SEVEN POINTS toward a neomodern urbanism

OUTMODED PARADIGM. Neomodern urbanism recognizes that a grid of blocks and streets is not essential to the definition of a city but is instead a product of historical circumstances. It also recognizes that these circumstances no longer exist. The open and continuous block-and-street paradigm of gridiron urbanism has not been reproduced in the developed world for over a half-century. In contrast, what has been produced is a closed and discontinuous set of grid fragments in conjunction with a new and expansive type of urban space. We call this mode of production “sub” urban despite the fact that today it houses more than 75% of the urban population, a percentage of the urban whole that is rapidly increasing. Neomodern Urbanism cuts its losses in the gridded historic core in favor of an urbanism of the 75%.


URBANISM THAT WE PRODUCE. From an existential perspective, the urbanism that we actively produce is the urbanism that economically, politically and culturally defines us. We are not defined by the continuous, grid-based urbanism that we have inherited from past generations; we are instead defined by the discontinuous, spine-based urbanism that we have produced for the last half-century. The point is self-evident; it is not necessary to be an anthropologist to understand that we are defined by the things that we make, and the things that we make define us. A Neomodern Urbanism embraces the identity encoded in spine-based urbanism that we produce.


HISTORICAL COLLAGE. Until we embrace the urbanism that we produce, as opposed to the urbanism that we inherit, the best architects can hope to accomplish are the designs of modest, Bilbao-like projects of urban rehabilitation built upon an outmoded grid infrastructure. There is nothing more enticing for a postmodern architect than the prospect of realizing "modern" forms on a premodern grid. The collaging of the architectural future onto the urban past accounts for many projects that shape our discourse today including Hadid in Rome, Foster in London, Piano and Rogers in Paris, Liebskind in Berlin, OMA in Porto, and DSR in Manhattan. Each of these projects sustain the fiction that urban traditions — anthropomorphic scale, defined public spaces, the open continuity of streets — endure despite the effects of global urbanization. Any claim that the traditional city endures is only 25% true.


POTEMKIN VILLAGE. Until we embrace the urbanism that we actually produce, as opposed to the urbanism that we inherit, the best urban designers can hope to accomplish are reactionary, class segregated theme parks shamelessly promoted under the banner of progressive urban reform. (As if there was no difference between gentrification and urban reform.) Piano at the Daimlerplatz, Foster at Masdar, OMA at Waterfront City and the projects of New Urbanists everywhere, begin a long list of "imagineers," charged with reproducing (at great cost) an outmoded urbanism inherited from the urban past, closed to the urban present, and reserved exclusively for the entitled classes. A hypermoderm architecture pressed into the service of a reactionary urban agenda is perhaps the most egregious effect of an ongoing postmodern divide between architecture and urbanism. A Neomodern Urbanism rejects this divide as it rejects the Potemkin Village as viable alternative to the modernist New Town.


NEOMODERNISM AND UNITY. Modernism was predicated on nothing if not the unity of architecture and urbanism. The progressive agenda of the modern movement expanded the discipline's exclusive service to the upper classes and extended the benefits of design to the greater population in the guise of broad-based urban reforms. Following on the heels of spectacular failures, modern urbanism was almost fully discredited, leaving postmodernism to reconstitute this traditional divide between architecture and urbanism almost thirty years ago. This new divide required relinquishing the urban project to the neo-traditionalists (more accurately identified as anti-modernists) and their Potemkin enterprise and reserving modernism for architecture — preferably executed on pre-modern urban infrastructure. Until we shift our focus away from urbanism of the past, we will have neither an architectural nor an urban project because neither can exist productively in isolation. Neomodern Urbanism is characterized by nothing so much as a commitment to the unity of archiecture and urbanism.


SELF-LOATHING. The monuments and theme parks of postmodern urbanism exist precisely because the urbanism of our time has been portrayed as illegitimate or “sub” urban in the eyes of those who routinely address contemporary urbanism. It is the failure to overcome our attachments to the outmoded city of blocks and streets, and to validate the effects of our own practices, that accounts for a discourse that has been unable to produce any significant reforms over the past half-century. The ongoing and relentless condemnation of the urbanism that we produce as suburban is nothing more or less than a condemnation of the society that produced it. Such a condemnation is an extravagant form of self-loathing that is so deep-seated it can only be described as pathological. We look at the city that we actually produce and, turning away from our own ugly visage, choosing to focus on the diminishing 25% as a prop in the elaboration of self-serving, fictionalized present.


