Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 14. No. 2, 131–145, May 2009
Civic Concinnity
MARK C. CHILDS
School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, USA
ABSTRACT Urban form, such as a main street or a district, arises from the interactions
of many designers over time. To compose the city, one must not only be able to design
a building, landscape or infrastructure, but also contribute to the emergent character
of towns and districts. This paper outlines the importance of this relationship between
individual acts of design and the collective design of the city, and delineates components of
a civic design process.
Introduction
To play jazz, it is not only necessary to master an instrument but also collaborate,
improvise, and feel the direction and possibilities of the music. To tend an
ecosystem, one must understand not only single species, but also the complex
interactions of species over time and place. Similarly, to compose the city, one
must not only be able to design a building, landscape, or infrastructure but also
contribute to the emergent character of towns and districts. A typical main street,
for example, is not the creation of a single designer, but arises from the interactions
of many players over time (Figure 1).
The Latin term concinnus means ‘deftly joined’. Our descendent term,
‘concinnity’, means the skillful and harmonious adaptation or fitting together of
parts to craft a whole. The term ‘civic concinnity’ is used here to emphasize that
the independent designers of the parts of the city should also compose how those
parts add to the whole of the town. These civic designers include architects,
landscape architects, civil engineers, public artists and others who design the built
places of a town. The beauty of a healthy meadow and the delight of a classic main
street are the emergent products of the co-adaptation of independent actors.
Of course, the idea that individual built places be designed to help create a
great town is not new. In examining how the buildings of ancient cities worked
together to create public spaces, Camillo Sitte wrote in his introduction to The Art
of Building Cities, “[The Acropolis of Athens] is no longer a simple square in the
ordinary sense of the term, but the work of several centuries grown to the maturity
of pure art.” (1945 [1889], p. 7). Edwards (1924) wrote, “ . . . the commonest error in
design is to concentrate attention upon a single building and to ignore its relation
to the environment” (p. 159).
Correspondence Address: Mark C. Childs, School of Architecture and Planning, University of
New Mexico, 2414 Central Ave SE, MSC04 2530, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001, USA. Email:
[email protected]
1357-4809 Print/1469-9664 Online/09/020131-15 q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13574800802670853
132
M. C. Childs
Figure 1. Rue Saint Louis, Quebec City, Quebec. “Poetry”, the Nobel Lauriat poet Octavio Paz writes,
“is governed by the twofold principle of ‘variety within unity’”. The variety of styles, sizes and uses
within the conventions of ‘main street’, such as building to the sidewalk, entrances and public windows
towards the street, and a scale tuned to pedestrians, illustrate this principle. Source: Photo by author.
More recently, Alexander et al. (1987) describe an approach to “understand[ing]
the laws which produce wholeness in the city” (p. 19) with the overriding rule,
“every increment of construction must be made in such a way as to heal the city”
(p. 22). Vernez-Moudon (1989) examines a San Francisco neighbourhood to
illuminate the complex interactions of building and neighbourhood form over time.
Davis (1999) explores the institutions and operations of building design and
production to understand how these cultures of building shape both individual
buildings and the fabric of a settlement. Habraken (1998) summarizes decades of
thought on implicit cultural understandings of how to make buildings and towns.
The current paper restates the importance of this relationship between individual
acts of design and the collective design of the city, and outlines a civic design
process to help improve the civic concinnity of our individual projects.
Civic concinnity offers a route between: (1) the poor coherence seen on the
periphery of many US towns where the individual built places fail to work together
to make a compelling larger form; (2) the lifeless order of the ‘single hand’ design
of tract housing and themed districts; and (3) mock or shallow contextualism
(Figure 2). All of these approaches—an over-independence of individual built
forms, totalizing order and hollow manners—cause a set of problems.
The poor coherence of contextual independence fails to create larger urban
forms such as main street, the theatre district or Chinatown. Without these
larger forms, the individual projects stand or die on their own. They do not benefit
from district synergies (Figure 3). Excessive independence causes inefficiencies
such as duplicate parking, disconnected sidewalks and poorly defined interstitial
space.
