Seeing the wealth of film coming from Hollywood over the
last decade or so recording various aspects of WW2 like Saving Private Ryan and
now the Monuments Men, depicting the horrific destruction of great cities in
Europe and Asia, I am reminded of the incredible destruction wrought on our
cities during the three or four decades following that most destructive international
conflict. Vast historic urban tracts
were cleared away to accommodate what “enlightened” planners and architects deemed
improvements. This modern movement
gained inspiration from a small group of essentially socialist designers in
pre-Nazi Germany and France. Their goal
was to develop and build the structures, organized in patterns that would
encourage the emergence of a new man – socialist man. And here “they helped to lay part of the
groundwork for the general destruction of American cities which some of their
students would undertake in the following generation”.[1] Enormous sections of ancient cities like Paris,
Rome, Berlin were also to be demolished to accommodate the new built
environment that would produce the new man.
Although most of these plans were, fortunately, never fully realized
they have left not only their physical imprint but falsely informed a
generation of planners and bureaucrats. The
hoped for evolution of socialist man did not magically take place as the
utopian designers claimed would surely follow the construction of the massive
new housing projects or “radiant cities” that were to be clad in gleaming new materials
and known as “social condensers”[2].
In America where post war politics during the McCarthy
terror forbade anything that might be deemed the slightest shade of “pink” only
the exterior form of the bold new architecture was adopted – free from any
possible socialist taint – now only a fashionable garment covering a new office
building or department store. Buildings
were to be clothed in glass and/or concrete soaring many stories into the ether
– standing on stilts with a fashionable abstract sculpture and fountain near
the entry. Not unlike the behavior of
Australian aborigines during the era of the cargo cult religion, American architects believed that by imitating
the exterior form of the new architecture as promoted by Corbusier and the
Bauhaus they would gain the cache or “magic” the new forms possessed and in
that way bring about social change - but instead of being incorporated into
designs for factories and working class dormitories the new “style” would be
used to “decorate” the towers of commerce and government for the wealthy and
powerful.[3] Our cities were to be sparkling crystals
rising from what was the ferment of the now discarded and soon to be demolished
historic urban centers.
As historic urban centers began to decay a great exodus of
white middle and upper class families began - to the bourgeois bliss of the horse
car, streetcar and now automobile suburbs.
Financial institutions began “redlining” the now moldering and abandoned
urban neighborhoods shortly after WW2 making it impossible to improve or
maintain the housing stock in these decaying areas. The FHA would not write mortgages for
existing housing downtown so that thousands of soldiers returning from Europe
or the Pacific could not begin families where they had grown up and where their
families still lived. The impotent and politically
unrepresented population of the inner cities were now displaced as their
housing became targets for massive demolition in order to support the rapid
movement of commuters to and from their offices and to accommodate the largest
construction project ever to have been devised: the Interstate Highway System -
those Giedion-Corbusier thruways[4]
envisioned by the wizards of the new reality.
Pharaohnic scale clearance programs begin to clear away the debris and
prepare a clean palette for the designers of both the interstate highway system
and the gleaming glass temples of Commerce.
Now that only the dispossessed and powerless lived downtown, destructive
transportation and development schemes were much easier to realize than if
other more powerful populations still resided in historic inner city
neighborhoods. Enter the Urban Apocalypse
- an era of vast destruction to American cities, causing an instant devaluation
of those already degraded properties under the roaring Giedion-Corbusier throughways
and known by the euphemism: Urban Renewal.
“Traffic engineers and
Corps officials haven't learned these lessons in isolation. Across the country
and across many disciplines, people are re-evaluating post-World War II federal
urban policies that had destructive effects on cities, despite their good
intentions. This destructive legacy has five major ingredients:
•Federal welfare
policy, which undermined city labor markets by paying people not to work and
penalizing them if they did.
•Promulgation of model
zoning codes that criminalized the mixed-use development patterns that were the
norm in traditional American neighborhoods and main streets, replacing them
with the now familiar pattern of sprawl: city housing, office, and retail
separated into pods and sprawled across the land.
•The Federal Housing
Authority created in 1934 helped popularize the low equity mortgage. FHA
subsidized home ownership to millions of Americans - which was great, except
that for many years FHA only subsidized newly constructed homes, meaning you
couldn't use FHA to buy a house in your old neighborhood. FHA also required
race segregation covenants until 1949 and allowed them until 1962.
•The urban renewal program
subsidized wholesale demolition and clearance of urban neighborhoods. In 1945,
many European cities were wastelands. Berlin, for example, was 80 percent
destroyed at the end of the war. Thirty years later, London, Rotterdam, Berlin,
and Hamburg were all rebuilt cities while U.S. cities looked as though World
War II had happened in the United States.
•Welfare, zoning, FHA, and urban renewal all did their
damage, but the most destructive program was the federal government's gross
over-subsidy of high-speed roads that cut through the fabric of U.S. cities.
The federal government paid 90 percent, states 10 percent, and locals 0
percent. This funding mix was so compelling that few cities opposed freeway
construction in the early years of the program.”
[1]
American Architecture and Urbanism, V. Scully, pg. 180
[2] “Central
to the idea of the social condenser is the premise that architecture has the
ability to influence social behavior. The
intention of the social condenser was to influence the design of public spaces,
with a goal of breaking down perceived social hierarchies in an effort to
create socially equitable spaces”. Wikipedia
[3]
Wikipedia, Cargo cult – see metaphorical
uses of the term
[4]
Scully, pg 180 – the full quote expresses the righteous fury of all who understood
the extent and permanence of the losses from both Urban Renewal and the Interstate
Highway System: “The destruction of Pennsylvania Station, Gropius’ own coup de grace to
Park Avenue in the Pan American Building, the abortive attempt on the New Haven
Post Office (to move once again to the provinces), were a few among many
grotesque results of that iconoclastic fury, and to them hecatombs of unnecessary
victims of the Corbusier-Giedion throughways must also be joined”.