_____ CITY. The fundamental obstacle to an understanding of contemporary urbanism — in every way equivalent to a psychological block — is our deep, unspoken allegiance to the historical city. This allegiance is a consequence of the ongoing legacy of postmodernism that demands rethinking. The contemporary Megalopolis bears little resemblance to cities of the past. The differences between the outmoded urbanism of blocks and streets and the mass-scaled urbanism that we build today are so acute as to make the traditionally defined term “city” irrelevant. We nevertheless witness the growing host of projects, essays and entire books whose titles offer some qualified version of the word ____ city. Such efforts must be looked upon, not as an active contribution to the field of contemporary architectural or urban knowledge, but as a requiem whose often striking profundity is based on an exquisite accounting of all that has been lost. Neomodern Urbanism explores the necessary work that follows the mourning.

CULTURE NOW: Rockford Redevelopment

model view with cross axial glyph

Coordinated by Thom Mayne, Karen Lohrmann, and UCLA, Culture Now is a project of urban revitalization operating under the auspices of President Obama's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Currently, twelve universities are contributing to the project which focuses on the plight of provincial American cities whose regional economic engines have vanished leaving their often considerable urban resources to decline and decay. Flint, Mobile, Cleveland, Merced, and Toledo are among the cities being investigated. The charge of the project is to leverage cultural resources, both within the cities and without, into large scale urban redevelopment. This project targets Rockford, Illinois, one of America's most distressed urban centers, offering new ideas for revitalizing the struggling inner-city through fresh design and programming.  For the complete project see the Culture Now website.

variations on glyph showing selected scheme: 2A

SIGN AND TOOL. The masterplan is not a definitive composition that specifies a single and final state for every element of a plan, it is instead an open framework that enables any number of design alternatives. It describes a set of possibilities (Manhattan), not a fixed, singular, orchestrated vision (Brasilia). While the masterplan of Rockford will not be composed in its entirety, it centers around a large-scale compositional element that will be referred to as a glyph. Defined as both a character and a symbol, the glyph represents the total scope of the project, exploiting rather than concealing the scale and singularity of the design intervention. While the glyph is ultimately described by forms, it is manifest as an open space or a void encompassing a new park and riverfront developments.  Regardless of this immateriality, the glyph has two specific roles that are both iconic and organizational. The glyph is simultaneously a sign and tool. 

As a large icon, the glyph creates a coherent figure with global visibility. Capable of branding Central Rockford as a unique part of the city, it also addresses a much larger identity for the Rockford conurbation.  Cities typically produce comprehensive symbols in the form of unique aggregate skylines punctuated by singular objects (monuments). As cities have come to grow through larger and larger units of aggregation over the past fifty years, however, large scale representation has shifted from the collective aggregation of the skyline to the large scale branded enclave that ultimately refuses to be swallowed up into a larger aggregation. Like the Palm Islands of Dubai, the glyph serves as the logo of Central Rockford, writ large in form and space.

Yet, while the Rockford glyph has an iconic dimension, the intent is not to create an arbitrary sign but instead to create a “motivated” sign. Motivated signs are characterized by a natural relation between signifier and signified. What this means is that the sign is deeply embedded in the structure and organization of what is signified. For example, the jagged skyline is a motivated sign of New York City insomuch as the aggregate quality of the sign is reflects the aggregate structure and organization of the gridiron block structure which accrues over time. Alternatively, the  “Big Apple” is an unmotivated sign of New York City. While and oversized red apple often serves as a logo for the city, it is not directly tied to the form of the city and so operates as an arbitrary or unmotivated urban icon. 

The Rockford glyph is intended to function as a motivated sign. To that end, it must not only be iconic but must also structure and organize the actual physical environment. This is accomplished through the use of the glyph as a constructed ‘datum’ against which a maximum of environmental diversity can unfold. In other words, given the compositional stability of the icon, the designs produced within and around it are freed from any obligations toward a unity or totality because the glyph already builds it into the composition. A ‘surplus’ of order is contained in the glyph such that all which follows may develop according to its own internal logic, safe in the assumption that it remains part of a greater whole. In this way, a large scale icon is translated from a pure, unmotivated sign into an organizational framework that enables a wide variety of events, events which, of course, cannot be fully foreseen by a designer. 