Civic Concinnity
133
Figure 2. Idealized silhouettes of houses applied to a warehouse adjacent to houses. Albuquerque,
New Mexico. Source: Photo by author.
Moreover, even a single built place that ignores its context can erode collective
forms. For example, in the midst of a sidewalk shopping district, a retail chain
store with a streetside parking lot is a disruption than can weaken the district.
Bad books cannot injure the good books, but bad buildings can do untold
damage to the very finest architectural masterpiece in the world, for this
latter, if it be situated in a town is not a self-contained unit. (Edwards,
1924, p. 40)
At the other extreme, ‘single-hand’ urban design can cause a number of difficulties.
The monotony of repetition replaces the vibrancy of multiple designs. The
critiques of English worker housing, Levittown, freeways, power lines and 20th
century low-income housing development all point to this problem.
. Large developments present a problem akin to the aggregation of the news
media. They fail to nurture a creative and democratic forum. They allow few
venues for new, dissenting, unfamiliar, minority, ‘unproven-in-the-marketplace’ or far-sighted stories to be heard. Moreover, they can contribute to
creating a political or economic hegemony.
.
Figure 3. This restaurant is housed in a remodelled gas station on Central Avenue, Albuquerque,
New Mexico. As this portion of Central Avenue shifted away from a Route 66 auto-celebratory strip to a
window-shopping street, service-station business moved away. The building gained a new use as part
of the pedestrian district. This is one of four former gas stations in the six blocks of the Nob-Hill district.
One is a brew-pub, another is currently for lease but was a restaurant, and the last is an upholstery
shop. Source: Photo by author.
134
M. C. Childs
Under a single design regime, new or revitalized emergent forms do not arise
to fit our times. Without vibrant new emergent forms, we are left only with
collective forms, such as the theatre district, that arose in a significantly different
cultural-economic-technological milieu. While these older forms often continue
to have significant value, we are failing to develop robust new types of districts,
and confounding a desire for emergent districts with nostalgia.
. Urban form becomes a ‘product’ for what Jürgen Habermas calls a cultureconsuming society, rather than the result of a culture-debating society (1989
[1962]). Main Street in Disneyland has a variety of buildings, a street and a
square, but it is a single design made for entertainment that copies the surface
forms of an emergent place but not the generative principle.
.
The third danger, shallow contextualism, is akin to bad poetry. Its problems
include:
Technique over content: The warehouse in Figure 2 mocks the idea of
responding to context. There may be a scrap of ironic wit in the gesture, but it
fails to offer anything of substance to its neighbours or to the life of the street.
A strong concinnity works to build collective public goods such as a vital public
realm, resilient ecosystems, or safe neighbourhoods.
. Lack of depth and nuance: Narrow definitions of context miss or avoid the
productive struggle with the complexities, multiple histories and nuances of
place. For example, the designers of the remodel and addition to an 1892
Italianate house on Albuquerque’s Spanish era plaza, to house a tourism-based
restaurant, had a contextually rich site (see Figure 4). They chose to erase as much
as possible the Italianate style and mimic Spanish-era design. Perhaps, instead of
leading tourists to believe that the modern addition was from an earlier era, a
richer approach may have been to develop an ‘Italianate pueblo’ style, an
approach potentially akin to ‘pueblo-deco’ (see Whiffen & Breeze, 1984).
.
Figure 4. The 1898 Herman Blueher house, originally in Italianate style, remodelled into La Hacienda
Restaurant on Albuquerque’s old town plaza. Source: Photo by author.
Civic Concinnity
135
Civic concinnity offers a path between these approaches. Its application can
induce a virtuous cycle of projects that form the context and inspiration for each
other. From these virtuous cycles a vibrant urban order emerges. Civic concinnity
can be outlined in three steps: read the contexts, frame and reframe and inspire
new designs.
Read the Contexts
Fundamentally, civic concinnity requires that individual projects be designed to
engage their built and natural contexts in order to deftly create larger forms. Thus,
strong design starts with deep analysis of the contexts.
Too often, site analysis consists solely of understanding the engineering
aspects of the property on which a project will be built. Such a site analysis
typically includes topography and hydrology, solar exposure, utility location,
descriptions of nuisances such as noise, and adjacent automobile traffic counts.
