But it looked so good in the drawings...
Not long ago, I got a look at plans to develop a 15 square-mile industrial site in the center of a Chinese city. I marveled at the pretty renderings. They showed smiling people under blue skies walking past rows of well-landscaped residential blocks, running with their dogs in waterfront parks and watching their children play in clever playgrounds, spacious retail centers with bright storefronts, and sports arenas with giant parking lots. The theme was sustainability, so the (American) architect had thrown in a wetland for wildlife and to help clean the river, vivid blue in the renderings.
I had the opportunity to ask the architect a naive question:
How do you design such large projects for so many people to do so many things? How can you anticipate and accommodate entire lives of needs?
The silence I got in return meant my insult was well understood. Actually, I was being polite. I had thought to say that the fuckers who design these centrally-planned cities should be forced to live in the results.
I've lived in Petržalka, a centrally-planned city in Slovakia. It was just after the iron curtain fell, and unchanged from the results of the central government's plans. The reality of Petržalka was a sadistic rat maze of gray and filthy neglect and unpredictable horrors that crushed the soul like no other place I've lived.
I'm sure the renderings the Soviet architects provided 20 years earlier for the city's development were just as optimistic and cheery as those this American firm provided to the Chinese. Gray horror is what happens when the people who live in the results of deigns have little to no say over those designs, and the designers show no humility, rather indulge in their ambitions and revel in the power given them. I'm sure the American architect had only the best intentions, perhaps most harmlessly just an intent to burnish his credentials with lovely renderings, for an American audience to coo over, and never build a thing. I'm also sure, if this Chinese city is ever developed according to the American firm's lovely plan, it will be equally soul-crushing and sadistic. Fingers will be pointed at any number of other factors; but that is Stalin blaming famines and genocides on unforeseen factors.
The process of such large-scale central planning only leads to sadism. And worse, as people get used to the sadism of the new city, because they have no choice and will make the best of it, the feedback loop will make the new horrible eventually feel normal. And we will not just come to expect it, we will design it again, because it's what we now want, because we're accustomed to it, and it feels right. And so the modern soul is smaller than it was earlier.
To some extent, this is true of every aspect of every building across the world -- they all have compromised features, and in time they become normal and expected and desired. It the effect of distance between designer and dweller is strongest and most evident in the vast centrally-planned horrors of the 20th century. The rot can only be healed when the compromise fails, and someone owns a new and better solution.
Large-scale central planning is always doomed to create more harm than good because power corrupts. It's intoxicating to think so big. Like playing in a vast doll house. You get to arrange millions of people in millions of ways. You get to make millions of people happy. You get to make millions of people appreciate you. It's one step from delighting in their worship, over your Godlike skills in creating the world they live in.
But people do not behave like dolls in a dollshouse. They do and want things that the architect cannot conceive, or care to conceive. Park benches will be put in places that look good in the drawings, but not where anyone wants to sit. Even if the architect and the dwellers come from precisely the same community, and share the same values, no one person can comprehend the full range of human experience or desire. Can a middle-aged man know what it's like to be a single mother? Can he anticipate and plan for a child's delight? And if the culture is different, or the class, the education -- then there are simply more opportunities for design that is far from what the dwellers want, need, or can work with. And what they do not own in their hearts, they will not own in life. Neglect and alienation follow quickly in buildings that we are required to live in.
In the package, the architect had included images of the current industrial site: gray, dirty and rusting buildings on gray, dirty and potholed streets clogged with rundown cars, under a smoggy and overcast sky. The river was milk-and-coffee colored. That is what the local culture had produced in that space. And that local culture is likely to remain after the American designs are built. What will they do with the new buildings? In Petržalka, the fear and complacency required of the Soviet system persisted in the terrible neglect and mismanagement of the buildings created for them by government architects. The only signs of life I saw were inside the apartments -- handcrafted tablecloths under ceiling bubbling with water damage. Family pictures on sagging bookshelves. These were the things the government had not yet figured out how to regulate.
The closer the designer and the dweller are, the better chance of a successful result, by which I mean a built environment that is useful and beautiful to the dweller. Central planning leads to a huge distance between designer and user.
The architecture of empathy aims for the strongest of bonds between the design and the dweller, as close an understanding of each other as is possible, as deep an appreciation for the many ways the architect does not live his or her life, but that other people do. Out with the focus-group and marketing based interpretations of consumer needs, where publicly acceptable answers are offered for money. In with handshakes, dinner together, and light conversation about the good life, what's important, what's annoying, and how life could be better. In one kitchen. In one yard. On one block. These are the personal and human elements and connections that drive good and enduring design. The process from there involves the hands and minds of everyone.
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