The glyph is abstract — it is neither character nor symbol, but somewhere in between. It needs to maintain a level of abstraction, not only to serve its iconic purposes, but to be able to fulfill its organizational function. For this reason the glyph is neither figure nor form. To possess iconic properties, it must exhibit the characteristics of a figure; to structure a large and complex urban environment, it must exhibit the characteristics of a field. It can be as simple as a line (such as the rectangle of the runway itself) or as complex as a ancient pictograph, yet it must exist between figure and form.

new glyph axes showing existing buildings and bridges and available construction
envelopes indicated in orange

The Rockford team members are Albert Pope, Alex Gregor, Yi-Chia Chen, Kyle Byrne, Libo Li, Sandra Marcatili, Kerim Miskavi, Weijia Song and Peter Stone. For the complete project see the Culture Now website.

integration...

two ladders skirting a hill top site

Frank Lloyd Wright's organic sensibilities would never allow him to claim the top of a hill. As far as a natural context was concerned, Wright would recommend a search of the intended building site for that one spot in which nature accumulates. The spot in which nature accumulates refers to a simple holism whereby natural systems come together in a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Having found the spot, Wright would recommend that an architect build anywhere but there.

Wright's fundamental deference to natural systems informed all of his work. For Wright, the ultimate model for any architectural and urban construction is the organism seen as but one component of a natural system. In this regard, responding to the building's context means integrating it into its surrounding natural systems. This integration precludes a building assuming a dominant position vis-à-vis all other natural systems. In a functional network there can be no privileging of a single part: certainly not a man-made part. Wright espoused the idea of "organicism." More sophisticated than the catch-all term organic, organicism requires more than mere resemblance — where a building is organic simply because it imitates natural forms or functions of a natural system. Organicism requires that a building become part of a much larger natural system in which it sits, and not simply dominate it. The idea is to integrate rather than dominate....

on urban identity

Aldo van Eyck once asked, "if society has no form, how can architects build the counterform?" The deceptively simple sound bite maintains that coherent social form makes architecture possible. In other words, absent a clear and credible social order, architects cannot construct the decisive linkage between social order and urban form. As a period piece of existentialist angst, van Eyck’s remark stands as a lament that all contemporary forms of the social are suspect, if not illegitimate. While he was right about the binding relation between urban and social form, van Eyck was wrong concerning its absence in contemporary urbanism. Contemporary society does have a form and, if it is recognized, this form can be used to create a counterform.

Robert Longo, Untitled, 1981, from Men in the Cities

Prevailing wisdom, however, follows van Eyck's lead. It suggests that the urbanism that we actively produce — the urbanism of megalopolitan sprawl — is a complete and utter failure. According to many in the design community, Megalopolis fails to produce a coherent urban form, fails to produce viable public or social identity, and it fails to produce the qualities of architecture and urban space that we have come to expect from cities. In short, Megalopolis is an aberrant, sub-standard, sub-urbanism that cannot stand up to the urbanism of the past. The work of zoneresearch seeks to refute these apparently systematic failures of Megalopolis and produce, for once, an objective assessment of the city that is now more than fifty years in construction. More importantly, we argue that prevailing urban forms — forms that we actively produce — constitute the urbanism that defines our social dimension. By discrediting this urbanism, we discredit the image of ourselves as it is presently projected into built urban form. Focusing on contemporary urban form and the subject that it produces, zoneresearch identifies Megalopolis as the one and only site upon which an alternate urban identity can be be constructed.

blue archipelago

first published as "Blue Archipelago" in Log 5, spring, 2005.

BLUE ISLANDS. Among the many maps that were produced by a stunned liberal electorate in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, the so-called cartogram enjoyed particularly wide circulation. The cartogram distorts the size of an area based on its population so that the greater the population density of a region, the larger its representation. The county-by-county cartogram of the election results revealed a direct relation between population density and votes cast for Republican and Democratic candidates. Democratic votes clustered in blue islands of high density surrounded by a sparsely populated sea of red space. The map was startling because it revealed an apparently deep ideological divide between cities and their surrounding regions – a divide that is clearly being driven by an urban dynamic. From a political standpoint, this divide came as a total surprise. Given the evolution of the city over the past 50 years, however, it should have been expected. That it was unanticipated is perhaps as telling as the existence of the islands themselves.