However, building projects sit within myriad other contexts. Governments,
corporations, developers and conventional clients typically represent well their
economic and programmatic contexts. However, the economic-programmaticpolitical interests of some clients such as non-profits, community groups, tenants
and future generations may not be as well represented and designers should work
to understand these interests. Perhaps, just as the government employs public
advocates in courtrooms, there is a need to find ways to establish public advocates
in the design of our cities. Civic concinnity aims at creating public goods, and thus
designers should additionally immerse themselves in the built, environmental,
civil society contexts and cultural conventions of a site (see Figure 5).
At a minimum, the pattern of urban forms and building typologies should
be studied. What, for example, is the character of the adjacent street, and, to
Figure 5. Pioneer Square, Portland, Oregon. Note that the line of buildings on the south side of the
square are all white (as are the ones on the north). This coherence, maintained in new buildings, helps
frame the public space. Source: Photo by author.
136
M. C. Childs
paraphrase Louis Kahn, what would it like to become? What are the building
typologies in the district? This site reconnaissance should not be limited to
immediately adjacent buildings and landscapes. For example, the Italian architect
Aldo Rossi made drawings showing the buildings in a town with similar
typologies to his projects whether or not they could be seen from his building site,
because these buildings constituted part of the conceptual context of his project
(Aldo Rossi, personal communication, 1983). Similarly, buildings that have similar
site conditions, such as street corner buildings along Broadway in New York City,
may serve both as inspiration and as an aspect of the context against which a new
building is evaluated.
Habraken (1998) describes a set of conceptual tools to examine the built fabric
of a place—levels of intervention, territorial order and cultural order. Levels of
intervention are the domains of control such as furniture within a room, tenant
improvements within a building shell, the design of a building within a site, and
the layout of blocks and streets within a development. When we design built-in
rather than movable furniture we are making a decision about what forms belong
to what levels. The design of the sidewalk often is a point of contention between
levels of intervention. Territorial order describes the patterns of who controls
spaces. Street vendors and buskers, people sitting at restaurant tables, parades
and renters make claims of territory (see Figure 6). Cultural order includes shared
concepts of building patterns such as unfenced American single-family residential
front lawns or the residential bay-windows of San Francisco (Figure 7), systems
such as balloon-frame construction, and types such as ‘Elm Street’ or a Law of the
Indies plaza.
This paper suggests that the cultural order also includes what Howard Davis
calls ‘the culture of building’. How is it that we organize the work of making
places? Local construction skills or production facilities may offer unique
opportunities. It is easier, for example, to build an adobe house in New Mexico
than in New York because the construction materials and skills are readily
available in New Mexico. Banking requirements may dictate the speed at which
Figure 6. Pike Place Alley, Seattle. The placement of posters on the alley wall is a long-standing
occupation of territory, sanctioned by local tradition. Source: Photo by author.
Civic Concinnity
137
Figure 7. The use of white on the exterior of buildings in San Francisco is an example of a social
convention that lends a sense of coherence. This image also illustrates a ‘fabric’ of street-forming
buildings and a ‘monument’ (Coit Tower) set in a surround of trees. Source: Photo by author.
a project is built and thus the possible tectonics. How we structure contracts and
the amount and type of information in construction documents clearly conditions
what we build. Understanding these aspects allows the designer to decide to work
with them or to attempt to reshape them. If, for example, we wish to have artisanal
stonework that builds on a natural outcropping we may need to write a different
contract or organize the work differently than we would for a concrete block wall.
In another light, how might we design a building in order to employ local
unskilled labour and provide job training?
As we are becoming more acutely aware, ecosystems also are critical contexts.
We must understand the roles our sites play in watersheds, flyways, carbon cycles,
epidemiological pathways and more. Hester (2006) presents numerous examples
of the importance of deeply understanding these systems and suggests a way of
building our habitats within the environment. He suggests that we aim to build
resilient systems that are diverse, adaptable and fit to their conditions that also
enable and inspire their inhabitants to take care of and enjoy the environment.
