or technology to take advantage of it.  It is in the interaction of individual people from each of these sectors through which an effective innovation can be evolved.

But isn't this architecture?  You have the architect who has what he feels is an innovative idea; you have the client/developer who has identified a particular business opportunity; and you have the contractor who understands how to get a project built.   

But as we know by looking around our cities, it's not any interaction of these three players that produces something interesting; the MITx professors also say that what makes any innovation really work is when each of the interactors has some knowledge of the other two sectors.  Only then can the aggregate ramifications of changes suggested by all sectors be grasped, thus making progress possible.

In architecture this simply means that the best buildings occur when an architect has some awareness of budgeting and construction methods; when a client/developer has some sense of what makes good design as well of the limits of his contractor; and when a contractor is able to comprehend the architect's intent as much as he is able to adhere to the client developer's budget and schedule.

The question is, if the innovative process is ingrained within us, why aren't there more architects becoming entrepreneurial innovators?  

Excerpt from "The Expediter"

CUT TO:

Interior, Building Department, Day.  Jason and Farid place the model against the wall.  Cary grabs a number.  He gets 644.  He looks up at the television screen.  They’re at 573.  He sighs.

Interior, Building Department, Later.  The number on the screen is 642.  Cary’s knee bounces nervously, his eyes glued to the screen.  Jason and Farid check out the women walking the floor.

FARID:  Hi.  My name is Farid.  Have you met my pet hamster?

JASON:  I want to schmeckel you.

Cary checks the screen: 4:25 p.m.  A customer leaves the counter.  Plan checker, 
ERNESTO, 45, calls out.

ERNESTO:  643.  643? Last call, 643.

Cary looks around.  No one is answering.  He starts to get up.  Suddenly a striking bleached-blonde, PETRA CRUZ, mid-30s, swoops in, a milk crate filled with drawings trailing behind her.

PETRA:  Ernie, hi.  (slipping into the chair)  I know it’s not my turn, I just have a quick little thing.

ERNESTO:  Petra, it’s always your turn.

CARY:  (turning to his colleagues) Did you just see that?

JASON:  A vanilla milkshake.

FARID:  Blonde, smooth, and delicious.

CARY:  Hey. (approaching the counter, livid)  It was my turn.

ERNESTO:  Are you 643?

CARY:  644, but she doesn’t even have a number.

ERNESTO:  Doesn’t matter.  It’s not your turn.

CARY:  (frustrated, huffing before sitting back down)  Who does she think she is?

JASON:  A sweet honey muffin, that’s who.

FARID:  A nibble is all I ask.

Petra stands up, leaves, glancing at Cary, smiling.

PETRA:  You’re up. (she looks back to the counter)  Thanks Ernesto.

ERNESTO:  Always a pleasure.

Cary drags his drawings as Jason and Farid set the model on the counter.

ERNESTO:  Did I call your number?

CARY:  No, but we’re next.

ERNESTO:  We’re closed.

CARY:  But it’s 4:29.  We still have one minute.

ERNESTO:  Not according to my watch.

CARY:  But the screen...

ERNESTO:  (shrugging)  Sorry.  (he stands)

CARY:  Oh no.  No way.  We have to submit this project today or we’re totally fucked.

ERNESTO:  What can I say?  You should have made an appointment or come in earlier.

CARY:  I came in two hours ago.  Maybe if you guys worked a little harder…

            Ernesto smiles at the insult, walks toward his office behind the counter.

CARY:  Who’s your supervisor? (almost vibrating with frustration)  Look.  I know the damned Mayor!  Maybe I’ll just give him a call.

ERNESTO:  (amused, turns back to Cary)  That’s a great idea.  Hey, maybe you can even submit your project to him.  (snickering as he disappears into his office)  Cary stands open mouthed as his door CLICKS shut.  Petra Cruz suddenly appears as Cary’s side.

PETRA:  It’s not who you know, it’s who you get.

CARY:  What’s that supposed to mean?