THE REGIONAL MODEL. Only closed cities are cut off from their surrounding regions; open cities are not. The blue islands are startling because they provide stark evidence that we live in closed cities. This evidence flies in the face of some of the most basic assumptions about our present modes of urbanization. The urban fabric is no longer seamless. Over the past half century, new development has jumped beyond the perimeter of the existing city and has formed into discrete suburban clusters. In the interstices of these clusters, open space has emerged and this open space has often been associated with the qualities of natural environments. In one sense, the fabric of the city has been dispersed. In another, urban fabric has been infiltrated by open space. This trend has led to the assumption that the closed, monolithic forms of the traditional city have been opened up to the natural environment.

This opening up of urban form was, of course, long anticipated. The green, spatially abundant, open city underwrote the practices of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Hiberseimer, and Ivan Leonidov, as well as those of Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Patrick Abercrombie, and N.A. Miliutin. The cities they imagined and drew dissolved into the landscape and integrated the urban and natural world into a new continuity. The open city was to achieve not just spatial integration but also integration between urban and natural systems that would reestablish an ecological balance between the artificial and natural world, long thrown off by the excesses of industrialization. This impulse called Regionalism , came into being in the mid-1920s twenties with the founding of the Regional Planning Association of America. While none of these architects or theorists managed to realize a veritable Regional City – indeed, their work often had the opposite effect – the idea has never fallen out of currency. Admired by ecologists and subject to recurring revivals (most recently under the label Landscape Urbanism) the open, regional city remains part of the operating logic of our suburban worldview. The Regional model is background noise; it goes unquestioned until such evidence appears that brings its assumptions to our attention. To wit, the blue and red maps that have measured, among many other things, the degree to which the American city has become profoundly alienated from its adjoining territory.

THE LOGIC OF CLOSED SYSTEMS. The crucial component of this Regional model is, of course, the open urban system that forms its core, and it is the recent foreclosure of this open system that has brought the Regional model into crisis. Closed urban systems have been rewriting the logic of the open city for the past five decades. From 1800 to 1950, gridiron urbanism was the dominant mode of urban production throughout the United States. During that time, the grid became the de facto vernacular form of the industrialized city. By today, we are all overly familiar with gridiron urbanism because it was the basis of every American city founded in the past century. Today it is simply synonymous with our understanding of “city.” Its open form and infinite extensibility once spanned our culture, connecting the banality of urban infrastructure to the myth of the open urban frontier. As infrastructure, its influence was pervasive, even subliminal. Like all urban infrastructures, gridiron urbanism defined the western city at an existential level.

In spite of the continuing value of gridiron infrastructure, its production came to an abrupt and unceremonious end in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Across a relatively short space of time, the grid was overthrown as the dominant mode of urban production and since then, no significant plattings of continuous streets have been realized. What came to replace the open form of the gridiron was, of course, the closed form of cul-de-sac urbanism. Much as gridiron urbanism came to define the world that it structured, closed cul-de-sac urbanism defines today’s city. Unlike gridiron urbanism, however, we are generally less aware of the cul-de-sac’s presence. Its intervention was subtle, its forms were often fractured, its impact was indiscernible (save the drawing up of strange maps), yet it is everywhere actively defining the opportunities we take, the routines we keep, the people we know and the connections that are (never) made. We are, nonetheless, even less aware of its existential effects. Primary among these would be the discontinuities of urban form. Cul-de-sacs are closed systems. They create an archipelago of densely populated islands closed off from the greater region.