A number of recent books from Anne Spirn’s Granite Garden (1989) to Douglas
Farr’s Sustainable Urbanism (2008) offer approaches to robust environmentally
contextual design.
The civil society contexts for a project include the activities of non-profits
and informal organizations, the everyday public realm, and the site’s narrative
landscapes. The New Land Marks public art projects developed by Philadelphia’s
138
M. C. Childs
Fairmount Park Art Association provide a strong example of an effort to create
projects around neighbourhood communities and local non-profits (see Bach,
2001). Understanding that a district has or is developing a tradition of busking
might suggest that buildings provide an informal stage area at their entrances.
Similarly, supermarket entrance arcades may be designed to support Girl Scout
cookie sales, the activities of other organizations that supermarkets allow to use
their entrances, and as a place for the old men to talk.
A rich analysis of site should also include its narrative landscape. The stories
we tell in, about and through built form provide a fabric of meaning (see Potteiger &
Purinton, 1998; Childs, 2008). This reading of place includes published fictions
that take place in the landscape such as the Madeleine series of children’s books by
Ludwig Bemelmans for Paris, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima for small New
Mexico towns, or Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings for Boston’s Public
Garden. It should also include local oral tales, place names, spatial practices such as
the location of a parade route or lovers’ lane, and unbuilt and pending design
proposals. A virtuous cycle of design can emerge from the interplay between the
narrative landscape and built forms in which each inspires each other. Antonio
Gaudi’s work, for example, was deeply implicated in and inspired by the art and
politics of the Catalan movement, and now serves as a cornerstone of Catalonian
ethos (see Hughes, 1993). At a more mundane level, a literature arose from the
landscape of Route 66 in the American West. In turn, the cultural weight and
marketability of this literature inspires new riffs on Route 66 architecture.
Each combination of programme, ecosystem, built context, narrative
landscape, design participants, etc. produces a unique field of possibilities for a
design. A building’s layered contexts may, for example, include the entire street,
the back alley, the architect’s oeuvre, a parade route, the rise of the hill, an active
society of buskers, the other-worldliness of the local winter ice fog, au courant
design practices, ‘patient’ money, the sets for movies, the lingering industrial
revolution, and the entire literature of the settlement, region and world.
Frame and Reframe
How can deep analysis become a critical tool for design? How might a designer
decide which layers of context should be major determinants of a project? For
example, should the central expression of a design be its enhancement of a street,
ecological stewardship, embodiment of regional myths or some combination?
Within all these potential contexts, a designer must take a stance about which
aspects matter and how they matter. They must choose the appropriate frames for
the project. What is the body of ‘literature’, the critical context, for a project?
Formulating this critical context depends on both the context and the nature
of the project. Civic concinnity is similar to chess—the meaning of a move is
dependent on the location of other pieces and on the characteristics of the piece.
We might fruitfully borrow the biological concept of ‘niche gestalt’—how a
species sees and evaluates an environment—to think about how a design may
both respond to and define its context (see Childs, 2001).
A niche is the physical and functional space in which a species survives.
Some variables in the environment are critical to a species and some are trivial.
In addition, what is critical for one species may be trivial for another. The concept
of a niche helps clarify how the context of a site may ‘look’ one way for one type of
building but be evaluated differently for another. High traffic counts, for example,
Civic Concinnity
139
may be a benefit for a gas station but a detriment for a villa. Thus one definition of
the context is made from the viewpoint of the needs of the project programme.
However, this project’s-eye view can be wide or narrow. For example, site
evaluations for many franchise stores may be limited to automobile traffic counts,
zoning regulations, the location of direct competitors, and a few other factors.
More insidiously, large real estate investment firms define a set of building
‘products’ that for ease of trade must be standardized, thus purposefully limiting
design responses to a narrow set of site variables (see Leinberger, 2007).
This narrow view centres on the initial programme for the project—how does
the site work for a book store or playground? The wider view considers the built
form in its site—how does the site look for a building that will initially house a
bookstore but which may later become a clothing store or a café, or for a water line
corridor that may later also provide a bike trail? In addition to providing for the
initial programme, the project should:
Respond to a wide variety of site conditions including characteristics of the
district. For example, in a walking district, a fast-food outlet may cater for both
drivers and pedestrians, or a supermarket may include a café with its own
sidewalk entrance.