PETRA:  Watch and learn.  (She passes behind the counter and goes to Ernesto’s office, tapping gently)  Ernesto?

            The door opens and Ernesto’s head appears.

ERNESTO:  What is it, my dear?

PETRA:  There is just one more thing...

            The door swings open.  Petra casts a knowing smile to Cary before disappearing inside.

            CUT TO:

            Exterior, The Edison, Sunset.  A retro bar at the base of a downtown LA office building.

Interior, The Edison, Continuous.  Camera pans along the bar stopping at Jason and Farid, who talk up Candace, a twenty-something hipster.

FARID:  Have you ever slept with a guy who giggles during sex?

CANDACE:  (furrowing her brow) Can’t say that I have.

JASON:  Would you like to?

Candace smirks, then turns away.  Jason and Farid share a shrug, then look around. Cary and Petra are sitting at a booth.

CARY:  I think there should be a law that developers who want to demolish a building have to prove to a jury of their peers that what they’re putting up is better than what they’re tearing down.

PETRA:  Yeah. (sipping her Negroni)  Good luck with that one.

CARY:  Yeah, maybe not.  (he drops his eyes sheepishly, then looks up)  Seriously though.  How’d you do it?

PETRA: Do what?

CARY:  At the building department.

PETRA:  I’m an expediter.  It’s what I do.

CARY:  I’ve always wondered.

PETRA:  What was that you submitted? 

CARY:  Just this project.  For a competition.  They want to fix up the area around the old plaza next to Olvera street. (in his best Spanish accent) La Placita.

PETRA:  That explains the huge model.  Think you have a chance?

CARY:  Doubtful.  Our submission is pretty out there.

PETRA:  This is LA.  Everything is out there.

CARY:  It’s based on this idea.  Urban succession.  You know, that a city evolves kind of like a forest, with particular building species dominating during economic expansions.  (off her glazed look)  You know, so in time a city becomes an archive of successive economies? (off her silence)  Never mind.

PETRA:  Building species.  I like that.

CARY:   I know.  Pretty crazy. But it kind of makes the city more legible.

            Petra, nodding, returns to her drink, taking a long, slow sip.  She smiles flatly.

CARY:  What?

PETRA:  (pausing) Nothing.

CARY:  No, really.  What?

PETRA:  It’s just…  It’s a cute theory.

CARY:  Cute?  Cute?

PETRA:  Cute isn’t the right word.  Underdeveloped, maybe?  I mean, the city as an archive of successive economies?  It just doesn’t work for every city.  Paris, for instance. 

CARY:  Paris is a great example of urban successionism.

PETRA:  Really? Didn’t they outlaw wooden structures within the city at some point?  I mean, how many building species were lost when that happened?

CARY:  (sighing)  Whatever.  It works for LA, that’s all I know. (as he takes a long drink of his beer, Petra watches him, thinking)

PETRA: I don’t know.  Maybe it just needs some elaboration.  For instance, is there a specific mechanism that induces speciation?

            Cary perks up, leaning forward.

THE MASSIVE MEDIA, PART 2

Architecture is a massive medium, it communicates what we value most – our hopes and desires, our aspirations.  In the same way, infrastructure conveys what is important to particular society: what we build, where we build, and how we build it speaks volumes about what we hold dear; and as our values change, the massive media of architecture and infrastructure change with us. The evolution of cities thus proceeds as we adapt our physical environment to changing political, social, cultural, and economic needs.  But how does that adaptation occur?  What is the mechanism of change?

In fact, a city evolves one project at a time; each project is an attempt to exploit an opportunity opened up by a change in political, social, cultural, or economic conditions; each project is the product of a specific interaction between particular individuals, one in which their often conflicting desires are locked in an ongoing struggle, a sort of metabolic process whose end-product is a completed project; and that it is in the aggregation of these projects -- these particular adaptations to specific urban conditions -- that the shape of the city emerges.