THE NETWORKED INTERIOR. Our awareness of closed systems has often been focused on their effects from within: their effects on both the foreclosure of the inner city and on the balkanization of the urban periphery. The effects of closure from without are arguably more consequential. Severing the city from its regional context deeply affects our relation, not only to provincial populations, but to the whole of the natural world. In an open city, each street ends at the horizon. In a closed city, each street ends in a terminal condition. Closed city destinations are met, not by the open road, but by the labyrinthine logic of the parking garage, the subdivision, the commercial mall, and the office park. In other words, in a closed city, destinations are defined by an interior condition, an interior condition that did not exist in the world created by gridiron urbanism. The continuity of the gridiron gave rise to an open urban frontier that, by definition, extended infinitely. Before 1950, the urban gridiron flowed seamlessly into the continental grid, creating a continuum for which there was no interior and exterior. This continuum created a univalent, universal space. Closed cul-de-sac urbanism, on the other hand, creates a bivalent space fashioned out of the division between an exclusive, highly controlled interior and a displaced exterior. Closed systems have reconstituted the open city as an interior and, in so doing, have relegated the greater urban region to an exterior position. The result is the blue island morphology so apparent in the cartogram.: small scale cul-de-sacs accumulate and, in turn, generate the cartogram’s red and blue cul-de-sacs.

How does the transition to bivalent space exclude the provincial region? A single image makes the point. A photograph of a standard, interstate exit sign covered in reflective lettering, this image indicates access to a road whose founding logic has long been lost. The road now originates from nowhere and goes nowhere. Phoenix’s 339th Avenue occupies the astral expanses of the Sonoran desert with no trace of the city in sight. The sign bears testament to a time when the entire urban project aspired to an open horizon. At that time, city and hinterland were both part of a single continuum. No longer. Today, 339th Avenue exists miles past the last residential subdivision; it has been cut off from the univalent space that gave rise to it. Outside the wall of closed urban development, the atavistic avenue stands adrift in the disorganization of an urban exterior. The interstate sign confirms that, once, hundreds of numbered streets would have met the desert’s edge. Today these streets have been replaced by a single highly regulated right of way, optimized for transnational traffic. The region exists only as an apron to this right of way. It remains, however, the home of the hinterland populations, the thousand-many red counties indicated on the cartogram, and now exterior to the urban nexus. In contrast to its former existence as a gridiron frontier, the hinterland possesses no spatial coordinates emanating from the city. This absence of spatial organization stands in distinct contrast to the closed-world geometry that is highly defined. The blue islands are spatially organized; the red seas are not. Given such a contrast, how could an ideological divide not exist?

OPEN CONTRADICTION. What is so striking about this interior/exterior condition is less the fact of its existence, than the fact that its existence is lost on just about everyone. This lack of awareness is all the more astonishing in a social, political, and economic world in which openness seems to matter so much. Risking a few generalizations, everything about American society is believed to be open: the government, the economy, education, and politics. The cherished right of “equal access” to education, capital, information, and markets is predicated on nothing if not an open infrastructure. The myth of the open society is crucial to the social psyche that pervades our nation’s discourses, including its urban discourses, and the existence of open infrastructure is indispensable to the myth of the open society.

When (an?) ideology exists in a vacuum, when it is everywhere contradicted by reality, adherence to it becomes increasingly blind. When (an?) ideology sponsors openness but returns nothing but interiors, when it sponsors horizons and returns nothing but terminal conditions, when it sponsors self-determination and returns nothing but corporate behavior – ideology splits off from the life-world. Under such conditions, words and deeds (ideas and things) break apart. Because it is so much easier to understand than a complex urban environment, ideology ultimately dominates the scene and the contradictory realities (of the closed city) are willfully ignored. Under such circumstances, the environment becomes completely opaque.

Living in a moment when urban systems are closed off from natural systems, and natural systems are in a state of radical decline (if not collapse), the consequences of being ideologically driven and environmentally blind could not be more catastrophic. A network of densely populated islands, each sealed off from its surrounding territory, creates a closed-world scenario of the most regressive kind. On the outside, entropy accelerates at an exponential rate. The absence of regional structure has led to the radical disorganization of space, profoundly alienating in its effect, and those who inhabit this space are as alienated as the land itself. Clinging to their radar dishes for survival, they become vulnerable to the most intense form of ideological manipulation that media-savvy politicians can buy.

