Hmm, why didn't I know abut this imagined
Treble Cleft Freeway leading into the Hollywood Bowl..or
Anyway, on to the catch of the day..
Here (page 111-141) in a PDF of a book of selected essays of Charles W Moore, is Moore's seminal, prescient 1965 essay
"You Have to Pay for Public Life"(from Perspecta, the architectural journal of Yale)..
If that goes offline, the complete essay, minus a few sentences, is here :pp 93-103.
Also: 112-141 here some pages missing, including the first (part of which is here).
--
Excerpt:
This issue of Perspecta considers monumental architecture as part of the urban
scene. I was asked to ferret out some on the West Coast, especially in California.
Perspecta’s editors suspected, I presume, that I would discover that in
California there is no contemporary monumental architecture, or that there is
no urban scene (except in a sector of San Francisco), or more probably, that
both monumental architecture and the urban scene are missing. Their suspicions
were well founded; any discussion from California in 1964 about monumental
urban architecture (as it is coming to exist, for instance, in New Haven) is bound
to be less about what we have than about what we have instead.
Any discussion of monumental architecture in its urban setting should
proceed from a definition of (or, if you prefer, an airing of prejudice about)
what constitutes “monumental,” and what “urban” means to us. The two
adjectives are closely related: both of them involve the individual’s giving up
something, space or money or prominence or concern, to the public realm.
Monumentality, I take it, has to do with monuments. And a
monument is an object whose function is to mark a place, either at that place’s
boundary or at its heart. There are, of course, private monuments, over such
places as the graves of the obscure, but to merit our attention here, and to be
of any interest to most of the people who view it, a monument must mark a
place of more than private importance or interest. The act of marking is then a public act, and the act of recognition an expectable public act among the
members of the society which possesses the place. Monumentality, considered
this way, is not a product of compositional techniques (such as symmetry about
several axes), of flamboyance of form, or even of conspicuous consumption of
space, time, or money. It is, rather, a function of the society’s taking possession
of or agreeing upon extraordinarily important places on the earth’s surface,
and of the society’s celebrating their pre-eminence.
A version of this agreement and this celebration was developed by Jose
Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses, into a definition of urbanity itself.
“The urbs or polis,” he says, “starts by being an empty space, the forum, the
agora, and all the rest is just a means of fixing that empty space, of limiting its
outlines. The square, thanks to the walls that enclose it, is a portion of the countryside which turns its back on the rest, eliminates the rest, and sets up in opposition to it.
Ortega y Gasset’s product is the city, the urban unit based upon the
Mediterranean open square, a politically as well as physically comprehensible
unit that people used to be willing to die for. The process of achieving an
urban focus is the same as that of achieving monumentality: it starts with
the selection, by some inhabitants, of a place which is to be of particular
importance, and continues when they invest that place with attributes of
importance, such as edges or some kind of marker. This process, the establishing
of cities and the marking of important places, constitutes most of the physical
part of establishing civilization. Charles Eames has made the point that the crux
of this civilizing process is the giving up by individuals of something in order
that the public realm may be enhanced. In the city, that is to say, urban and
monumental places, indeed urbanity and monumentality themselves, can occur
only when something is given over by people to the public.
Planners have a way of starting every speech by articulating their
(private) discovery that the public body’s chief concern is people. The speech
then says unrelatedly that it’s too bad the sprawling metropolis is so formless.
It might well be that if the shibboleth about people were turned inside out,
if planning efforts went toward enlarging people’s concerns—and sacrifices—
for the public realm, that the urban scene would more closely approach the
planners’ vision, and that the pleasures of the people would be better served.
The most evident thing about Los Angeles, especially, and the other
new cities of the West is that in the terms of any of the traditions we have inherited, hardly anybody gives anything to the public realm. Instead, it is
not at all clear what the public realm consists of, or even, for the time being,
who needs it. What is clear is that civic amenities of the sort architects think
of as “monumental,” which were highly regarded earlier in the century, are
of much less concern today. A frivolous but pointed example is the small city
of Atascadero, which lies in a particularly handsome coastal valley between
Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was first developed in the ‘20s as a realestate
venture with heavy cultural overtones and extensive architectural
amplification. Extraordinarily ambitious “monumental” architecture popped
up all over the townsite. Buildings of a vague Italian Romanesque persuasion
with a classic revival touch, symmetrical about several axes, faced onto wide
malls punctuated or terminated by Canovesque sculpture groups. The effect
was undeniably grand, if a bit surreal, exploiting wide grassy vistas among
the dense California oaks. But there wasn’t much of a town until the ‘40s.
