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The Beautiful City
eautiful is not what springs immediately to mind when one thinks about Twentieth Century cities like New York or Los Angeles. No, the images are those of schizophrenic or alcoholic bums on the sidewalk, gangs as ruthless and barbaric as any ancient Vandal or Visigoth, and oppressive, monotonous monoliths that leave the streets in perpetual shade. The pungent aroma of ozone and diesel fumes attacks the nasal passages and makes the eyes water. Gridlock. Stress. Serial murder. Cannibalism. Conspicuous consumption next to burned-out, desolate wastelands. But we need not accept this condition. After all, we built it. We can build it anew. And we must build it anew if we are to satisfy the ideal of aesthetics, and to guarantee every citizen a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There is very little happiness evident in modern life in the city. And the murder of innocent citizens denies them the right to life. This much must be obvious.
A Theory of Aesthetics
eauty is intelligible novelty. In order for there to be intelligible novelty, there must first be recognition, i.e., some level of familiarity and expectation. The information lies in the novel or surprising details within this overall pattern of recognition. The setup for a joke presents one expectation, which the punchline contradicts. It is the unpredictability in a relationship that keeps it going. If total predictability sets in, the friendship or relationship wanes. That is why our best friends are people who make us laugh, or think, even if we seem to have nothing in common. Most of us love sunsets, surf, forests, mountains, the Sonoran Desert, and clouds, because we all have a certain level of expectation and familiarity with these things, yet there is variety in the details.
esthetics is whatever we do to not-be-bored. Sex, food, getting warmed up or cooled down, or coming in out of the rain, can all provide a moment of pleasure. But once the need is satisfied, we are satiated. We are never satiated with aesthetic pleasure. The First Law of Aesthetics is that Aesthetic pleasure is intelligible novelty.
Architecture
rom the First Law of Aesthetics, we can immediately conclude that the endlessly repeated, identical, rectangular window treatments on 20th Century High-Rise boxes represent the nadir of aesthetic sensibility. Such buildings hold no more aesthetic interest than a shoebox. So city-dwellers hurry along, eyes on the ground. Only tourists look up at the forest of towers, impressed by their sheer size, if nothing else.
t may be hard to find rules for beauty, but it is not hard to find rules for monotony. The relentless application of any geometric rule (such as the rule of plumb and horizontal lines meeting at right angles, common to domestic architecture) must lead to monotony. Even with row houses, each house can be differentiated by color, as they are in Amsterdam. As Jane Jacobs has pointed out, row houses with a mix of offices, businesses, and walk up apartments along a curving street, with wide sidewalks, stoops, and trees...well, this is paradise for human beings. The front surface of each row house need not be flat. It could have a subtle "bay window" effect. While such apartments would have a freight elevator in the back (which many tenants would use), the height of such buildings will rarely exceed five or six floors, because that is as much as most people would care to climb. Surprisingly enough, this kind of architecture provides the maximum number of households per acre, 100-200, better than high rises, and of course, far better than the 3 households per acre in suburbia. A great city is designed for walking, which means it must be compact, and not allowed to sprawl all over the landscape.
he endless repetition of rectangular window units is not only boring, it makes it impossible to see the entire building as a single shape. Near the Battery Park, on the tip of Manhattan, there is a cylindrical skyscraper which avoids any window treatment and thus becomes a single sculpture. The reflective glass curtain wall has an attractive blue color. Unfortunately, more boxes have been built around it, somewhat hiding its beauty. The Dallas skyline features many "sculptural" skyscrapers, which make for an attractive skyline. I am not suggesting that skyscrapers are inherently bad, or that we should pull them down. But new cities may be built in a new way.
ith the dawn of the 21st Century, we see a new kind of aesthetics being developed on computers, which really does succeed in escaping the box. See "The Sky Line; Building on a Computer Screen," by Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker, March 12, 2001. The new software not only allows the architect to freely create non-rectagular three-dimensional shapes, it also does the engineering. It was exactly this kind of software that allowed the engineering of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which may very well be the forerunner of a whole new and distinctive 21st Century architecture.
Human Factors
rchitecture should be restful; it should make solitude or gregariousness equally possible. Architecture has an enormous, unrecognized influence on social life. The pleasure we find in friends is aesthetic pleasure. It ultimately boils down to intelligible novelty. It makes one day at work different from another. In a happy office, there is a kaleidoscope of human relationships, which change from day to day. The difference between a happy office and one where people are sullen and glum often depends on the precise layout of each floor, and the positioning of break rooms, coffee machines, copiers, elevators, the use of glass walls (with shades), and the flow of human traffic. All these architectural details determine whether it is easy or hard to meet others, and whether it is easy or hard to have any solitude.
n some office buildings, there are whole floors of desks, without partitions. No solitude. In others, there is a maze of corridors, with nothing but closed doors and no way to orient oneself as to direction. No human contact. Such buildings are machines built for machines. But contrary to the Bauhaus school of architecture, we are not machines.
Urban Design
he principle of intelligible novelty can be applied to the layout of entire cities. At least until 1965, Paris consisted in row houses, for the most part. Only a few special buildings, such as the Notre Dame cathedral, were freestanding. Some features of Paris simply grew, without plan, giving us the narrow, winding streets that remain from Medieval times.
ome features of interesting cities were consciously superimposed on a chaotic Medieval pattern, for instance, the broad, tree-lined boulevards radiating from a central traffic circle that we find in Paris. The combination works beautifully. We want some order, and some disorder. We want some planning, and some things we want to leave to the accidents of time or topography. Seattle and San Francisco are interesting cities partly because they are built on steep hills, around irregular bodies of water. While freeways may go slashing through, ignoring topography, the ordinary residential street does not.
ity planning produces brutally monotonous designs, but not if we made the Ideal of Intelligible Novelty our highest priority. It applies to the design of cities, to the design of buildings, and to the layout of offices. This is the Ideal of the Beautiful City.