. Be adaptable to changes in the initial programme and to other programmes. The
taxpayer slot building and its descendant, the shopping mall storefront, are
prime examples of buildings that are readily adaptable to multiple retail and
other programmes. Sloped-deck parking garages are not so flexible.
. Contribute to the character of a district so as to increase the vigour and value of
the location.
.
These wider-view considerations may still focus on the self-interest of the project
owner. However, there are other interested parties. In many arts, an audience
member may choose without significant consequence to engage and disengage
with the work. We can buy and then put down a book, or go to a movie and walk
out. These arts have voluntary audiences. Similarly, the owners of built places are
voluntary audiences. However, buildings, landscapes and public works also have
significant involuntary audiences. Non-owner occupants, neighbours, passers-by
and citizens who have to suffer a confusing network of hospital corridors or
a building that erodes the character of a beloved neighbourhood are involuntarily
affected by these architectural designs. This is, of course, the basis for building and
zoning codes.
As professionals, architects, landscape architects and civil engineers are
charged with both serving clients’ needs and advocating for the public good (for a
nuanced defense of professionalism see Freidson, 1994). This is more than a matter
of complying with the letter of regulations. It is rather a central component of good
design. In addition to the concerns for human health, safety and welfare that codes
address, designers have a duty to steward public goods such as human dignity,
ecosystem health, community conviviality, a creative milieu, and the character of
the town. The nuances and particular conditions of these public goods are
often beyond the reasonable reach of regulation, and must be addressed by the
designer’s judgement. The project’s-eye-view should be supplemented with the
civic view. How does a proposed design contribute to the vitality of the town?
A number of social and environmental systems offer frameworks for
considering the civic view:
140
.
.
.
.
.
.
M. C. Childs
The scales of governance: A federal courthouse is part of a nationwide set of
buildings and should answer to this context. A fire station may be part of a more
local context.
The catchments from which the majority of users come: A neighbourhood park
has a different context than an airport.
The environmental context of a design: The watershed may be the local system
for issues of potable and waste water, but the planet’s atmosphere is the local
system for greenhouse gases.
The scales of economic systems: If the city is funding the project, then the use of
city-based labour and materials will be of interest. On the other hand, the arrival
of the railroad and its link to the national economy allowed tin roofs to become a
signature component of New Mexico architecture.
The history of the district, settlement and region: Who built the surrounding
landscapes; why; and what was their culture of building?
The local street culture: How does the community use the public realm, and
how would they like to use it? An example of incorporating street culture into a
design is Michael Pyatok ‘s Hismen Hin-Nu Terrace in Oakland, CA, which
provides places for local street vendors to set up shop.
However, concinnity is not simply a matter of following a set of trends. A new
work may reframe its context. T. S. Eliot claimed of literature:
What happens when a new work of art is created is something that
happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it. The
existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is
modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art
among them. (1976 [1920], pp. 49 –50)
A project may redefine a context. For example, Michelangelo recast Rome’s
Capitoline Hill with his design for the Piazza del Campidoglio and Cordonata
steps (see Bacon, 1974, pp. 114 –119, and Kostof, 1995, pp. 491 –496). Similarly but
less beneficially, when in the mid-1980s One Liberty Place broke the gentlemen’s
agreement not to exceed the height of the statue of William Penn on Philadelphia’s
City Hall, it redefined the sense of downtown Philadelphia. The Fremont Troll
in Seattle, Washington recasts the leftover space under a bridge as the home for a
community landmark (Figure 8).
There will be tensions between the civic view and the building view.
Meadows and other ecosystems are not composed solely of happy symbiotic
relationships. The balances of predators, prey and parasites are components of
natural ecosystems, and similar relationships may be part of a civic gestalt. These
tensions between views include:
Projects have their own sphere of influence. A sidewalk coffee cart may
transform the character of a portion of a street but is not likely to induce us
to reconceive of the relationship between town and state, as could a new
courthouse. Designers too often either overreach, believing that every project
will revolutionize architecture or the city, or dismiss the potential power of a
small project.
