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The Architectural
Community and the Polis:
Thinking About Ends, Premises, and Architectural
Education
Historically, architecture has had multiple ends,
and these ends often exist in tension. One end of architecture, long prominent,
has been defined with reference to communities, specifically to the buildings
commissioned by communities. In the architecture commissioned by religious
or political or artistic or athletic communities, architects have understood
themselves to have a primary obligation to address the variety of practical
and formal issues important to their patrons--and I would argue that addressing
the concerns of patrons (including the formal concerns of patrons) is a
pragmatic duty not superfluous but intrinsic to architecture.
But there are other ends of architecture equally
prominent; and a second has been a definition of purpose in architecture
with reference to the architectural community and its own internal
history and standards of excellence. These standards include not only such
abstract traditional architectural virtues as durability, convenience,
beauty, and decorum, but also particular works of architecture that function
as iconic and authoritative points of reference: the Parthenon, the Pantheon,
the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, San Andrea at Mantua, the Tempietto,
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, the University of Virginia, the Robie House,
the Villa Savoye, the Chrysler Building, the Salk Institute, etc. For architects
this second purpose is primarily formal rather than pragmatic. And although
the formal concerns of architects cannot supersede in importance the pragmatic
concerns of their patrons (for if they did, very little architecture would
actually get built), these formal concerns are in some way the essence
of architecture and are what distinguish architecture from "mere" building,
to which architecture is otherwise and at all times necessarily and intrinsically
connected.
It should be easy to see the potential tension between
these two historic ends of architecture, the inherent possibility for conflict
between what the patron wants and what the architect wants. We know however,
from seeing successful works of architecture, that such conflicts can be
resolved more or less satisfactorily. But there is yet another historically
prominent end of architecture, one that goes beyond the good of the patron
and his community, and beyond the good of the architect and her community;
and that end is the good of the city. This end is implicit in the traditional
architectural virtue of decorum; and it is this virtue of decorum that
links the community of architecture to that larger community, the city.
But this third end implies something else, something more: that architecture
is not only an end in itself, but also a contributing means to (as well
as one tangible manifestation of) some higher end. This higher end is the
good life for human beings; and in an even more direct and fundamental
way, the good life for human beings is also the end for which the city
exists.
So, to reiterate: historically, one purpose of architecture
is pragmatic, and concerns the interests of particular communities that
are patrons of architecture. A second purpose is formal, and concerns standards
of excellence within the architectural community. And a third purpose--civic
purpose--is similar to the others in that it too refers architectural ends
to a community; but it differs in that the community with which it is concerned,
the city, is rarely if ever the direct patron of architecture. This difference
therefore requires some further consideration of just what kind of community
the city is, and the nature of the city's purposes.
THE NATURE OF THE CITY
I propose that the city is understood best as a
community of communities, the foremost purpose of which is to enable its
citizens to live the best life possible. This proposition is broadly Aristotelian
in its outlines; and for human beings the end it identifies is comprehensive,
for human beings do not seek the best life possible for the sake of something
else. Clearly, there is considerable disagreement today about both the
good life for human beings and the nature and ends of the city; and I will
discuss some of those disagreements shortly. But our language itself testifies
to this ancient understanding of the city as a community of communities,
for the very word "politics" designates the art of ordering in right relationship
the various communities comprising the polis.
As a community of communities, the city exists dynamically
and simultaneously as an economic order, a moral order, and a formal order;
and these orders interact in tense, conflicting, complex and unpredictable
ways. Nevertheless, we can see for ourselves the economic order of the
city embodied in commercial and familial institutions; can see the moral
order of the city in institutions of religion, law, medicine, education,
politics, and family; and can see the formal order of the city in architecture
and urban design.
Within the larger community of the city, smaller
communities provide occasions and social, physical, and cultural contexts
within which the purposes of architecture are partially defined. Architects
have traditionally given greater attention and prestige to the public and
civic spaces of the city, by giving formal primacy to public and civic
buildings fronting and defining such spaces. Why have we done this? Generally,
I suspect it is because there has been a mutual recognition among members
of smaller communities within the city that what they have in common is
their status as citizens. And specific to architects, there has also been
a recognition that well designed civic spaces are both a symbol and an
artifact of the urban community of which architects themselves are part.