THE REGIONAL CONTINUUM. Despite the fact that the cartogram is mathematically generated with statistical precision, it looks like a cut of strangely marbled meat: a continental pork chop charred to a crisp by the effects of global warming. The reddish fat is shrunken to gristle, the blue meat has turned rancid. The modernist dreams projected by Wright, Mumford, Leonidov, and Milutin belong to the past. Their idea of an open Regional city that would restore balance between natural and the urban world is so out of synch with present-day realities that their example is all but useless In dismissing their utopian predispositions, however, we must admit that they were correct in saying that there can be no divide between the city and its hinterland. There can be no urban interior and natural exterior for the simple reason that there simply is no exterior to our ecology. There is only one environment and everything, every creation and every destruction, must be entered on the balance sheet. An urban system closed off from, and all but blind to the natural systems that support it creates an exterior capable of being abused with impunity. Corrupt accounting practices that keep so many items off the balance sheet remind us that the opposite of Regionalism is a fool’s paradise.

an object subject network...

first published as "Last Metropolitans" in Log 4, Fall 2004.

OBJECTS WITHOUT SUBJECTS. We are often so busy investing our architectural objects with meaning — turning in dazzling performances of technical and plastic virtuosity — that we tend to forget about the subject of our work. We aim to produce architectural spectacles — concert halls, museums, big city airports and libraries — but give scarce consideration to the fact that spectacles create spectators. To say the obvious, spectacles serve specific economic, social and political ends, ends that a dazzled spectator can only remotely suspect. This strategic distraction is meant to shut down a greater awareness, for that is what spectacles do and why we are glad to have them pass as events in our lives. When spectacles never end, however, when an entire city is conceived in spectacular terms, then our lack of interest in spectators becomes much more problematic. In this regard, we discuss much about cities but rarely about the citizens created by the processes of urbaniztion. Today, for example,we are obsessed with the "Metropolis" but rarely consider what constitutes a Metropolitan. One may respond, in protest, that such considerations take us too far a field, into politics or psychology or economics and are as such best left to the devices of the social sciences. But when such devices find their way into built form, as they are known to do, we are, unfortunately, no more aware for it. The creation of such blind spots are the ultimate cost of our tendency to pursue, to the end, objects without subjects.

ENCODING SELF IN URBAN FORM. The problem of the Metropolitan turns out to be an interesting case in point. For all of those who engage in the rhetoric of the Metropolis today, how many among them would consider those they scrutinize, or even themselves, to be true Metropolitans? Given a world of identity politics, where race, sex and gender coin a specific self, the declaration of an urban identity becomes a curious choice. The very idea of encoding self or identity in urban form is, in fact, laughable. This is because the Metropolis is a historical phenomenon, not a multi-purpose tag for “big city.” Built upon a 19C gridiron infrastructure, the Metropolis emerged at the turn of the 20^th century, reached its peak in the 1920s, crashed in the 1930s and was subsequently driven into extinction by the technical, political and economic realignments precipitated by the Second World War. When cul-de-sac urbanism displaced gridiron urbanism as the dominant mode of urban production, the Metropolis died along with the urban subject that it created. Who was that subject? Is it possible to pick up the trail if only to understand what an urban subject is, or the limits of what urban identity can confer?

METROPOLITAN PORTRAIT. A search for some of these answers takes us back to 1938 when the American photographer, Walker Evans, walked down into the New York subway with a camera hidden in his coat and proceeded to take some of the most extraordinary images in the history of “portrait photography.” An exercise in absolute randomness, Evans would choose as his subject anyone who happened to sit opposite him in the subway car. He never asked who they were, what their name was, where they were going or why they were on the train; he simply and systematically operated the shutter. In a dry, laconic voice, Evans spoke of his methodology: “I would like to be able to state flatly that sixty-two people came unconsciously into range before an impersonal fixed recording machine during a certain period of time, and that all these individuals who came into the film frame were photographed, and photographed without any human selection for the moment of lens exposure.” (Evans, 1952) Besides being something of a manifesto for the Documentary School of photography, the severe analytical mode is remarkable in the displacement of both the author and his subject alike. (He did not even time the shutter release.) To say that these images pushed the traditional boundaries of photographic portraiture would be an understatement. No one was posing. No characteristic expressions were sought, and none were offered. The photographs did not attempt to render apparent individual identities. They were not celebrations of uniqueness. They were instead a random and mechanical measure of an untutored and unsuspecting metropolitan crowd. Frame by frame, train after train, with each successive click of the shutter, Evans would incorporate anyone who happened to face his camera into an ambitios metropolitan portrait.