Underneath this process is a pattern that seems to underlie adaptation across the spectrum: ecosystems at every scale seem to be directed by a microcosm at a scale small enough relative to the ecosystem that it seems invisible; when a change in conditions knocks an ecosystem out of equilibrium, it is the effort of the microcosm that does the hard work of restoring order.  Often, despite the overt desire of the ecosystem to return to a previous equilibrium, the microcosm works at the smaller scale adapt it to the reality of the new conditions.   

How does it do this?  The microcosm works chiefly through signaling and other more complex forms of communication.   In forests, for example, a change in conditions propels the microcosm to adapt.  Microbial organisms such as bacteria, algae, and fungi engage in metabolic activity that reconfigures the environment to cultivate a new habitat, one more in line with the altered ecological conditions.  The forest changes its makeup, autopoietically, rearranging its biota through a succession of species, continually seeking equilibrium.

Cities evolve in a similar way; however, instead of an unseen microcosm instigating change, it is what I call the metrocosm that does the work.   The metrocosm consists of an ecosystem of citizens engaged in a riot of activity that includes all manner of interaction – fighting and playing; buying and selling; politics, sports and entertainment; crime and punishment; eating, praying, loving, etc. – that, when taken together, is the city, autopoietically remaking itself, interaction by interaction. 

When this activity occurs in the realm of architecture and infrastructure, the life of the city can be read in its physical form; thus the city itself becomes a massive medium broadcasting to the world the collective message of the metrocosm.  This is how a city like New York is always New York even though both the medium and the message are constantly changing.

SUCCESSIONISM ISN'T JUST FOR CITIES ANYMORE

Urban Successionism posits that a city evolves one building at a time, that each building is the specific result of the interaction between particular people at a particular time, and that cities are archives of successive economies.  Because of this, one can read a city, understand its metrocosmic ecosystem, and propose ways to evolve it further.

But successionism is not limited to urban evolution; it occurs in all manner of human endeavor: sports, the arts, politics, religion all evolve through a succession of movements, styles, economies, each of which mutates, project by project, a result of one human interaction after another and identifiable as a moment in that evolution only upon aggregation or the passage of time.

MACROCOSMOS:

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES

Internet technology has impacted how we live in many ways, changing patterns of human interaction, transforming everything from commerce to politics, from entertainment to journalism to interpersonal relations; in short it has become the de-facto public realm, substituting much of what we do in the actual world with a simpler more efficient way to do it virtually.  The Occupy movement seemed at first to invert this trend: it used the Internet to activate civic centers across the US.  But was its ultimate effect the opposite?  Did it instead confirm our fears that the very places that once formed the core of our urban experience have become irrelevant to most of us?  Has the internet succeeded in rendering the city as we know it meaningless?

TECHNOLOGY

Technology has played a significant part in the development of cities from the very beginning.  One of the first cities was Jericho, settled as the earth began to warm after the last ice age and agriculture was discovered. The springs around the city created a fertile plain, but one that flooded easily.  A wall was constructed to keep the city dry; but it also proved valuable as a defense against marauding outsiders. The walls of Jericho became more and more elaborate as techniques of warfare became more sophisticated.

Eventually the walled city spread to Asia Minor and Europe, evolving a variety of species that incorporated such innovations as battered walls, crenellation, and moats.  Byzantine cities such as Venice and Genoa secured themselves using different methods: in Genoa, the city was surrounded by a double wall forcing access to the city through a relatively small passage in the harbor, which gave the city a strategic advantage; Venice went a step further and forced all access to the city to occur over water, which, together with its location at the head of the Adriatic, enabled it to become the dominant political and economic connection between Europe and the Muslim world.  It thrived for centuries, until warfare technology evolved to the point that Napoleon could conquer it in 1787.