This understanding of the ends of architecture, the
ends of the city, and their relationship to one another does not deny inherent
tensions between the pragmatic, formal, and civic purposes of architecture;
nor does it deny that there will always be differences among citizens about
the nature of our common good and how best to achieve it. But this understanding
does presume that ideas of "the good life" and "the common good" are live
ideas; and it also presumes that architects understand themselves to be
citizens as well as architects--implying among other things that architects
are members of, and therefore have obligations to, more than one community.[1]
Now, from shared and living notions of "the good
life," "the common good," "membership" and "obligation," coherent theories
and practices of architecture and city making can follow. But I think it
is precisely our misery as a profession and as educators that both the
culture of architecture and our larger political culture currently lack
such shared and live notions.[2] And notwithstanding the urgings from the
Boyer Report[3] and other quarters that the architectural profession and
architectural education reorient ourselves to the making and sustaining
of "community," I see few professional and educational programs today with
the cultural, intellectual, and institutional resources needed to sustain
such an enterprise.
SOURCES OF RENEWAL
I think we do not lack these resources entirely,
however; but it might surprise you to hear where I think they may reside.
These resources do not reside, I suspect, in what we tend to consider our
elite institutions of higher learning (and I will try shortly to explain
why). They may reside as ongoing good habits in architectural programs
in universities historically grounded in a regional mission and sensibility.
But these good habits may or may not be supported by coherent intellectual
articulations of the nature and ends of architecture and architecture's
relationship to human communities; and where these good habits are not
supported intellectually, I suspect and fear their future is tenuous. Where
these intellectual and cultural resources do reside is in those architecture
programs located in academic institutions sponsored by religious communities,
of which there are currently four in the United States that have accredited
professional degree programs: Catholic University, Detroit Mercy, Notre
Dame, and Andrews University (where I teach).
Now, I can hardly maintain that any of these institutions
are or have ever been widely regarded as leaders in American architectural
education; or that it is necessarily the case that they ever will be. I
simply maintain that, whether they know it or not, such institutions are
unusually well situated and equipped, both culturally and intellectually,
to promote coherent theories of architecture and urban design that understand
these activities in terms of communal purposes--including the purposes
of communities as patrons, the purposes of the community of architects,
and the purposes of that larger community which is the city.
One reason an architecture program located in this
kind of academic institution should be able to do this is because, if it
is healthy, such an institution is already an example of the kind of community
that historically has supported and been supported by architecture made
with reference to communal purposes. If I can put this another way: although
I am not for an instant suggesting either that the theological substance
at the heart of such religious communities is unimportant or that its status
as believed truth is unchallengeable, regardless of the theological substance
at the heart of any such community its communal form is Aristotelian--and
is therefore existentially supportive of traditional Aristotelian views
of the nature and purpose of community generally, and of the city in particular.
But there's a second reason why architecture programs
located in religious universities seem better suited than their secular
counterparts to promote community. On the one hand, religious communities
tend to regard it as a truth of the human condition that individual human
well being is necessarily related to communal membership and obligation.
Perhaps even more importantly however, such communities have believed and
continue to believe that discovering, understanding, and serving the truth
is the primary purpose of liberal education. And this last point has, I
think, larger implications for architectural education than we tend at
first glance to recognize.[4]
This idea that truth is the proper end of a liberal
education may seem simply to confirm both the National Architecture Accreditation
Board's (NAAB) and the Associated Collegiate Schools of Architecture's
(ACSA) own professed regard for the importance of a liberal education for
the practice of architecture. But there is in fact a problem here because
in many institutions of both higher learning and architectural education
the very idea of truth, let alone its pursuit, increasingly is regarded
as illusory. The professed ambition instead is to create and propound useful
and aesthetically pleasing "fictions;" and to the extent that this is the
direction in which the intellectual leadership of architecture and the
academy are determined to go, it poses significant intellectual and practical
challenges to architects and educators sympathetic to the Boyer Report's
call for architectural education and practice to be redirected toward "building
community." For while the ambition to create pleasing fictions will always
engage the interests of some of the people some of the time, it is a singularly
unhelpful approach to the necessarily long term projects of building and
sustaining communities. And this is simply because in order for human beings
to succeed in achieving long term objectives such as these, we generally
need to believe in what we are doing.
