Coda: the Value of Architecture

A General Theory of Value, Coda .......Page 11–1 Not to be duplicated or cited without author's permission. THE VALUE OF ARCHITECTURE being the Coda of A General Theory of Value © 2003, Michael Benedikt We have been engaged in what could fairly be described as a study of the architecture of value—with "architecture" understood quite abstractly. Here, in the Coda, we turn to the value of architecture quite literally. Our question: can the theory of value developed in this book shed light upon how architecture is valued?—and, by extension, how the whole designed, built, and landscaped physical world is valued? Or ought to be? We ask because around the world the quality of buildings and the condition of the physical environment is for the most part lamentable and on the whole getting worse. At the beginning of the 21st century, several overlapping factors can be listed as contributing to this trend: • continued rapid population growth in and around cities, causing crowding and over-stressing all physical and legal infrastructures; • powerful market forces, intensified by globalization, riding roughshod over traditional practices, values, and uses of the land; • distraction by the mass media and by other technologically-assisted entertainments and communication systems; • a general lack of understanding of the kind of good that (good) architecture is, and the value of what it does for everyone, not just for elites; A General Theory of Value, Coda .......Page 11–2 • people's passion for individual freedom over liberty—freedom in the form of physical mobility, job opportunity, experiential variety, "better deals," and greater consumer choice...at almost all costs; • citizen reluctance to pay (and government reluctance to dedicate) the tax monies required to create and keep public buildings in good repair and civic spaces a reason for pride; • the values, doctrines, and strategies of architects, engineers, and other design professionals throughout the latter part of the 20th century attempting to respond to above conditions—but exacerbating them instead. In this chapter, we will look into all of these issues and more. I will suggest that turning people's attention to the quality of the designed environment and raising their level of ambition with regard to it would do far more than effect healing or repair of the physical environment. It would unleash a period of general economic prosperity the likes of which the world has seldom seen. So large are the number and types of skills involved in making fine buildings and landscapes, so engrossing is the task, so universal and yet local are the opportunities, and so literally as well as symbolically constructive is the creation of architecture, that architecture—and environmental improvement generally—adopted as a cultural project and encouraged as an economic activity, could be redemptive at a national if not global scale—a source of peace, prosperity and justice in the process; a source of pleasure and beauty in the result. This, at least, is what I am going to argue. But let's start at the beginning, with... I. The Problem The American reader who began with this Coda might wonder what the problem is. After all, who does not value architecture highly (and beautiful streets and parks too)? Take Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Water" house in Pennsylvania, the Library of Congress building in Washington D.C., the late great World Trade Center, the Guggenheim Museum, or the Chrysler or Empire State buildings in New York; the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, for gosh' sake)...these A General Theory of Value, Coda .......Page 11–3 buildings are paragons of value by almost any measure, and there are dozens more like them around America. Indeed there are hundreds. Hardly a town cannot boast of some buildings that are admirable—a church here, an office building there, a campus building, a bank, a house, a courthouse, even a water-tower. Large cities, of course, can boast of more: old and new neighborhoods with million-dollar houses, and scores upon scores of structures that have some scale, and style, and importance as landmarks. In workmanship, materials, engineering, and design, all of these buildings are "better than they have to be" and "cost a bundle." In a word, they are architecture, whether they earned a page in some history of architecture book or not. And how enviable is the working life of the average architect. What is there to complain about here? Relative to other occupations, do architects not enjoy considerable social status, nice incomes,1 safe and pleasant working conditions, long professional careers, higher-than-average opportunities to be creative, and the certainty—a certainty that few other professionals can feel—that their work will leave a lasting mark on the world? What more could one want from a career? For these and other reasons, not since the 1940s has there been less than a crush of students wanting to get into architecture schools in North America (and around the world), despite entrance standards that are regularly among the highest of all university departments. All this, I imagine, is what a reader who opened this book with this Coda, could reasonably think. But those who have made their way here through previous chapters might also have reasons for wondering what the problem is. Given the serious difficulties that still face humanity—poverty, hunger, disease, ignorance, injustice, inequality, violence, environmental destruction, political chicanery, terrorism, unfair taxes, etc., etc.—why would anyone but a spoiled and officious minority care one way or another whether the art of architecture—over and above making safe and serviceable buildings—was alive and well and properly valued by all? Perhaps (goes the objection) democratic societies have overvalued architecture for too long already, a hold-over from bad old aristocratic times. After all, if a country's people are generally healthy, prosperous, and free, what does it matter if their landscape is tough and scruffy? What does it matter if their cities become sprawling agglomerations of highways and whatever-won't- literally-fall-down? Would one rather be sick, poor, or subjugated among the stately avenues of A General Theory of Value, Coda .......Page 11–4 a Paris or Prague or Washington D.C.? Beautiful buildings, beautiful streets, parks, monuments, etc., are luxury goods. They always were and always will be; and good for everybody, to some extent, only because they generate tourism dollars. And besides, if beauty lies in the eye of the beholder (as it surely does), who is to say that the run-down, honky-tonk, or super-efficient, one-size-fits-all edifices of our day are not as beautiful in their own way as the structures of any place or era? I have presented two groups of possible responses to my opening-for-discussion of the question of architecture's value. They are, in summary: (1) There is no cause for concern since there is quite enough architecture to go around already and no shortage of happy, well-compensated architects to provide more when we want it. And (2), even if there isn't much good architecture around by some mandarin measure, who cares? It's a free country. We have (most of us) more serious problems—or at least better things to do with our time and money than to invest in producing refined "architectural pleasures," or to spend in enjoying them. Spending the next few pages on both of these responses will take us to the heart of our subject matter. There is, in fact, a dire shortage of buildings and places in America worthy of being called "good," or "architecture." Look around at the condition of the bulk of our urban and suburban landscape; or read writers like Edward Relph or James Howard Kunstler to experience the shock of recognition: America (is in) a crisis of the human habitat: cities ruined by corporate gigantism and abstract renewal schemes, public buildings and public spaces unworthy of human affection, vast sprawling suburbs that lack any sense of community, housing that the un-rich cannot afford to live in, a slavish obeisance to the needs of automobiles and their dependent industries at the expense of (other) human needs, and a gathering ecological calamity that we have only begun to measure.2 Outside of its wealthy and (usually) historic enclaves, the American built environment is hostile to inhabitation: angry freeways ploughing through wastelands of space; thousands upon thousands of derelict and abandoned buildings (with new ones well on their way to joining them); urban parks that are little more than weed patches with broken swings and a concrete basketball "court;" countrysides that are fenced, billboarded, and littered all the way to the A General Theory of Value, Coda .......Page 11–5 national park gates; shopping malls with forty-foot-high blank walls turned to their lake-sized, half-empty parking lots; suburban high schools that are hard to distinguish from minimum-security prisons...and almost everywhere that people work the same water coolers, the same over-recycled air, the same squeezed-down, fluorescent-blasted "office landscapes" of plastic and metal, with the real landscape—such as it is, crisscrossed by wires and poles—glimpsed remotely through darkened glass. Not just in its crumbling older bridges and roads but in its newer buildings and streetscapes everywhere, America is a broken-down place, hard and cheap and scrappy, and becoming more so each year as its better-off citizens, cocooning themselves in their leathered SUVs and home-theaters, communicate by cell phone to meet in themed restaurants at coordinated times.

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