Cities like Florence and Paris kept building new walls further out as their thriving economies pushed them into the surrounding lands.  Eventually, as the political and economic status gained equal footing with military, the walls were no longer needed.  In fact in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the enemy was not as often invaders from the outside, but insurrectionists from within.  Napoleon III used the rationale of improving the health of the city to engage Baron Haussmann to create the present urban structure of Paris, the grand boulevards connected by “etoiles,” which accomplished three tasks simultaneously: they discouraged the insurrectionists certainly (the Paris Commune of 1871 notwithstanding); but they also introduced an efficient new sewer system, and ultimately created an underlying structure for the city that facilitated the spread of the Metro, all of which created the Paris that we know today.

In New York, it was also the urban structure – the grid – that facilitated the construction of its subway at the turn of last century.  But it was the arrival of the telephone as well as the elevator that transformed New York into a vertical city.  In Los Angeles, which had been a series of villages connected by the largest urban-rail system in America before the arrival of the automobile – an event that, while enabling LA’s horizontally expansion to be as quick and thorough as its economy would allow, also transfigured it beyond recognition.

And what might a city of the internet look like?  So far every city has had to adapt to it in small ways: the loss of book stores, record stores, libraries and post offices; but what new urban artifacts will emerge?  Will any city be transformed by the technology?  Or be born of it? One can imagine a world in which the wealthier 1% live in “lifestyle” cities – those devoted to shopping, playing, or cultural activities –  while the poorer 99% live in “drone” cities – those devoted to the support and maintenance of the 1%. 

But another reality may already be already unfolding before us.  In Megatrends, John Naisbitt predicted a correlation between “high tech” and “high touch.”  In cities across America this is happening; a trend is emerging toward embracing authenticity.  Perhaps propelled by the Internet’s ubiquity, there is a new appreciation of the hand-crafted object, the fresh produce of farmer’s markets, a vibrant street culture.  Could it be that the flattening effect of the internet has inspired a desire for the dimensional?  That the global reach of the world-wide-web has compelled us to become more intensely local? 

The ubiquity of the internet reminds us that technology alone does not create these cities; there are always other places that have many of the same elements in place – London and Paris during the emergence of underground rail; Chicago and New York at the birth of the skyscraper; Detroit and Los Angeles during the rise of car culture – but why does one city expand beyond expectations – or reason – while the other remains relatively intact or even withers? 

EVOLUTION

Technology-driven urban transformations are clearly the exception.  In the evolution of cities, most change occurs in small ways, almost invisibly.  Cities are constantly remaking themselves through millions of tiny gestures performed by individual citizens on a daily basis.  In this way, a city lives.  It is what evolutionary biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan call autopoietic in that cities are constantly adjusting themselves to adapt to changing conditions.  In Microcosmos, they write, “this modulating ‘holisitic’ phenomenon of autopoiesis, of active self-maintenance, is the basis of all known life.”

Margulis and Sagan argue that although we live in the Macrocosm, which makes up the visible world, all our basic life functions – including evolution – occur at the level of the Microcosm – the ecosystem of micro-organic cells that, in the human body alone, constitute more that ten-times the number of human cells.  These cells, mostly bacteria of some sort, are of unknown origin with a mysterious function because they are unable to survive outside their human ecosystem.  What is clear is that these microbes undergo a complex series of interactions – signaling, communication, reproduction, transpiration, even fermentation – that result in byproducts necessary to sustain the human body.

This is also true for macrobes in nature.  A forest is an ecosystem of macrobes – trees, shrubs, grasses, etc. – and each of these macrobes is itself an ecosystem much like the human body.  The question is, if we understand that ecosystems occur at all scales, can we begin to see the city as a sort of ecosystem, one created through the interaction of human macrobes?  Certainly the physical byproducts of such interactions – architecture and infrastructure – are not themselves living organisms; but does that mean that the city as a system – as an ecosystem – cannot act in an autopoietic manner?

Consider then the Metrocosm, an ecosystem at the urban scale made up of human macrobes in constant interaction whose residue is the city itself.  The metrocosm evolves to survive, just as any ecosystem does.  It is constantly changing in order to remain the same.  And it does so through two related mechanisms: adaptation and mutation.