THEOLOGY, NATURE, AND ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION
I'd like to conclude with a brief consideration
of how architectural education seriously engaged with an intellectual tradition
grounded in religious community might differ today from architectural education
not so grounded; and my sense is that this issue could be approached from
a number of different directions. I've written elsewhere at some length
about the difference between ethics and architecture grounded in traditional
communitarian sensibilities, and ethics and architecture grounded in contemporary
individualist sensibilities.[5] But this is only one area where contemporary
attitudes about architecture and the city will logically differ between
communities of shared belief and "communities" of shared unbelief.[6] One
might just as profitably consider the formal differences that would likely
manifest themselves as a consequence of different understandings of human
freedom; or of the relationship between memory and hope, and the relationship
of these to the creative act; or of the notion of artistic inspiration
as it might relate not to the zeitgeist but rather to the heiligegeist.
But here let me limit myself to a consideration of different views of nature
and human nature; and on the one hand suggest some implications for the
architectural community that follow from an understanding of nature as
a product of chance; and on the other hand some implications that follow
from a Christian (and antecedently, and still, Jewish) understanding of
nature as created by God--a topic I choose in part because of the currency
of and enthusiasm for the idea of "sustainable design."
Many today regard the belief that nature was created
and is sustained by God to be irrational; and find it more rational to
believe that nature is a product of chance. But although there are reasons
given and evidence marshaled to support either of these conclusions, in
a fundamental way both are theories about mystery; and neither can be certified
by the kind of logical proof that we customarily associate with either
science or mathematics--indeed, scientists and mathematicians come down
on both sides of the issue. In the view of nature as created, nature is
regarded as somehow purposeful, and this is seen as a sign of God's providence.
In the view of nature as a product of chance, there is no purpose in nature
beyond what human beings attempt--nobly or pitifully--to impose upon it.
In the chance view of nature, the only "law" discernible
is the law of struggle, a process Darwin referred to as natural selection,
guided by an impulse that Nietzsche referred to as the will-to-power; and
human culture is to be understood above all as a series of power relations.
The traditional virtue of justice, for example, becomes in this view an
ever shifting compromise between parties of relatively equal power; and
all historic so-called "morality" is seen as a mask that disguises each
individual's will-to-power (most often from him or herself).
Now I concede that there is substantial evidence
all around us to warrant such an interpretation of both nature and culture.
But we need to recognize that such an interpretation of nature makes it
hard to make a coherent and persuasive case for developing communal sensibilities
in architectural education; or for encouraging an ethic of environmental
responsibility; or for promoting, say, racial and gender equity in the
architectural profession. The fact that some persons simultaneously seem
able to hold both this "chance" view of nature and these aspirations
for architectural education can perhaps be attributed to personal sentiments
and cultural habits that have not quite caught up with thought--or vice-versa.
Regardless, with the premise that nature is a product of chance that issues
in a war of all against all, one might well develop for purposes of self
preservation the kind of respect for nature that one develops for a crafty
and powerful enemy; but likewise, one could not in (quite precisely) good
faith engage in sustained community building and communal enterprises without
in some fundamental way engaging in intellectual self deception. For to
engage in such communal activities in good faith and not be self deceiving
implies a different understanding of nature.
Consider therefore an orthodox Jewish and Christian
theology of creation and some of its implications for a theory of urbanism
and environmental responsibility. In this view, the first fact about nature
is that it is created by God (which, incidentally, implies neither a literal
six-day creation, nor a static view of nature, nor that everything and
every impulse found in nature is good). The second fact about nature is
that human beings are both part of and different from nature, an understanding
which also expresses a common human intuition that human beings occupy
a kind of intermediate place in the universe. Philosophically, this view
of nature (and human nature) distinguishes itself immediately from at least
three other views of nature prominent in the contemporary intellectual
landscape.
