Over at The Independent, Holly Williams has a candid and entertaining interview with legendary architect (but don’t call him a “star-chitect”) Frank Gehry. Despite his advancing age (he’s currently 80) Gehry is still full of opinions about the state of architecture and urban planning. Among the more colorful views he shared was:
Other [criticisms of his work] are a little harder to dismiss – or at least they rile him rather more. Shouldn’t he make some more socially relevant buildings? Aren’t his designs too extravagant? Times are tough, after all. This lights the touchpaper as effectively as the s-word. “We are architects … We serve customers!” he barks. “I can’t just decide myself what’s being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them. Look, I went to city planning school at Harvard and I discovered that you never got to change a f-cking thing or do anything. Urban planning is dead in the U.S.”
Putting aside the statement’s context, we felt it was worth it to consider this last comment at face value. Is urban planning in fact dead in the U.S.?
Short answer: No, but it has some serious health problems. When you consider the massive projects in areas like Tysons Corner and the efforts of New York’s Janette Sadik-Khan, it’s clear that innovation in urban planning hasn’t entirely met its demise — though granted, there are certainly problems with our accepted paradigms for city planning, such as the idea that cars should be the locus of urban design. Of course, from a bird’s eye view (or architect’s eye, as the case may be) the micro aspects of change may be more difficult than the macro. Still, while Gehry may have been thwarted on plenty of occasions, we don’t think it’s time to throw in the towel on U.S. urban planning just yet.
December 17th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Planning is dead only in the minds of architects because architects plan in a bubble. Case and point Mr. Gehry, your monstrosity at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Yes it garnered much attention and praise from the upper crust of New York but in reality hardly anyone in Brooklyn liked the idea. After all downtown Brooklyn is not and never will be Midtown Manhattan.
So Mr. Gehry if planning is dead then why did your Atlantic Yards project get shot down? Oh that’s right because of community development efforts from the local activist organizations, a subject that is focused on within urban planning programs. Oh silly architects, you should be worried. After all, once Urban Design becomes mainstream than we won’t have any use for you.
December 17th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Only an egomaniac would think Gehry’s stylistic contributions to pop culture make a bigger difference than writing the laws that guide development. Please.
Hey Frank, the feeling is mutual. Sincerely, urban planners of America.
December 17th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
I agree, urban planning is almost dead. What urban planners approved such sprawl development across the US? Puerto Rico is a disaster thanks to this lack of vision, but did anyone ask an urban planner a second opinion before turning this island into highway city?
The answer is no, btw… =P
December 17th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
[...] for the kind words, Frank. Infrastructurist chimes in with their thoughts: Is urban planning in fact dead in the [...]
December 17th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
I’m an architect from Mexico, here many times the planners, have looked the US cities as an example of well done urban planning. I’m not an especialist but I think the spirit of innovation that time ago caracterized the US planners work, is absent in the way that are facing the new chalenges of cities.
December 17th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
I agree with JL. This statement is completely absurd in the context of the Atlantic Yards project, which he designed.
A high-rise commercial development in Brooklyn makes absolutely no sense from any angle, and was extremely unpopular with the area’s residents. The development would have made much more sense in Manhattan, Jersey City, or Newark (where it would have been vastly cheaper and less controversial)
December 18th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Actually, Downtown Brooklyn is a larger job center than either Jersey City or Newark.
Don’t distract from the issue. If the city had sold Ratner the property at half price and leveled multiple blocks for him to build brownstones, it would have been just as bad as leveling multiple blocks for him to build high-rise projects.
December 18th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
I don’t think planning is dead, but I do think that the field suffers from a couple of chronic maladies. I believe that Gehry is referring to professional planning practice here, as opposed to bottom-up community driven grassroots efforts. My take is that the urban planning profession has done a lousy job of articulating to the public at large what exactly it is and what principles it stands for, collectively. This is complicated by our fragmented land use regime in the US and a nearly complete lack of regional planning, despite the fact that regions (rather than individual municipalities) are the scale that probably matters most. The United States is a country with a built-in mistrust of government at all levels, and this makes effective public sector planning excruciatingly difficult as planners are considered “the man” rather than a partner to collaborate with. This is the profession’s own fault as the failed urban renewal schemes of years past really wrecked its reputation. Lack of public profile and understanding + US cultural issues + hands tied due to past planning disasters = what Gehry is trying to get at, IMO. And FWIW I work as a planner.