The metrocosm adapts in much the same way a forest does: through successionism. But while a forest adjusts its ecosystem plant by plant, reacting to changing environmental conditions, the city does so building by building.  In fact, every building can be seen as the result of a specific interaction between particular individuals – the developer, the city, the contractor, the architect – and it takes on an appearance that reflects this unique interaction.  Thus in any building it is possible to read the intent of the city planners, the economic strategy of the developer, the current construction conventions, as well as whatever style the architect chooses to employ.  The city is legible in its architecture.  And because development tends to occur during times of economic expansion, the city becomes an archive of successive economies.

The metrocosm can also mutate.  Mutation is an extreme form of adaptation and is facilitated through technology.  It is what occurs when a political/economic environment calls for extraordinary change at exactly the moment that the technology is there to make it happen.  Think of the sewers, boulevards and Metro system in Paris; the street grid, subway system, and elevators in New York; the car in Los Angeles: each metrocosm was able to transform itself toward its desired future precisely when the technology to do so became available.

CITIES

This is why the metrocosm looks the way it does: its buildings reflect the styles in vogue during successive economies, while its urban form and infrastructure reflect the ascendant technology at the time of its greatest economic expansion -- which is not always good news.

Take Los Angeles, a place simultaneously beautiful and horrific; both reimagined and ruined by the automobile, LA defies easy categorization.  In his recent book, “No More Play,” architect Michael Maltzan interviews a number of people across the city to get their assessment of the place, but few are able to give a definitive answer.  Qingyun Ma, dean of the USC School of Architecture considers LA not to be a city, yet to be somehow urban; pressed to name this brand of urbanism, he called it “intermediate utopia.”

Perhaps Los Angeles is not a city in the conventional sense; but it is a metrocosm.  If we embrace the metrocosm as an ever evolving, self-maintaining, and self-preserving system, then the notion of whether it is a city or not becomes irrelevant.  The important thing to recognize is that, as a metrocosm, it has the best chance of survival the more adaptable it is. 

This is the problem with places like the city of Irvine, California.  Designed for the car, virtually every decision was guided by the intent to make life as convenient for the driver as possible, from the size and shape of the roads and freeways, to the location and layout of shopping centers, to the layers of exclusivity within gated residential communities.  It may seem to work, for now; but what happens when as-yet-unimagined technologies arrive?  Not only is the structure of the master-planned community fixed, but in Irvine the CC&Rs restrict the ability to adapt. Irvine could forever be stuck in a late 20th century, car-centered mentality.  Adapt or die: its only hope for survival may be to be swallowed up in the ever-expanding Southern California metrocosm extending from the Ventura County line, all the way down to Camp Pendleton at the southern border of Orange County.

I am convinced that the future of the metrocosm lies in the complete opposite direction of Irvine – the ability to adapt freely.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the Netherlands.  Because of its relentlessly artificial topography, The Dutch metrocosm known as the Randstad, which includes cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague, was forced to adapt to survive – which has made it naturally more open to change, more inclined to welcome new technologies, and why the entire country is such an exciting place to watch as world culture transitions from one technology to the next.

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)

A CITY IS NOT A FOREST: 
URBAN SUCCESSIONISM AND THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES

Taking the idea of Green Architecture to its logical conclusion – the city as an semi-autonomous ecosystem – gives us another way to think about urbanism. But how does an urban ecosystem function? How does it come into being, grow, evolve?

SUCCESSIONISM IN FORESTS

An ecosystem just doesn’t emerge fully formed overnight. In a forest, for example there is a distinct process that occurs, something known as the succession pathway: First, nudation, which could occur, say, after a glacier has exposed a raw granite in a canyon such as in Yosemite. Next is the migration and arrival of propagates, then rooting and initial growth, then competition of species, which, for a given set of conditions leads to a climax community, a mix of species that achieves a fairly stable equilibrium. Such an equilibrium usually remains in place until the conditions change, either slowly or due to trauma. When the change is slow, the equilibrium shifts to adapt; when the change is sudden and/or catastrophic as in a fire or ice age, a sort of nudation occurs and the cycle begins anew with a succession of plants more suited to the altered condition.

