Two presidents’ visions of America’s urban future are currently competing. Both are too big. One is too ugly. And the other may consume itself in a too-richly spiced feast of architectural over-indulgence. The USA deserves better but is not getting it from either president.
In Chicago, former President Obama’s Presidential Library, has landed in historic Jackson Park: a 225 feet high flat-roofed and granite-clad concrete tower. It has a Sith-Lord-meets-conning-tower aesthetic. Largely bereft of windows and surrounded by lower blocks of precast concrete and glass curtain walls, it is described even by its own architects as “monolithic” and by its critics as “ugly”, “a jail”, “Soviet” and “brutalist”. Based on multiple studies of the types of places people tend to like and why, I can report confidently that it has none of the patterns, natural forms and sensitive handling of scale that most people find attractive and reassuring. It has all of the locational and symbolic sensitivity of the relentless black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Six hundred miles away in Washington, D.C., President Trump is planning to supersize Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s original Washington masterplan and out-French the French. To escape the need to host American state dinners in tents on the White House lawn, he has demolished the White House’s 1940s neoclassical East Wing and is replacing it with a $300 million ballroom by the skilled classical architect James McCrery. Three times as big as the original, the outside is replete with a balustrade, string courses, alternating pediments, a piano nobile and a Corinthian portico with all the trimmings. Inside, a double-height hall, with arched niches, fluted pilasters and a coffered ceiling, will adorn the largest classical room built for a century.
On nearby Memorial Circle, the President is planning a giant classical triumphal arch between the National Mall and the Arlington National Cemetery, topped with statues of eagles and a winged lady. At a White House dinner, Trump showed donors three models, informing them that he favoured, you guessed, the largest option which, standing at 250 feet, would block symbolic views between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery.
Palpably modelled on the French Arc de Triomphe, which was itself inspired by Rome’s Arch of Titus, the new Washington Arch, Trump has told supporters, must be bigger than Jean-François Chalgrin’s Parisian precedent. Predictably, the Washington Arch is already being called the “Arc de Trump”. If the remodelled Oval Office is anything to go by, it will be dripping with gilt swags and festooned with over-ripe fruit in luxuriant cornucopia, though for now, the renderings by Nicholas Charbonneau show welcome restraint.
Which will it be: classical bombast or placeless corporatism? Federal nostalgia or digital civic aesthetics? Nothing about Obama and Trump’s visions for the future of American cities is the same, other than their shared elephantiasis. But in this, both are within the American urban tradition.
Once upon a time, the United States was an urban civilisation and, briefly, the world’s most significant city-maker. The American model was megalomaniacal: consistently taking European technology and precedents, dialling them up from genteel to gigantic and re-exporting them around the world.
Thomas Walter’s gargantuan 1850s dome over Washington’s Capitol may have been inspired by European churches such as Paris’ Les Invalides. However, in turn, it spawned a shoal of European domed civic imitations: Brussels’s Palais de Justice, Budapest’s parliament, and Berlin’s Reichstag.
By the 1890s, American architects could create 200 lavish temporary Beaux Arts buildings out of mere plaster and artificial stone for the 1893 Chicago World Fair, which are better than almost anything subsequently built in the last 80 years. With perfect irony, the World Fair took place on the very site on which Obama’s watchtower library is now being erected. The historically resonant location, precisely where American architecture demonstrated so supremely its classical and city-planning expertise, merely rubs coarse salt into the wound Obama is inflicting upon Chicago.
“Humane walking architecture, rich with texture, decoration and patterns was eviscerated and replaced with driving architecture, featureless and faceless.”
Ultimately, American urban super-sizing got out of hand. During the long 20th century America de-urbanised as her cities became too big to be urban. Middle classes fled to the hugely expanding suburbs where long commutes and declining neighbourly life undermined their residents’ prosperity, connectedness and happiness. Wider and wider freeways cut through city centres, often mysteriously physically segregating majority black neighbourhoods. Downtowns were scooped out and offices and homes replaced with parking lots, as Jeff Speck has related. Subtle towns of Lego bricks became cruder towns of Duplo bricks. Humane walking architecture, rich with texture, decoration and patterns was eviscerated and replaced with driving architecture, featureless and faceless. Glories such as Chicago’s Garrick Theatre were demolished for lumpen multi-storey car parks. Among the many unseamed downtown neighbourhoods were Detroit’s Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, which were sliced up by wide freeways and whose largely black populations were decanted into heartless and over-sized “public housing projects”. All of these failed and have been in turn demolished — a savage flop of “sustainable development”.