PSYCHOLOGICAL STRUGGLE. As much a thought experiment as a photography project, Evans’ anonymous portraits attempted more than a matrix of anonymous headshots. The sum of this project would not emerge from the multiplication of standard subway cars and camera frames — nor would it emerge from multiple rolls of exposed film or a pile of black and white prints. Positioned within the very nexus of a modern urban infrastructure, Evans would capture, not just numbers, but the complex psychological struggles that attend the formation of the metropolitan subject. Written into the set of each body and the lines on each face were the effects of the congested street, the crowded platform and the fast moving train. The faces Evans photographed reveal nothing if not the degree to which the mechanical protocols of metropolitan infrastructure penetrated into the substance of urban existence. As such, the photos can stand as the concrete visual analogue to a thematic already identified in 1903 by Georg Simmel: the struggle of the individual to maintain a nominal integrity against the sovereign forces of the Metropolis. In his essay, “the Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel suggested that a psychological transformation was demanded by the big city. This semi-anesthetized state, characterized by Simmel as blasé, anticipates by more than three decades Walter Benjamin’s similar concerns about the fatally damaged “sensorium” of the modern urban masses. Due to overcrowded streets, inhumane working conditions and the expanded theatre of industrialized warfare, Benjamin rightly feared that a brutalization of the senses would lead to a crass aestheticization of politics and thus to the Fascist State. What Simmel and Benjamin anticipated was appalling; a social body defined, not by ideals or shared purpose, but by the shock and exhaustion of its routine existence.

SELF-PRESERVATION. Benjamin’s caveat was written into the conclusion of his famous 1936 essay on mechanical reproduction published just two years before Evans began randomly clicking into the rush-hour crowd. Unlike the essay, however, the photographs were inconclusive as regards to the plight of the metropolitan subject. Even a cursory look at the shots reveals that [neither the mechanical protocols or] Evan’s shutter did not extinguish identity. In spite of the circumstances, uniqueness remained. More than being merely indifferent or physically stunned into some form of neurological shock, the faces betrayed a set of complex responses drawn up into intricately strained muscles and hollowed out eyes. Existential struggle is there as is, certainly, nervous exhaustion. Some form of marginal integrity too is registered. More important, however, for each of these passengers there existed an invisible wall marking a space whereby self-coherence and humanity are momentarily preserved and the collected pressures of the city is subdued. In contrast to the essays, the photographs make no great claims against the urban masses or the Fascist state, but instead record the particular features of a specific someone who is simultaneously anyone, caught by the camera in a kind of inert defiance of what lies hopelessly outside their control. Such is the conclusion based on the strength of Evans work; that we are still, in 1938, in the presence of coherent urban subjects.

OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS. While commodified and shocked into some semblance of a collective identity, and so incorporated into the metropolitan machinery, the apparent illusion of coherence or self-possession is sustained. The historical city always supported this illusion and, as a historical city, so did the Metropolis. This was done by simply mediating between object and subject. By mediation it is meant that the surrounding infrastructure became that object against which a coherent self could ultimately be defined. Beyond the deleterious effects of routine existence, one can read in these “captured” faces an epic confrontation between the citizen and the city’s bone-crushing machinery. The portraits show us that the Metropolitan subject was ultimately capable of rising to this occasion. Without the city [Metropolis], however, there is no mediation and no occasion, only the engine of urban production that can produce neurological fatigue (or not) and some large quantities of abstract space. Evans’ portrait of an individual who is tentatively reconciled to her urban surroundings reveals the historical potential of the city as a mediating agent. The faces show a gripping and anguished interrelation of subject and object, born out of an unholy alliance between metal and flesh that is only a minute away from stripping its inhabitants of everything they have. However, a mediating function is performed just the same.

TOURISTS. Appropriately enough, the last Metropolitans were last seen sitting on a train. Nineteen thirty-eight marks the threshold of world war, the subsequent abandonment of gridiron urbanism and the evacuation of the Metropolis. The majority of the passengers that Evans photographed — those that survived the war — would use those same trains to decamp to the suburbs. Out there, new subjectivities would emerge in reaction to the appalling scenarios outlined by Simmel and Benjamin. These subjectivities were no longer concerned with urban density, sensory stimulation or the dynamics of the Metropolitan era. Like the subjectivities recorded by Evans, the new subjectivities were technologically mediated, but these technologies had little to do with the mechanical protocols of the Metropolis. As opposed to the material calamity of concrete, flesh and steel that is New York City mass transit, postwar technologies would form much more benign networks [immaterial infrastructures] as they began to reshape cities with vacuum tubes, copper wire and radio waves. As such, they created altogether different psychological struggles than those recorded on the subway. Postwar infrastructures are not about an excess of stimulation but an absence of stimulation. They are about the absence of mediating form, mediating form that had traditionally linked object and subject, but at a price that could no longer be borne by its citizenry. This absence brings us back to an architecture of spectacle, an architecture of objects without subjects that has necessarily come to replace the mediation provided by the historical Metropolis. Evans’ passengers are gone. There is no one left to photograph but us tourists — dazzled spectators — who shuttle through the city in search of spectacular form.