SUCCESSIONISM IN CITIES

In cities, the succession pathway would also occur, in an albeit modified way: nudation would describe the raw land prior to the arrival of humans; the migration and arrival of propagates would refer to the first settlers, who would accomplish rooting and initial growth of the city by erecting non-native buildings according to their own traditions. Competition of building species would begin upon arrival of subsequent settlers who would erect their own non-native buildings as needed; a succession of species would take turns being dominant; this pattern would continue through waves of growth until reaching, for a given set of conditions, a fairly stable equilibrium consisting of mix of species with one or more achieving dominance. As with forests, such an equilibrium would remain in place until the conditions change, either slowly or due to trauma. When the change is slow, the equilibrium shifts to adapt; when the change is sudden and catastrophic as in a fire, earthquake, or economic crisis, a sort of nudation occurs and the cycle begins anew with a succession of species more suited to the new conditions.

EVOLUTION IN FORESTS

A forest has a variety of ways it can adapt to changing conditions. Successionism favors contingency over climax, meaning that a climax community is most often transitory, that a state of constant adaptation is more the norm, as environmental conditions continually shift. Evolution occurs at the level of the individual and at the level of species, where, through natural selection, good traits persist across generations and where innovations introduced by new variants are also rewarded. Desire to thrive propels individuals and species to adapt or die. New species are formed once this adaptation passes a certain threshold. And when it comes to the survival of the forest itself, there is an additional tool: the ability of the ecosystem itself to mutate to create the optimum mix of species for the forest to endure.

EVOLUTION IN CITIES

Cities are like forests in that adaptation to changing conditions is driven by a desire to thrive: most development occurs out of an attempt to meet a present need. The city also has many tools it can use to adapt. Building owners can alter individual structures to meet their needs; or they can build a new mutation of an existing species, one with adjustments that more closely match what they want; or they can develop an entirely new species.

Cities are not like forests in that conscious human intervention often directs the process. The evolution of cities is moderated by pressures not present in forests, social forces looking both forward and backward: Planning, a force driven by a hope of what city might become, tries to anticipate and shape future development, while Preservation, a force driven by the memory of what once was, attempts to protect the city from further change. In most cities both these forces work in various degrees to temper the mechanics of what a pure Darwinian capitalism might wreak, often simultaneously encouraging and discouraging new species from taking root.

URBAN ECOSYSTEMS

For cities, the establishment of propagates, successive dominations, fugitive equilibria, traumas, and rebirths occur over and over again with a climax state remaining ever elusive. This is because unlike forests whose ecosystems are driven by Ecology – which is always seeking equilibrium – the ecosystems of cities are driven by Economy, which is always seeking expansion. For a city to survive it must continue to grow. This requires a climate conducive to growth, when both a robust economy and the political will converge. This means growth occurs during times of economic expansion, often after trauma – Fires, Floods, Earthquakes, War, Depressions, Recessions, etc. – mobilizes a city to rebuild itself. In fact, Post-Traumatic Stress is a fertile time for cities, when more new species are created and established; but propagation relies on economic expansion to make it possible.

URBAN SUCCESSIONISM IN LOS ANGELES

Could this be why cities look the way they do? Because they reflect the styles in vogue during times of greatest economic expansion – why Paris is so dominated by Hausmann era apartment blocks or San Francisco is so Victorian? Or why the Inland Empire looks the way it does? Clearly there are other factors involved; but looking at successive dominant species does make cities more legible. Los Angeles, which at first glance appears quite incomprehensible, seems to undergo a major shift every 30 years; tying its architecture to its economic cycles helps to bring the city into focus.

Pre-1885

In the beginning, the first settlers – the Tongva – seem to have built no permanent structures in the village of Yangna near downtown. Instead they famously gathered around what was later termed El Alisal, a massive Sycamore located on a spit of land now sandwiched between on and off ramps for the southbound 101. During the Spanish and Mexican periods, the architecture was Spanish Colonial. Later, as the economy shifted from the missions to cattle ranching, the architecture remained simple, mostly adobe structures.