Cars, Dogs or People
ne can design a city for people, which gives us 1965 Paris, a city of row houses with interesting architectural details. Or we can design it for dogs, which gives us the typical suburb, three households per acre, to permit the backyards full of yapping dogs, bored, ignored, with nothing their breed was bred to do. Or we can design it for cars, which gives us Los Angeles, where no one walks, where no one knows their neighbors.
y rule about pets would be that they have to stay indoors, and they can be taken outside only in one of those airline pet carriers. No dogs on leashes. Dog owners must have indoor doggie toilets, with swinging doors that the dog can push through. While in the dog toilet, an electric fan quietly vents odors out of doors. After the dog leaves, it flushes. Such a dog toilet would cost at least $1000 and must be installed by a plumber. Dogs could be trained to use it. Perhaps there would be enclosed dog parks where the dogs are allowed to run free. Do I dislike dogs? Yes, I have to admit, I do. I walk every day; I used to cycle every day, and my greatest enemy in both exercises is the dog. Why do people keep dogs? Some breeds were created for hunting, others for herding animals, but neither activity is part of our life today. If people must have dogs, they must be required to keep them indoors, where they cannot kill toddlers, or keep the neighborhood awake at night with their aimless barking.
Dangerous Dogs
reeds of dogs that are known to have killed human beings I would ban altogether, not only from the enclosed metroplex, but from every town or city or suburb. They might be allowed in rural areas. I do not subscribe to the "vicious dog" theory or the "vicious breed" theory. The rules of behavior are exactly the same for all members of the canine species, whether wolf, coyote or dog. Every canine is friendly, gentle and tolerant with its own pack, but with any living creature not of its pack, if its anger exceeds its fear, it will attack. Dog owners never seem to understand this. They think just because it is gentle with its own pack (made up of humans and other pets), it will be gentle with everyone. Not so. A ferocious wolf will allow the puppies to step on him, pounce on his tail, or pull his ears. But let a stranger approach, and it is all fury.
he factors that influence fear and anger are also the same for all canines. Canines are territorial. Any living thing not in its pack which invades its territory makes it angry. As for fear, canines are more afraid of adults than of children, and they are more afraid of humans standing their ground than ones that run. Thus, the very first thing my Daddy taught me about dogs, was "never run from one." Even a child is unlikely to be attacked if it stands still.
o why single out certain breeds of dog to be banished from urban or suburban precincts? Merely because of their size and strength. These are the breeds that are large and strong enough to kill a human being, and that includes Rotweilers, Dobermans, pit bulls, bulldogs, and the larger breeds of Shepherds and Hounds. Miniature poodles are just as likely to attack a stranger child who runs from them. It is just that miniature breeds are too small to do much damage. I might mention that there are breeds of large dogs which have never harmed people, probably because they were bred to be retrievers, rather than hunters.
Civilization and Permanence
s Lord Clark said, "Civilisation has something to do with permanence." This leads me to wonder whether we have as yet built an American civilization. As Lord Clark said, we still live in wigwams, which I take to mean, wood frame houses, with wood or asphalt shingles, paperboard sidings, plastic doodads on the windows, and everything else required to make a house unlivable in about thirty years. Civilization requires some confidence in the future, and some care about our great-grandkids great-grandkids. Perhaps we haven't achieved that. But we should. I propose to make it a law that everything non-consumable be designed to last forever, given the prescribed maintenance and repair. This is particularly necessary for buildings, roads and bridges. Thus, build houses and buildings out of galvanized steel, use galvanized steel sheeting, use brick, glass, bronze or stone for the exterior, and roof it in ceramic tiles, bronze sheeting, slate, or metal. There is a new type of metal roofing which looks like slate. This might make houses more expensive, but so what? They would last forever, and be passed down, generation to generation.
Every city should be built to withstand the destructive forces of that region. On the West Coast, that means they should be earthquake proof. In Tornado Alley, cities must be tornado proof, all the way up to F5 tornados. In addition, they must be able to withstand straight line gusts of 95 mph, and softball sized hail. Along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, cities must be hurricane proof, all the way up to F5 hurricanes.
Great Cities and Metaphysics
have one last point to make about the beautiful city and about utopian analysis in general. In this book we find a rational, non-metaphysical approach to social problems. However, no great civilization has ever existed without a great metaphysics to go with it. Nor has there ever been a grand architecture without metaphysics. Can we imagine the great monuments of Ancient Egypt or Medieval Europe without the spiritual beliefs and energy that went into them? Therefore, utopian analysis cannot answer all questions, and does not suffice for a peak civilization. For that we must turn to the science of metaphysics, based on reproducible mystical states and on symbolic revelation.
See Evidence of Mind and Soul. There we will find a spiritual basis for aesthetics, which does not contradict what is said here, but goes beyond it. The mandala technique can be applied to all the arts, including architecture and music, resulting in buildings that are double curved and unique, covered in brilliantly colored tiles...in other words, a city which is the exact opposite of 20th Century cities, in every way.
Copyright © Dr.H 2003
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