Then, on the major mall, an elaborately sunken panel of irrigated green, there
cropped up a peninsula of fill surmounted by a gas station. Later, there came
another, and more recently an elevated freeway has continued the destruction
of the grand design. All this has happened during the very period in which
Philadelphians, with staggering energy and expense, have been achieving
in their Center City long malls north from Independence Hall and west from
a point just off their City Hall, grand vistas at every scale, an architectural
expression overwhelmingly serene, all urban desiderata which the Atascaderans
did not especially want or need, and have been blithely liquidating. Doesn’t
this liquidation constitute some sort of crime against the public? Before we
start proceedings, we should consider what the public realm is, or rather,
what it might be in California now and during the decades ahead, so that the
“monumentality” and the “urbanity” that we seek may be appropriate as
functions of our own society and not of some other one.
In California cities, as in new cities all over the country (and in
California just about all cities are new cities), the pattern of buildings on the
land is as standard as it is explosive. Everywhere near population centers, new
little houses surrounded by incipient lawns appear. They could be said to be at
the edge of the city, except that there is no real edge, thanks to the speed of
growth, the leapfrogging of rural areas, and the long commercial fingers thatfollow the highways out farther than the houses have yet reached. Meanwhile,
in areas not much older, houses are pulled down as soon as zoning regulations
allow, to be replaced with apartments whose only amenity is a location handily
near a garage in the basement.
The new houses are separate and private, it has been pointed out:
islands, alongside which are moored the automobiles that take the inhabitants
off to other places. It might be more useful and more accurate to note that
the houses and the automobiles are very much alike, and that each is very like
the mobile homes which share both their characteristics. All are fairly new,
and their future is short; all are quite standard, but have allowed their buyers
the agonies of choice, demonstrating enough differences so that they can
readily be identified during the period of ownership, and so that the sense of
privacy is complete, in the car as well as in the house. This is privacy with at
least psychic mobility. The houses are not tied down to any place much more
than the trailer homes are, or the automobiles. They are adrift in the suburban
sea, not so mobile as the cars, but just as unattached. They are less islands
alongside which the cars are moored than little yachts, dwarfed by the great
chrome-trimmed dinghys that seek their lee.
This is, after all, a floating world in which a floating population can
island-hop with impunity; one need almost never go ashore. There are the
drive-in banks, the drive-in movies, the drive-in shoe repair. There is even, in
Marin County, Frank Lloyd Wright’s drive-in Civic Center, a structure of major
biographical and perhaps historical importance, about whose forms a great
deal of surprisingly respectful comment has already appeared in the press.
Here, for a county filling up with adjacent and increasingly indistinguishable
suburban communities, quite without a major center, was going to be the
center for civic activities, the public realm, one would have supposed, for which
a number of public-spirited leaders in the community had fought long and
hard. It might have been, to continue our figure, a sort of dock to which our
floating populace might come, monumental in that it marked a special place
which was somewhere and which, for its importance, was civic if not urban. But
instead of a dock for floating suburbanites, it is just another ship, much larger
than most, to be sure, and presently beached (wedged, in fact) between two
hills. It demands little of the people who float by, and gives them little back. allows them to penetrate its interior from a point on its underside next to the
delivery entrance, but further relations are discouraged, and lingering is most
often the result of inability to find the exit.
A monster of equivalent rootlessness hoves into view from the freeway entrance to California's one established anchored city, San Francisco. The immense new Federal Building just being completed by John Carl Warnecke and a host of associated architects, stands aloof from the city's skyline, out of scale with it, unrelated to anything in the topography, no part even of the grandiose civic center nearby.
Slick details, giant fountains, and all, it draws back from the street and just stands there. It is one of the West's largest filing cabinets, and it is unfair, of course, to expect from it any attributes of the public realm for it, some distant bureaucrats would spitefully have removed it to Oakland. So much for the Federal Heart of the City.
...It is interesting, if not useful, to consider where one would go in Los
Angeles to have an effective revolution of the Latin American sort: presumably,
that place would be the heart of the city. If one took over some public
square, some urban open space in Los Angeles, who would know? A march on
City Hall would be equally inconclusive. The heart of the city would have to be
sought elsewhere. The only hope would seem to be to take over the freeways,
or to emplane for New York to organize sedition on Madison Avenue; word
would quickly enough get back..