1885-1915

When the railroad reached Los Angeles, the first real estate boom hit the city and the new buildings reflected this, reshaping what had been a sleepy Spanish-speaking outpost into a growing Victorian metropolis. As more and more people flocked to Southern California for the healing effects of its weather, people like the Greene brothers adapted the forward-thinking yet non-native Arts & Crafts movement to create a new California variant that propagated, mostly as bungalows, across Southern California through the first World War.

1915-1945

The rise of the oil economy, increased car use, and the birth of Hollywood further accelerated the growth of the city. The dominant species between the wars were the adapted non-native period work of architects such as Wallace Neff, Gordon Kaufmann, and Paul Williams in the private realm, while the public realm favored the art deco style found in ferro-concrete infrastructure throughout the city.

1945-1975

Coming out of World War II, a new real-estate boom, propelled by the surging aerospace industry, swelled the city and a fascination for the future fueled an explosion of new building species. Following the earlier adapted non-native strains of Modernism from Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra, new home-grown hybrids were developed by efforts such as the Case Study program and propagated by a housing industry hungry for new product.

It was also during this period that the most significant transformation of Los Angeles took place in the many ways it adapted to the ongoing trauma caused by that most invasive of pests – the car. Not only did these adaptations change the way the city looked, but the auto itself changed the way we lived, steadily diminishing the public realm while expanding private one. Though the process began when the car was first introduced, it was during the post-war period that the most massive concession – the system of freeways that first disrupted then later defined the city, was constructed.

The car induced trauma indirectly as well. Allowing freedom of movement throughout the city, the car eliminated the need for intra-urban rail, which had created a matrix of villages across the city. It incentivized real estate developers to fill in between the villages, which erased boundaries and made inevitable the annexation of those villages into a single, massive urban ecosystem.

1975-2005

Following the malaise of the post-Vietnam era, the new species that emerged were mostly a postmodern mess. The era that spanned approximately from1975 to 2005 produced such unprecedented hybrid species as the McMansion, the minimall, and the Alameda Corridor; however it also witnessed the birth of more compelling hybrid species from Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, and Morphosis.

2005-Beyond

Based on our past, it appears we alternate every thirty years from a forward to a backward-looking trend in species making. Where does that put us today? Even though we see the unfortunate propagation of apartment mega-complexes like the Medici and the Orsini – invasive non-natives, adapted, it seems from similar such apartment communities in Orange County – I have the hope that a new green economy will pull us, through technological innovation and force of will, toward embracing the future once again.

CITIES AS ECOSYSTEMS

In order to allow ourselves to view cities as ecosystems, we actually have to shift they way we think about our role in the world – not as separate from nature, but as part of it. The question is, how to balance Ecology and Economy to reach an equilibrium in which both are sustainable? We need to think holistically about villages, cities, and regions that function somewhat self-sufficiently on their own, yet operate more significantly as linked elements in ever larger ecosystems.

Studying cities as ecosystems places architecture in a context that is larger than traditional histories of architecture seem to consider. While this appears to remove architects from a central role in the shaping of cities, it actually frees us up. Like mad scientists working in remote labs concocting cures for unimaginable diseases, architects are at the forefront of imagining new species to adapt to present and future conditions. If you want to get excited about the future, just walk through an advanced studio in any one of the several architecture schools in Southern California. We may not have an economy to build these emerging visions just yet, but when we do, we’ll have plenty of interesting options.

GREEN AND GREENER

Last week, after a closed door meeting with members of the City Council, a stop-work order was lifted for a solar array under construction on a hillside in Northeast Los Angeles. The project, a 429 megawatt photo-voltaic system for a 53-bed nursing home adjacent to Debs Park, polarized residents in the surrounding communities: some decried the desecration of a pristine hillside, others questioned the wisdom of placing such an array in a High Fire Severity Zone; still others saw the uproar as blatant nimbyism.