. Branding through signature architecture is the latest acknowledgement of the
long-standing trend to create buildings as novel, iconic baubles. Too often, both
owners and designers are motivated to stand out from the crowd, even when
that entails a significant cost to the crowd.
.
Civic Concinnity
141
Figure 8. Fremont Troll, Seattle, Washington. Artists: Steve Badanes, Will Martin, Donna Walter and
Ross Whitehead. The context of the underside of a bridge includes the folk tale that this place is the
habitat of trolls. Source: Photo by author.
For ‘low-profile’ or ‘fabric’ projects, designers too frequently just go along,
conforming to the current patterns and rules without advancing the dialogue
about the pattern. For example, we need insightful and business-savvy work to
improve production housing neighbourhoods. Similarly, the typology of the gas
station/convenience store could evolve to better fit walking districts.
. We sometimes fail through oversimplification, thinking that a project can only
either conform or be novel. Antonio Gaudı́’s Casa Milá apartment building in
Barcelona is widely understood as a novel building. However, it conforms to the
accepted urban design rules of Ildefons Cerdá’s Eixample and thus does its
part in constructing a continuous street wall with balcony projections. Even the
‘Manzana de la Discordia’ (block of discord) on which three disparate modernist
buildings—Gaudı́’s Casa Batlló, Josep Puig i Cadafalch’s medieval-Dutch
inspired Casa Amatlier and Lluı́s Doménech i Montaner’s Casa Lleo Morera—sit
side by side has a remarkable coherence and helps make the fabric of Barcelona
(see Figure 9).
.
Combining the building and civic views requires overcoming these and other
tensions—finding ways to increase the sphere of inspiration of a flower stand,
providing a cogent brand by increasing the value of the neighbours and context,
creating a multivalent response to the various frames of context.
Framing or reframing the context is ultimately an aesthetic-political act
that makes manifest which private and public goods the act of building aims to
support. However, these frames should be multivalent. A great built design, like a
rich fiction, may be of many places and eras simultaneously. Shakespeare could
write to many audiences at once. He interweaves dirty jokes, sword-play, wordplay, existential angst, and the invention of new language. His works are of
his time, yet reach back to older stories and have inspired generations. A great
142
M. C. Childs
Figure 9. The so-called ‘block of discord’ in Barcelona, Spain. Even with the variety of expression given
the three neighbouring buildings by early modern masters, together they form a portion of the urban
street wall conforming to the urban design patterns of the Eixample district. The facades are
all decorated mass-walls of similar height composed with elaborated bases, middles and tops.
The windows of all three are primarily punched openings with highly structured frames.
Moreover, all the facades are public masks displaying wealth and cultural status to the public realm.
Source: Photo by author.
building may provide a brandable image while complementing a historic district,
operate carbon-neutrally and be comfortable, display a delight in engineering and
use artisanal materials.
Inspire New Designs
The principle of the second man, according to Edmund Bacon, is “it is the second
man who determines whether the creation of the first man will be carried forward
or destroyed” (1974, p. 109). He gives the example of Florence’s Piazza della
Santissima Annunziata.
The form of the square remained in doubt until 1516, when architects
Antonio da Sangallo the Elder and Baccio d’Agnolo were commissioned
to design the building opposite to Brunelleschi’s arcade. It was the great
decision of Sangallo to overcome his urge toward self-expression and
follow, almost to the letter, the design of the then eighty-nine-year old
Civic Concinnity
143
building of Brunelleschi. . . . but it is really to Sangallo that we owe the
piazza in its present form. (p. 109)
Similarly, Kathy Edwards and Esmé Howard describe the mutually reinforcing
combination of street design, programme of monuments and houses for the
wealthy that created and expanded Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia
(Edwards & Howard, 1997). However, to create synergy, the response of the
second designer need not be affable. Borromini designed Saint Agnese Church in
Rome. His rival Bernini was the sculptor of the Circo Agonale Fountain in front of
the church. In a probable apocryphal story, Bernini reportedly said that one of the
figures in his composition has his hands up to shield his eyes from the façade of
Saint Agnese (Forbes, 1899, p. 19). Las Vegas, Nevada can be seen as the site of a
surreal boasting contest.