One view holds that man is fundamentally separate
from nature, and nature is simply raw material for human consumption--an
operative (if often only implicit) post-sixteenth century notion fundamental
to the industrial revolution and modern economies. A second common view
of nature--in part a reaction to the first, but also with a long intellectual
history of its own--would make no fundamental distinction whatsoever between
the human and the natural. But this has the conflicting consequences of
on the one hand rendering any human intervention in the natural environment
inherently suspect, while on the other hand rendering any such intervention
logically immune from criticism. Yet a third view of nature (common among
today's critical theorists) holds that nature itself is a "construct,"
the alleged properties of which are human inventions rather than human
discoveries; from which it would seem to follow logically that nature commands
no inherent respect, if indeed nature can logically be held to exist at
all.
In contrast to these views, historic Jewish and Christian
theology understands nature to exist independently of human beings; that
"human nature" is part of nature; and that it is part of human nature to
make culture--including physical culture, made from found nature transformed
by human efforts into cultural artifacts. Human beings moreover are by
nature social; and different cultures are the social and historical forms
of individual and communal human aspirations for, and understandings of,
the very best kind of life. The cultivated landscape, buildings, and cities
are, in turn, the physical and spatial forms of culture. Arts such as agriculture,
architecture, and city making are therefore cultural interventions in nature,
but are also themselves in some sense natural. Indeed, it is in this sense
that Thomas Aquinas meant that reason is the tool with and by which man
(male and female) participates in nature, and that art is "reason in making."
It is also this sense in which Aristotle meant that "art imitates nature,"
i.e., that the artist acts towards his or her desired ends in a manner
analogous to the way that nature acts towards her ends, because such is
man's place in nature as the "rational animal."
To invoke Aristotle yet again is to underscore that
divine revelation is not the sole source of this traditional western understanding
of nature. But Judaeo-Christian religion has been and is today the institutional
bearer of this understanding of nature; and Judaeo-Christian theology suggests
at least two imperatives that should point architectural education to the
ends of urban and environmental responsibility. One is a general imperative
to acquire knowledge of nature, which in architectural education would
be an imperative to cultivate among architects and their patrons that specific
knowledge of nature germane to the art of building. The second imperative
would be to promote an environmental ethic that in the Christian tradition
falls under the rubric of "stewardship."
Knowledge of nature "germane to building" includes
an awareness and understanding of the variety of physical and social forces
that influence the building design process and its results: physics, construction
materials, climate, geography, human nature, etc. The virtue of stewardship
implies both a uniquely human ability to be caretakers of the natural order
and the responsibility to do so, precisely because creation belongs to
God and not to us. Stewardship also implies a recognition that whatever
else human beings are, we are also created beings and therefore "of nature;"
and that to pursue through building and city making our own good independent
of a knowledge of and respect for that larger created natural environment
of which we are part is to misunderstand the nature of our own good. In
the Judaeo-Christian view of human nature, the natural order is something
which commands human respect, including on occasion an appropriate measure
of fear that is itself natural; but the respect that this fear engenders
is less like the grudging respect for an enemy than the respect for a friend
whose purposes are sometimes but not always the same as our own.
My comments here are neither an exhortation nor a
plea, nor do they represent any sort of triumphalist political ambition
for either Jewish or Christian religious communities. I'm just making observations.
The culture of architecture, including architectural education, seems to
me in disarray. We want artistic independence and communal belonging, a
sense of inner-driven artistic vocation and more respect from other professions,
equality of opportunity and guaranteed results, regional identity and a
global economy, advanced technology and communion with nature, consumer
goods and a simpler life; and we want it all, right now. I think we all
understand these and other such desires, because desire is fundamentally
human. But human life is a condition in which unlimited desire is certain
to be frustrated; and part of the art of living well is learning how to
order our desires. I have tried here to suggest the kinds of cultural and
academic contexts that seem to me the most promising intellectual soil
for nurturing and advancing a communal understanding of architecture, the
city, and a sustained and sustaining natural environment. Whether this
understanding will soon become central or long remain marginal to the culture
of architecture, only God knows.
This essay was presented in March 1998 at the annual
meeting of the Associated Collegiate Schools of Architecture in Cleveland,
Ohio.
