Brent D. Ryan - The Largest Art: A Measured Manifesto for a Plural Urbanism

The Largest Art

The

Largest

Art

A Measured Manifesto for a Plural Urbanism

Brent D. Ryan

2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Names: Ryan, Brent D., 1969- author.

Title: The largest art : a measured manifesto for a plural urbanism / Brent D. Ryan.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017017108 | ISBN 9780262036672 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: City planning--Philosophy.

Classification: LCC NA9031 .R93 2017 | DDC 711/.4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017108

EPUB Version 1.0

To John Louis Ryan and Isidro Bello Verdeal

Inspirations in family, work, and life

Contents

Preface

Midway through architecture school, I first heard the term urban design. I found the idea amusing: could one really design a city? My fellow students and I found the design of buildings to be challenging enough; designing a city seemed impossible, never mind unlikely. Gradually I warmed to the idea. At New York Citys Department of City Planning, myself and my colleagues, architects all, sketched design concepts and wrote zoning regulations for growing areas of the city, mostly in Manhattan where developers sought to build more than was currently permitted. Our urban design was slow and halting; regulations took years to be enacted and we urban designers could not oblige building constructionthat had to wait for market interest. Participating in New Yorks incremental urban design, watching its cityscape slowly respond, was a different creative satisfaction than my schoolmates possessed. As architects they could design smaller spaces where every detail reflected their hand. My urban design hand was spread widely over the cityscape, but its imprint was fainter.

When I departed New York to become involved in urban design education, I saw a different side of the discipline. As in architecture school, urban design students represented their ideas through plans, sections, and perspectives. Gazing one day at a plan for a hilltop complex with hundreds of new housing units in dozens of buildings, I was struck both by the drawings seeming completeness and by my realization that the project, if constructed, would take years if not decades to complete. Although my students saw and represented urban design as scaled-up architecture, I knew it to be a gradual enterprise, constructed by many and built over time. Why did we design such projects as pop-up citiesready to build, complete in and of themselves, and immune from the realities that afflicted real urban design? Maybe it was because we knew nothing else, no other means of design.

What was urban design? Was it the gradual, incremental aesthetic enterprise of my time in New York, or was it the large, ready-to-build project of our urban design studios? My colleagues, experienced and talented as they were, either did not know or could not articulate the difference. All knew that cities were constructed over time and that urban design took time as well (of course) but nevertheless, we continued teaching and producing ready-to-build models. Urban design, it seemed, was a paradoxical field whose practitioners and scholars seemed uninterested in its paradoxes. We taught urban design as a larger version of architecture, but it functioned this way only rarely in practice, where it was a slower, piecemeal art. We felt urban design to be both a formal and a social enterprise but these latter ideals contributed little to the three-dimensional schemes that constituted the disciplines visual language.

History and theory offered only intermittent assistance in resolving these paradoxes. Urban design histories were mostly turgid affairs: long, beautifully illustrated lists of cities that culminated somewhere in the twentieth century. Urban design theory consisted either of best practicesanodyne but attractive to many studentsor of tracts of political economy or even philosophy that came from outside the discipline and rarely ventured far within. Most interesting by far were urban design manifestos, each purportedly a radically new take and disdaining, even attacking others. It seemed that nearly all such manifestos had been written by architects except for one, Good City Form, written by city planner Kevin Lynch.

Lynch was himself paradoxical; extremely well known, he remained an outlier in urban designs intellectual universe. He did not self-identify as an architect, yet all aspiring urban designers knew his first book