...More recent years have their monuments as well. Indeed, by
almost any conceivable method of evaluation that does not exclude the
public, Disneyland must be regarded as the most important single piece of
construction in the West in the past several decades. The assumption inevitably
made by people who have not yet been there—that it is some sort of physical
extension of Mickey Mouse—is wildly inaccurate. Instead, singlehanded, it
is engaged in replacing many of those elements of the public realm which
have vanished in the featureless private floating world of southern California,
whose only edge is the ocean, and whose center is otherwise undiscoverable
(unless by our revolution test it turns out to be on Manhattan Island).
Curiously, for a public place, Disneyland is not free. You buy tickets at the gate.
But then, Versailles cost someone a great deal of money, too. Now, as then,
you have to pay for the public life.
Disneyland, it appears, is enormously important and successful just
because it recreates all the chances to respond to a public environment, which
Los Angeles particularly does not any longer have. It allows play-acting, both to
be watched and to be participated in, in a public sphere. In as unlikely a place
as could be conceived, just off the Santa Ana Freeway, a little over an hour
from the Los Angeles City Hall, in an unchartable sea of suburbia, Disney has
created a place, indeed a whole public world, full of sequential occurrences,
of big and little drama, of hierarchies of importance and excitement, with
opportunities to respond at the speed of rocketing bobsleds (or rocketing
rockets, for all that) or of horse-drawn street cars. An American Main Street
of about 1910 is the principal theme, against which play fairy-tale fantasies,
frontier adventure situations, jungles, and the world of tomorrow. And all this
diversity, with unerring sensitivity, is keyed to the kind of participation without
embarrassment which apparently at this point in our history we crave. (This is
not the point, nor am I the appropriate critic, to analyze our society’s notions
of entertainment, but certainly a civilization whose clearest recent image
of feminine desirability involves scantily dressed and extravagantly formed
young ladies—occasionally with fur ears—who disport themselves with wildest
abandon in gaudily make-believe bordellos, while they perforce maintain
the deportment of vestal virgins—certainly a civilization which seeks this sort
of image is in need of pretty special entertainment.) No raw edges spoil the picture at Disneyland; everything is as immaculate as in the musical comedy
villages that Hollywood has provided for our viewing pleasure for the last three
generations. Nice-looking, handsomely costumed young people sweep away
the gum wrappers almost before they fall to the spotless pavement. Everything
works, the way it doesn’t seem to any more in the world outside. As I write this,
Berkeley, which was the proud recipient not long ago of a set of fountains in
the middle of its main street, where interurbans once had run and cars since
had parked, has announced that the fountains are soon being turned off for
good, since the chief public use developed for them so far as been to put
detergent in them, and the city cannot afford constantly to clean the pipes. Life
is not like that in Disneyland; it is much more real: fountains play, waterfalls
splash, tiny bulbs light the trees at night, and everything is clean....
Of course Disneyland, in spite of the skill and variety of its
enchantments, does not offer the full range of public experience. The political
experience, for instance, is not manifested here, and the place would not pass
our revolution test. Yet there is a variety of forms and activities great enough
to ensure an excellent chance that the individual visitor will find something
to identify with. A strong contrast is the poverty or absurdity of single images
offered up by architects, presumably as part of an elaborate (and expensive) ingroup
professional joke. The brown-derby-shaped Brown Derbies of an earlier
generation, which at least were recognizable by the general public, have given
way to such phenomena as the new Coachella Valley Savings and Loan in Palm
Springs which rises out of vacant lots to repeat Niemeyer’s Palace of the Dawn,
in Brasilia. Across the street from this, a similar institution pays similar in-group
tribute to Ronchamp. The most conspicuous entry in this category of searches
after monumentality, though, is architect Edward Durrell Stone’s revisitation
of Mussolini’s Third Rome in Beverly Hills. This one has plants growing out of
each aerial arch. Apparently there was a plethora of these arches, for they crop
up again along Wilshire Boulevard, as far away as Westwood Village without,
however, contributing much continuity to that thoroughfare...
...A chain of Disneylands would have a disquieting effect not unlike
that of the new transcontinental chains of identical motels that weigh the
tired traveler with the hopelessness of driving all day to arrive at a place just
like the one he started from. One can hope, too, for the day when the gradual
loss of differentiated place, the gradual merging of the gray no-places and
the inundation of the places of special significance, will cause the slumbering
citizenry to awaken, to demand to spend its money to have a public life. But it
seems unwise to wait for that.