into background...

Infrastructure is everywhere. It exists all around us, even where you are right now. You can see it when you sit at your desk, look out your window and when you watch television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church, or go to school. Urban infrastructure is there every time you walk out the door. It operates, without effort, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Infrastructure cannot be put down like a newspaper or a book, shut off like a computer or radio, or walked out of like a bad film or a bad building. It determines if you walk fast or slow, left or right, up or down. It determines, actually, if you walk at all. As opposed to a foreground object, infrastructure operates in the background leaving us largely unaware of the complex network of subjects and objects (actants) that surround and define us. The fact that infrastructure is unseen makes it more important, not less. It constructs world...

The majority of objects that make up the built environment tend to vanish from consciousness and perform their functions invisibly. Most buildings can be thought of as tools in the sense that they almost always “disappear” in favor of a larger context (city) or ulterior purpose (function) by which they are dominated. Revealing themselves only when they cease to function, background buildings possesses a unique potency. Like utensils, fixtures and furniture, they provide basic services, providing the ingredients of a life-world that nonetheless escapes our conscious awareness. Because background buildings are ambient and immersive, they are always and already in use; in the sense that they provide for the most basic level of existence, they can be said to define the built environment at  an “ontological” level.

The conception of architecture as a tool or background object can be seen as the opposite of the conception of architecture as a foreground object or a spectacle. Architects must devote their time and energy to the exquisite production of museums, concert halls, pavilions, embassies and campus buildings which are spectacular in the sense that they are high profile buildings that typically contain an important political or cultural programs. Traditionally classified as “monuments,” foreground buildings are intended to remain in the consciousness of its users. Far from disappearing from the awareness of the occupant, they are characterized by their novelty and uniqueness. Often becoming destinations in and of themselves, foreground buildings are not meant to fade into the background or be forgotten, but are meant to make an enduring mental impression.

Foreground buildings are rightfully favored by designers because they not only foreground specific objects or events, but also foreground the ultimate potential of design. While we would like to believe that all of our buildings are received with the utmost attention, this is decidedly not the role that the vast majority of buildings are given to play. This fact can be difficult for designers to process. (No one aspires to compose elevator music.) Yet, if we limit ourselves to foreground design, we preclude the possibility of serious work on the “hidden,” ontological dimension of the built environment that would otherwise be left to the spreadsheets of bankers and developers and the mathematical calculations of engineers. If buildings are only regarded as foreground spectacles, their role as the “invisible actors” of the environment remains unaddressed, untheorized and opaque to design discourse and to design itself. With so much of life being carried out at this level, such oversight would undermine what are arguably the discipline's most profound (if prosaic) applications.

From within the perspective of urban theory, there is a quick and easy entrance into the hidden life of background objects; the movement from the design of icons to the design of tools goes directly through our nebulous classification of urban infrastructure.  Infrastructure is the urban equivalent of buildings and tools insomuch as it exists in the same ontological network as other, smaller background objects irrespective of its scale. Thus we can see infrastructure residing at the upper end of the complex (actant) network that includes routine objects such as utensils, appliances, furniture, windows and buildings. Included in this network are the broad classifications of integrated tools such as transportation infrastructure — streets and freeways, parking garages, transit terminal — utilities — electricity, water, information — and services — reservoirs, water treatment facilities, sanitary landfills. Like tools, urban infrastructure is taken as granted in it's daily functioning, “withdrawing" into the background and becoming invisible or unseen in spite of the fact that it is manifest in the broad light of day. Like a tool, infrastructure constitutes our ontological preconditions operating subliminally within complex "actant" networks (fn).