Architecture and Identity

November 24, 2006

Anthony Tung's book Preserving the World's Great Cities is another piece of evidence in my long running argument that questions surrounding cities are best approached through a comparative methodology. In this case the issue is specifically preservation of the cityscape. Tung was a member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and when that ended he traveled to some of the world's cultural capitals, east and west, to see how they went about preserving their own cityscapes. It turns out that cities all over the world.. of whatever religion and heritage.. are facing parallel challenges.

I was also struck by the way an architectural style could be connected to a cultural identity. The most dramatic example of this is Warsaw. In World War II when the Nazis wanted to stamp out not just the Polish nationalist cause, but their very identity, they began to demolish the historically important structures of Warsaw. After the war Poles were faced with a question: how to rebuild. They opted to reconstruct, by means of photographs and maps and memories, in all the historic detail possible, the old Warsaw city center:

Thus the significant buildings, streets, squares, and parks of the past could be remade in the same location they had occupied for centuries. The Germans would not be allowed to steal from Warsaw that specialness of place which constitutes the essence of collective urban memory. [84]

The story is a neat affirmation that identity has markers and that something terrible is lost if the places of a shared public life are destroyed.

In contrast to this extreme care for the past stands the treatment of the traditional cityscape by communists. Tung treats the story of both Moscow and Beijing in one chapter. In both cases a government came to power by means of a revolution, and inherent in that revolution was a judgment of the social organization of the past. Between 1924 and 1940 approximately 50% of the historically significant structures of Moscow were destroyed (155). In summing up the situation in these two cities Tung writes:

...since in both nations Communist revolutionary movements represented an attempt to correct deeply rooted social inequities in which large agrarian populations were exploited by elite consumer cities, Communist policies often had an anti-urban and anti-intellectual bias. At various intervals, the architectural achievements of past generations were associated with rejected historical values. [133]

The important idea here is that architecture has been "associated" with older values. When you think about it, that is odd. One could imagine a revolution in which architectural works were allowed to stand simply for their technical mastery or beauty.. or utility! When changing a society, who cares what the buildings look like? But that is not the way it works historically.. architectural styles are indelibly associated with values.. and they become connected to identities. Who we are is strangely connected to the structures in which we live.

The chapter on Vienna and Amsterdam, bundled together because of underlying similarities, was an example of cultural continuity. The struggle in both these cases was how to make a tradition meet the demands of the modern world, with increased population and new transportation needs. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, a school of architecture arose that modeled a philosophy of continuity. Tung describes the design technique of Otto Wagner:

Wagner believed that architecture should be conceived with regard not only for contemporary functions and technologies... but also for the compositional continuum of the city as a whole, causing the social face of new buildings to act in concert with existing historic structures and spaces to make the city more beautiful. Unlike most other twentieth-century architects, Wagner required his students to draw each building proposal in its urban surroundings, a practice he followed himself. [208]

I could not help but compare that philosophy of continuity with the practice of Frank Gehry, as on display in the documentary The Sketches of Frank Gehry. The point of Bilbao.. or of the Disney Concert Hall in LA.. is not continuity or development of a cityscape.. but a jumpstart of the cityscape. It is as if Gehry and the host city were saying: we have nothing really to offer, no real identity.. but want to make a splash. If one accepts the idea that cultural identity is bound up in architectural style, then it should be clear that designing a building is not about making a splash, but of adding a voice to a community. The architect influenced by Otto Wagner would probably not presume to be able to design something for a distant and foreign city such as Bilbao, Portugal.