NOTES
1. Please note that I am not saying that the obligation
to the polis always trumps every other obligation, or that the polis
is always in the right. It was, after all, in the golden age of Athens
that the city put Socrates to death. It is to say, however, that membership
in a political or religious community requires of those who challenge the
community's authority some account of the failure of that authority to
promote the primary ends that such authority legitimately exists to promote,
viz., the well being of the members of the community. In other words, in
communities so understood, authority is not challenged because authority
itself is inherently bad or malevolent, but rather because some particular
authority is regarded as insufficiently authoritative.
2. One could argue that there is a kind of rough
and ready intellectual consensus in today's culture of architecture, but
that it is incoherent and self contradictory. I think many if not most
architects would agree with the following propositions: that the city is
the community to which architects are morally obligated; that the city
is above all a place of ruthless Darwinian economic competition; that architects
must be true to their art; that architects have an obligation to formal
innovation; that architects have an obligation to celebrate and express
"difference;" that architecture gives physical and spatial form to existing
cultural ideals; that architecture can and should be a force for cultural
change; that architects have an obligation to be ecologically responsible
and to promote and design durable buildings; that architects working in
the conditions of the modern marketplace can properly disregard durability;
that architecture is first and foremost about making places for communities;
that architecture is primarily a manifestation of power relations; that
good architecture and urban design should promote equality and cultural
and economic diversity; that culturally authentic architecture can only
be created and understood by an elite avant garde, etc., etc. Any or all
of these propositions may be defensible in the context of some larger framework.
But currently that framework is missing, and the professional "consensus"
that such propositions may represent is simply incoherent, little different
than no consensus.
3. Building Community: A New Future for Architecture
Education and Practice, Ernest Boyer and Lee Mitgang, a 1996 Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching study of architectural education.
4. Notwithstanding the philosophical and religious
origins of education in western culture (including the institution of the
university), the long and in some places continuing struggle in the west
to demarcate the proper spheres of theology, philosophy, and modern science
has made the idea that theology and philosophy aspire to and can say something
about truth suspect to both the modern and the post-modern mind. To the
modern mind the only truth we can know is scientific truth; and the metaphysical
realism of theology and philosophy is dismissed as a charming or not so
charming narrative or myth. But perhaps the most important post-modern
insights have been that science itself is a kind of narrative, as Thomas
Kuhn has argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; and
that human beings engage no part of the world unmediated by narrative.
Taking their cues from Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, many in the academy
now regard scientific truth as skeptically as modern scientists have long
regarded theological and philosophical truth--notwithstanding the incapacity
of these new post-modern narratives to account for their own truth or falsehood.
For persons intellectually unable to abandon questions
of truth (whether in science, philosophy, or religion), Alasdair MacIntyre's
After
Virtue characterization of man as a being who by his nature is a teller
of stories, and by his history is a teller of stories that aspire to truth,
suggests a philosophical narrative that justifies an understanding of truth
and our ability to know it as being at once true and provisional: "the
best truth so far," a commitment to which necessarily involves a critical
engagement with and extension of historical traditions--a type of engagement
that, needless to say, is necessarily intrinsic to the purposes of academic
institutions sponsored by religious communities.
5. See especially my "Ethics in Architecture," Inland
Architect, May-June 1993: 74-83, republished as "Communitarianism and
Emotivism: Two Rival Views of Ethics and Architecture" in Nesbitt, Kate
(ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture. Princeton: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1996); and also my "Virtuous Reality: Aristotle, Critical
Realism and the Reconstruction of Architectural and Urban Theory," The
Classicist, Volume 3 (1996): 6-18.
6. I am here assuming a certain self-consciousness
and intellectual consistency among both unbelievers and believers that
are often in fact empirically absent. My own sense is that in the modern/post-modern
west, many secularists retain affections for the formal and communal aspects
of traditional urban life unaware or unappreciative that such attitudes
are a dying vestige of traditional Judaeo-Christian culture. At the same
time, one often finds among religious communities (including their leadership)
unreflective enthusiasm for suburbia and no understanding whatsoever of
the virtues of the city; and I think this reflects a certain lack of awareness
of how contemporary religious life is so frequently organized along the
individualist/therapeutic model embodied physically in contemporary culture
by suburbia. My entire argument for the potential urban formal contributions
of religious communities presumes a growing intentionality and self-consciousness
within such communities about who we are and what we do.
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