December 18th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
If you want good public transportation, the best thing to do is eliminate city planning. Their regulations are the ones that destroy the utlity of public transportation: they tell you what you can build, where, how much square feet you can devote to what type of construction, they mandate street parking, parking garages, and car accommodation.
The reality is that accommodating cars is EXPENSIVE. If we never had to accommodate such wastes of space, and we were allowed to build what we felt was most needed wherever we felt it was most useful, then cars would practically disappear from urban landscapes.
December 18th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Heh. There is no singular “we” in urban politics. There are only competing interests. One “we” always wants another “we” to stay the hell away from them, while yet a third “we” finds that themselves forced to absorb the externalities of the policies that benefit the first two “wes” while getting few or none of the benefits of those policies. And this, David, is why planning is necessary.
December 18th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Danny, what you say about public transportation was true 70 years ago. Since then, the government has spent so much on roads that additional capacity can be profitable to the private sector. In fact the primary road boosters today are people who want to operate privatized toll roads (with the assumption that local governments will keep paving local streets…).
December 18th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
[...] Is Urban Planning Dead in the U.S.? Frank Gehry Thinks So … Share and Enjoy: [...]
December 18th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Why is it that the Forbes top 10 recession-proof cities in the US, are ones that are ones without much planning? For example, #7 on their list, Houston, is infamous among planners for having no zoning.
December 19th, 2009 at 1:17 am
If he means Urban Planning in the sense of Robert Moses and his meat axe, may it rest in peace. If he means Urban Planning in the sense of relatively innovative solutions to contemporary problems facing urban citizens, he’s very much mistaken.
December 19th, 2009 at 4:27 am
That planning = zoning is a really unfortunate association many people make about the profession. However, all cities are bound by some sort of plan, and it is, as James sort of pointed out, a matter of prioritizing needs that delineates between the “good” and “bad”. I had the good luck of starting out in planning with a terrific group that had a deep grassroots philosophy, and it’s fueled my good faith in planning because I’ve seen how much potential linking planning with people has!
Forbes’ recession-proof cities seem more closely bound by their tech/other corporate hubs than by their urban forms (although that counts too, I’m sure).
December 19th, 2009 at 4:59 am
i’d say gehry is dead, his tired overdone crumpled designs were old 10 years ago. he is following the path of other discarded former starchitects such as Graves, Jahn and Venturi. nevermind that in-your-face starchitecture in general is so out of style now.
December 19th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Frankly, Gehry is right. We are not designing at the urban scale. Even Romans could do that. Highway design we have. Bridge Design too! Gehry knows who the clients are: the Banks and Investors really. Gehry is and always will be the greatest of sculptors in my mind, like Michael Angelo, and a damn good one. There’s a world and a city in each of Gehry’s works, he inspires me and many others to seek a different order to things. But Frankly– integrated urban design for a sustainable solution is not a sculpture or landmark alone; urban design for a viable, livable future requires an entirely new and transformative paradigm, not a “project” mentality.
In our documentary feature film “Sprawling from Grace” We explore where we’ve been with our love-affair with automobile and why that was a wrong turn sixty years ago. Since WWII Urban Design has died a slow death by displacement of people away from the natural center of cities to the periphery.—About the same time as the death of the street car! The last major urban design project Radio City comes to mind. What’s been done since? Brasilia?Arco- santi? You tell me? You are all the arm chair critics!
Urban Design as we know it is Dead. TOD—Transit Oriented Development is key, because a parking lots will never be “urban space”, and parking garages are just for the lipstick on a pig. However, I am sure that not a single Landmark project Gehry has designed will aggregate into a community, a neighborhood district, or a city, or a region. It takes a design culture, and this too has died when the streets died. Please People!– Let us re-double our efforts to revive an old art form in the new way. Niccolo in Denver
December 27th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Development has become so site specific that the “planning” has been lost in the shuffle.
April 18th, 2010 at 7:16 pm
[...] The discussion (which we also live-blogged) was provocative and energizing in its own right, all the more so because of a shared sense – it seemed to me – that this is an important question and we need to find ways to engage the broader community of planners in muddling through the answers. And some of that is happening, including serious conversations among planners, cutting edge community engagement work (by organizations like the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, the Orton Family Foundation, CityLab 7, National Charrette Institute, and our own PlaceMatters), and even entertaining throwaway comments by the likes of Frank Gehry (“urban planning is dead”). [...]