Right now the largest single patron available to be pressed into
the service of the public realm is the State Highway Department. Freeways
until now have been one of the most serious generalizers of place in the
state, ruthlessly and thoughtlessly severing some communities, congesting
others, and obliterating still others, marring, gouging, and wiping out whole
landscapes. Yet, for all that, they loom large in the public eye as one of the
biggest, strongest, most exciting, and most characteristic elements of the
new California. If one had to name the center of southern California, it would
surely be the place not far from the Los Angeles City Hall where the area’s
major freeways wrap together in a graceful, strong, and much photographed
three-level interchange (in the photographs, the tower of the City Hall rises
through the distant smog). Much of the public excitement about San Francisco’s
small dramatic skyline is a function of the capacity to see it, a capacity which is
greatly enhanced by the bridges (themselves major California monuments), by
the freeways that lead to them, and now by the freeway that comes up from
the south and breaks through the hills in the nick of time for a magnificent
view of San Francisco. Indeed, in San Francisco as in few places, the view which
gives a sense of the whole city is one of the most valuable parts of the public
realm, one of the parts that is most frequently attacked and must be most
zealously defended. One of the public views’ most effective defenders could
be the freeway builders, though admittedly, they have more often acted as saboteurs, as when they tried and partly succeeded, in San Francisco, in building
a freeway wall between the city and the bay.
I am writing this in Guanajuato, a middle-sized town in the middle
of Mexico, crammed into a narrow canyon, with just two narrow streets (one
up and one down) in the bottom of the canyon, and with a maze of stepped
pedestrian ways climbing up the canyon’s slopes through the most remorselessly
picturesque townscape this side of Greece. Under this runs a river, which used
to inundate the city from time to time. Ten years ago a suburban portion
of the river was still further depressed, and its former bed was lined with a
handsome pink stone to serve as a canyon for cars, moving downhill above
the river. Now, in a bold project happily called “the urbanization of the river,”
this development is being continued through the center of the town to let the
river run with cars as well as water, sometimes behind buildings, sometimes
under the ancient vaults over which the buildings of the town center spanned
the river bed. None of the picturesque eighteenth-century delights is being
threatened; a whole new twentieth-century layer of visual delights, at the
scale of the automobile, is being added instead. The urbanity that results from
this enlargement of the public realm is even more striking than the visual
charm. The pedestrian spaces remain undefiled, even unattacked, while cars
grind below, as in a miniature of a Hugh Ferris City of the Future that loses,
miraculously, none of the delights of the past.
Guanajuato should offer us some lessons. The cities of California
are much bigger, broader, and grayer, but then their budgets are larger, too
(especially the items for freeway construction). They urgently need attention,
before the characteristics that distinguish them at all are obliterated. There is
no need and no time to wait for a not-yet-existent Establishment to build us
the traditional kind of monuments or for a disaster gripping enough to wake
the public conscience to the vanishing Places of the public realm we got for
free. Most effectively, we might, as architects, first seek to develop a vocabulary
of forms responsive to the marvelously complex and varied functions of our
society, instead of continuing to impose the vague generalizations with which
we presently add to the grayness of the suburban sea. Then, we might start
sorting out for our special attention those things for which the public has to pay, from which might derive the public life. These things would not be the
city halls and equestrian statues of another place and time, but had better be
something far bigger and better, and of far more public use. They might, for
instance, be freeways: freeways are not for individual people, like living rooms
are and like confused planners would have you believe the whole city ought
to be; they are for the public use, a part of the public realm; and if the fidgety
structures beside them and the deserts for parking—or for nothing—under
them don’t yet make sense, it is surely because there has so far been too little
provision for and contribution to and understanding of the public realm, not
too much. The freeways could be the real monuments of the future, the places
set aside for special celebration by people able to experience space and light
and motion and relationships to other people and things at a speed that so
far only this century has allowed. Here are structures big enough and strong
enough, once they are regarded as a part of the city, to re-excite the public
imagination about the city. This is no shame to be covered by suburban bushes
or quarantined behind cyclone fences. It is the marker for a place set in motion,
transforming itself to another place. The exciting prospects, not surprisingly,
show up best at Disneyland. There, on the inside of the Matterhorn from the
aerial tramway over the bobsled run on the inside of the plastic mountain,
is a vision of a place marked out for the public life, of a kind of rocketing
monumentality, more dynamic, bigger, and, who knows? even more useful to
people and the public than any the world has seen yet.
Link, p 111-141