On the surface, the law seems to favor this last group. The California Solar Rights Act of 1978 and its subsequent amendments, does not allow any governing body to block new solar projects with unreasonable regulation and requires that permits be obtained through an administrative not discretionary process. This means that solar panels can be placed just about anywhere without restriction and without public review. Here in Los Angeles, it’s about the same as getting an electrical permit.

By this standard, the nursing home did everything right. They wanted to be smart about energy costs and they wanted to be green. I really believe that their hearts were in the right place; but I also believe they were hoodwinked the company they picked to install the array. When these guys caught a glimpse of the several-acre open hillside above the nursing home, just there for the taking, I believe they steered their client away from the more difficult task of mounting the PV panels to the buildings and urged them to take advantage of the slope.

There’s green, and there’s green. I think by sizing the array far beyond what could be considered reasonable in anything zoned R-1 Residential, these guys were targeting the soon-to-expire rebates offered by the state – the larger the array, the bigger the rebates – and then the bigger payoff down the line: the nursing home does not own the array, it leases it, so the installers reap the benefits of the power the array generates in perpetuity. As the cost of power goes up, they make more money.

Is this the green economy everyone keeps talking about? Another opportunity for savvy entrepreneurs to make a few bucks in the guise of doing good? Sure, some would say, why not? Green is green; who does it hurt? I think it hurts all of us. Green should be about the big picture, certainly, but it should also be about livable places. I think any solar ordinance for Los Angeles should accommodate how a community chooses to builds itself. Things like the Northeast Hillside Ordinance allow us as citizens to participate, to feel we actually have a stake in shaping our neighborhood. How else are we to establish an emotional commitment to a place?

In our area, this particular corner of Northeast Los Angeles, along the banks of the Arroyo Seco, we want green everything – solar power, wastewater polishing, transit oriented development – but we also want to protect our environment. The bottom line is this: You can put solar panels anywhere; but how can you ever replace open space?

THE BIPOLAR PARKWAY

The recent work on the Pasadena Freeway has been an exercise in contradictions – a beautification that actually renders the scenic byway less beautiful; safety barriers that make the road less safe; and a nod to local history that insults Arroyo Seco culture by reducing its significance to bland, ill-conceived motifs dreamt up in Sacramento and stamped in concrete to last an eternity.

The $17 million project started just as the six-mile stretch of freeway received both landmark designation and a new/old name to go with it. The “Arroyo Seco Parkway,” has, in the course of its renovation, lost many of the elements that made it, the first “freeway” in America, so groundbreaking – the innovative curb and gutter system, the classic wood and steel safety barriers, and the compound curves built for speed (a lightning-fast 45 miles-per-hour); actually the curves will remain. What won’t are the vistas to the series of sycamore-filled parks that line alternating sides of the highway as well as into the Arroyo Seco channel itself.

In place of all this, drivers will be treated to new decorative elements courtesy of CalTrans – concrete side barriers stamped with a pattern attempting to mimic either the rubble walls that characterize the Craftsman homes along the Arroyo or the broken concrete walls that first adorned the route; “historic” lighting that bears no relation to any of the fixtures anywhere in Northeast Los Angeles despite their cloying faux-traditional look (and which, when suspended one hundred feet in the air, look pathetically inadequate); and a concrete center divider stamped with a bizarre design motif of alternating arches intended, apparently, to reference the bed of the channel on the one hand and the parabolic arches of the several overpasses on the other. Some call it the Happy-Sad Highway; I prefer the Bipolar Parkway.

I guess the most irritating thing about the whole exercise is the implication of community input. This is CalTrans: there was none. They took it upon themselves to tell us what we’re about. I say, don’t bother. If you’re going to “restore” the parkway, then really do it – go back to the original drawings and put it back to the way it really was, down to the smallest detail. If you can't do that, then do what you do best – simple clean lines, the latest technology, the most current light fixtures. Anything in between is at best pastiche and at worst a slap in the face.