After a century in which the United States first defined and then ditched the modern city, we are left with two different presidential visions for the American city: Fifties corporate modernism with a superficial high-tech sheen, or federal classicism on a growth drug.
The Obama Library is beyond redemption: so flawed in its location, conception and execution that it is hard to see it ever becoming a much-loved landmark. The architects, New York-based Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, have form in nominative antiphrasis: a folk art museum which is modernist, a pavilion which has precisely nothing of the form, nature or tone of a pavilion and, now, a Presidential library which is bereft of books. In what has coyly been described as “a break with tradition”, the Obama Library has no research library and will not house the former President’s archives. Jackson Park has been mashed up for an empty box.
There is a good functional case to be made for Trump’s ballroom, however. The world’s superpower should not be hosting state dinners in tents. Nor is the loss of the Forties East Wing quite as shocking as it first seems. The White House, like a Shinto shrine, is old in name only. It is really a modern building pretending to be antique. Though the many Democratic supporters of classical architecture are appalled by Trump’s ballroom — traditional architecture, it should be noted, is the preferred architecture of both Democratic and republican voters — the plans could, in fact, be redeemed, but not if Trump remains actively in charge. The former real estate developer is rumoured to be personally deeply involved in the negotiations, planning, fundraising and design, delaying other meetings for development discussion, supposedly insisting on concrete not stone for the super-sized triumphal arch and always asking, “How can it be bigger?”
Trump’s contempt for historic fabric sits within a clear presidential tradition. Harry Truman had the entire White House gutted and rebuilt internally while his family moved next door for three years. Of the original building, only the exterior walls and some re-installed doors, chimney pieces and wood panelling remain. The recently demolished East Wing was a 1942 near-total replacement, by McKim, Mead and White, of the 1902 original. And many of its interiors had also been transformed several times. Trump’s derision for normal consultation and approval via the National Trust for Historic Preservation offends but is not illegal. The White House is exempt from the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act.
Meanwhile, Memorial Circle is a good place for a triumphal arch, even if the probable scale and decorative excess would be obscene to Thomas Jefferson’s and the Founding Fathers’ more reserved aesthetics. Federal classicism’s moderation revealed its underpinning confidence and civility. The new arch needs to calm down. It should be in communion with the history of Washington, D.C.,not with the more brittle dictator gargantuanism of Beijing’s 10,000-seater Great Hall of the People or Pyongyang’s never-completed 105-storey “Ryugyong Hotel”.
Despite the flawed directions being taken by both Presidents Obama and Trump, there is hope for American cities. Increasingly Americans are rejecting towns that could be anywhere and so are nowhere. As long ago as 1955, and haunted by memories of the small town Marceline, Missouri, in which he grew up, America’s most culturally iconic entrepreneur, Walt Disney created a place for Americans to enjoy which rejected all of the emerging traffic-modernist truths of post-war US cities. Main Street, Disneyland is not just pretty and nostalgic. It has no cars, and it is human-scale. That, Disney and his designers realised, was what made people happy.
Over the past generation, a growing number of American researchers, investors, developers and city mayors, from both Left and Right, have reached the same conclusion that Disney did 70 years ago. Many developers have created so-called “new urbanist” towns and urban extensions which ignore most of the development patterns of the last 80 years: Seaside, Celebration and Kentlands and dozens more. All are rewarded with more consumer demand and higher land values, typically between 15% to 100%, as analysis by Chris Leindbeger, me and others has shown. In fact, so successful are they that a consortium of investors is funding the first new American city, California Forever, to be built on walkable pre-modernist principles for over a century.
Make places better and people like it. Republican mayor Jim Brainard’s transformation of downtown Carmel in Indiana was so popular that he was re-elected seven times becoming one of the longest serving American mayors. Streets with higher “walkscores” tend to be worth more, revealing pent-up demand. The economic, social and political benefits are clear.
Many American cities face huge challenges of discord, infrastructure decay and housing affordability. But to these challenges, the vaulting scale of Obama and Trump’s architectural visions have no answer. So, the message for my American friends is this: if you want your towns and cities to prosper, if you want to help heal the fissures in society, then ignore Trump and Obama. Don’t supersize your towns any further, but reweave them. Help each neighbourhood feel enclosed and intimate, with all the concomitant advantages of prosperity, community and public health that brings. Help them feel small again.