How might we design to inspire the ‘second man’ to respond? Hubbard
(1980) proposed a model for fruitful time-delayed dialogue: case law, the written
decisions of judges. Under the judicial principle of stare decisis, prior law does not
dictate but rather frames current decisions, and current decisions are made with
an ear for their future consequences.
Fundamentally, to encourage the design equivalent of stare decisis, later
designers must see value in joining their work to previous projects in order to
make a larger form. Showing that the work has already built upon a larger form or
tradition is one way to articulate this value. The architect John Gaw Meem and his
cohort in early 20th century New Mexico, for example, developed and gave
legitimacy to the Santa Fe style by rooting it in earlier traditions and by building
a set of structures that worked together to recast Midwest Victorian Santa Fe
(Wilson, 1997). Researching and designing with a rich sense of context asserts a set
of values about that context. Publicly documenting that research and the design
responses in a set of diagrams may provide a record of design thought, similar to
the body of case law that is fundamental to legal analysis.
Alexander et al. (1987) propose other approaches to invite subsequent
engagement with a project, including: (1) “Every building must create coherent
and well-shaped public space next to it” (p. 66); and (2) the building layout and
construction including placement of entries, main circulation, interior open
spaces, daylight etc. should be “coherent and consistent with the position of the
building in the street and in the neighbourhood” (p. 77). Both these rules help the
building be part of something larger than itself. Subsequent designers can respond
to and build upon these larger forms.
Moreover, anticipating ways in which a design may be added to, remodelled,
or reframed and providing for such adaptations may allow the building to survive
a change in programme and to better fit an evolving context. Brand (1994) outlines
a number of approaches to designing adaptable buildings, including suggesting
that designers create a set of scenarios for the possible future of the built form.
If our restaurant fails, can we easily sell it for other retail uses? If a theatre is built
across the street, can we attract their foot traffic? Habraken and ‘open building’
advocates have explored multiple means to provide for adaptability at multiple
levels of control (see www.obom.org, or www.open-building.org).
144
M. C. Childs
Implications
The products of global real estate practices, such as the Wall-Street-tradable
project types (see Leinberger, 2007), corporate franchise models, brandable
icons, and large-scale themed environments, tend strongly to respond to the
standardizing context of the global market. More detrimentally they also typically
either minimize responses to other contexts (e.g. chain stores), or package a stock
product in local dress (e.g. ‘Colonial’ tract housing).
One basis for the existence of professions is that they steward a set of public
goods that would not adequately be produced in an unconstrained market (see
Freidson, 1994). Civic concinnity can support the public goods of environmental
stewardship, adaptable and resilient built forms, a democratically convivial
public realm, and enabling and inspiring milieus.
However, to fully engage in the practice of civic concinnity we must find
ways to respond to global real estate practices in ways that deliver both the
private goods of the market and the public goods for which we are responsible.
This may mean: (1) enriching our praxis as outlined above; (2) reshaping the
professional education of multiple disciplines to vigorously address civic
concinnity; (3) working with local and alternative capital; and (4) acting with
whatever collective political-economic weight and skill is available to the
professions to articulate and advocate the public goods that we offer.
The environmental stewardship, ‘green design’, argument, although by no
means won, is well engaged. The arguments for the other public goods of civic
concinnity such as supporting the public realm and civil society have not yet
been as politically viable. This may partially be the result of an internal tension
between the desire to be the grand master total designer and the joy of playing the
multiplayer game of civic concinnity.
Perhaps we can disaggregate some projects by forming ‘improv jazz bands’ of
designers as alternatives to single firms or hierarchical design and production
teams. We need to give awards to the designers of nuanced background buildings
and projects that richly re-knit districts. Developing a mechanism to habitually
publish diagrams of how our projects fit into their multiple contexts can provide
a record akin to case law and medical charts, and foster education, research, and
debate.1 We should regularly invite non-profits and civil society groups to review
and participate in projects.
Design regulations should be rebalanced so that they do not give an economy
of scale to large projects. Maybe zoning or anti-trust laws could be shaped to limit
the size of developments. We should advocate for municipal and state funds for
truly public spaces, and restructure the rules of public utilities and public works
agencies so that they, as a matter of course, help build a robust public realm. Great
sidewalks, for example, should not only be part of state highways when they
become the main streets of towns, but the highway engineers should be honoured
for how well they support the street life of the community.
Underlying the virtuous cycle of civic concinnity is the belief that what
the philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls a ‘culture-debating society’, in which
participant-citizens create, partake of and negotiate the meaning of cultural
products, is preferable to a ‘culture-consuming society’ in which we design either
total environments such as Disneyland or a variety of disconnected products such
as 20th century highways and fast-food outlets (Habermas, 1989). We must work
Civic Concinnity
145
to restructure our professional and governmental organizations to enrich our
ability to debate.
Civic concinnity aims to create urban forms and coherence from the nuanced
interactions of multiple individual designs. It requires that designers first research
the contexts of a project, then design a multivalent response to and reframing of
these contexts, with an eye towards inspiring others to continue the argument.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers, his wife and his colleagues for their insightful
critiques.
Note
1. Diagrams such as Edmund Bacon’ s in Design of Cities, 1974; Leon Krier’s in Leon Krier, 1992; or even
Peter Eisenman’s approaches to building analysis extended to the analysis of a building in the city
(see Eisenman, 2008) could serve as models for such a graphic record of the architect’s conception of
the project’s role in the city. However, it may take a government, professional body or other
interested party to establish requirements and standards in order to induce architects to regularly
publish such diagrams. Perhaps New York City’s Art Commission, Seattle’s Design Review
Program or another body could pilot such a public design record.
References
Alexander, C., Neis, H., Anninou, A. & King, I. (1987) A New Theory of Urban Design (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).
Bach, P. B. (Ed.) (2001) New Land Marks (Washington DC: Grayson Publishing).
Bacon, E. N. (1974) Design of Cities (New York: Penguin Books).
Brand, S. (1994) How Buildings Learn (New York: Penguin Books).
Childs, M. (2001) Civic ecosystems, Journal of Urban Design, 6(1), pp. 55–72.
Childs, M. (2008) Storytelling and urban design, Journal of Urbanism, 1(2), pp. 173–186.
Davis, H. (1999) The Culture of Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Edwards, T. (1924) Good and Bad Manners in Architecture (London: John Tiranti).
Edwards, K. & Howard, E. (1997) Monument Avenue: the architecture of consensus in the New South,
1890–1930, in: C. L. Hudgins & E. Collins Cromley (Eds) Shaping Communities (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press).
Eisenman, P. (2008) Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950–2000 (New York: Rizzoli).
Eliot, T. S. (1976 [1920]) The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen).
Farr, D. (2008) Sustainable Urbanism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley).
Forbes, S. R. (1899) The Aqueducts, Fountains and Springs of Ancient Rome (Rome: Via Della Croce).
Freidson, E. (1994) Professionalism Reborn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Habermas, J. (1989) (translation) [1962] The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press).
Habraken, N. J. (1998) The Structure of the Ordinary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Hester, R. T. (2006) Design for Ecological Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Hubbard, W. (1980) Complicity and Conviction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Hughes, R. (1993) Barcelona (New York: Knopf).
Kostof, S. (1995) A History of Architecture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Krier, L. (1992) Leon Krier: Architecture and Urban Design 1967–1992 (London: Academy Editions).
Leinberger, C. (2007) The Option of Urbanism (Washington DC: Island Press).
Potteiger, M. & Purinton, J. (1998) Landscape Narratives (New York: John Wiley and Sons).
Sitte, C. (1945) [1889] The Art of Building Cities (New York: Reinhold).
Spirn, A. (1989) Granite Garden (New York: Basic Books).
Vernez-Moudon, A. (1989) Built for Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Whiffen, M. & Breeze, C. (1984) Pueblo Deco (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press).
Wilson, C. (1997) The Myth of Santa Fe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press).