Interior of one of the townhouses looking toward the common backyard.

Running parallel to the back of each row of townhouses is a long subterranean corridor, cramped, artificially lit but still dark, with pipes and cables running through its length, moisture trickling down its unfinished concrete walls, it’s the mechanical and services spine of the block. Garbage cans are lined up at each door marking the otherwise inconspicuous switch to another home. At the end of the corridor is another door, this one leading to a series of hidden exterior steps running parallel to the blind exterior end wall of the townhouse row. If you are not looking for them, the steps, and those coming in and out, are indeed hard to see… Ni vu ni connu. Here the ideology of making a distinction between what is allowed to be seen and what should remain hidden is designed into a long corridor allowing for the covert movement of trash and extra-marital affairs.

We are in Lafayette Park (1961-5), Detroit, the residential complex designed by Mies Van der Rohe. Our tour guides, all long time residents, are immensely proud of where they live. Given the recent financial crisis and the decline with which Detroit has become infamous for (Detroit, mausoleum of high capitalism) it is remarkable (at least for the visitor) to see such a viable community so near downtown. According to one of our guides, the reason why the complex has withstood the crisis is obvious: good design and pride in its architecture. This, it could be added, has gone hand in hand with the tastes of a portion of the middle class on more stable incomes and mortgages. ‘We sometimes have issues with new residents putting up fences, but they are quickly brought down.’ He has a chuckle recalling how he once asked a fellow resident to remove her patio furniture because he was showing the place to visitors. Lafayette Park, he comments with a sigh of relief, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places so resident owners are not allowed any exterior modifications, including modifications to the planting scheme. Appropriation takes place within. And each townhouse visited reflected the personal tastes of the owners within the boundaries set up by the architect and the NRHP–ultimately left to cosmetic changes.

Lafayette Park with shopping plaza to the right, high rise residential slabs in the centre and townhouses to the left.

Lafayette townhouses with its NRHP-protected planting scheme in the foreground.

‘Architecture is too important to be left to architects.’ (Giancarlo de Carlo, 1967)

‘And what did the users add? Their needs.’ (Henri Lefebvre, in 1968, discussing the modifications to Le Corbusier’s Maison à Pessac)

When I visited Lafayette Park in April 2011 I was in the midst of a review of the theory and practice of participation in architecture from the 1950s onward. And so I wonder how heritage conservation, also translated into a distinction between things shown and things hidden, relates to the notions of appropriation and occupation for residential architecture as developed since the 1950s. If we follow this trend and see creative appropriation as a form of emancipation from the rigidity of Modern architecture then how should we balance the conservation of residential projects that have become Modernist icons? These are, after all, representatives of a culture’s heritage and a strong emphasis on the process of design over the aesthetics of the product, might indeed make us forget about the value of the object that frames this same process. Lafayette Park is turning out to be a successful product and process. And its resident-owners have bought into the particular lifestyle and ideology it represents as well as how it should be represented. While this is certainly true for those we met, others may not be so convinced (those putting up fences, for example), but certainly everyone appears to be toeing the line. At the moment, Modern residential projects are being re-visited and re-valued so that the tension between ‘user needs’ and design determinism may not, in particular instances, be such an issue after all.

Yet I still cannot help thinking that there is something inherently fraught with the balance between conservation and appropriation, especially when it comes to ‘living’ communities like Lafayette Park. Given that there is no clear boundary between private interests and public concerns, should the ethics governing the conservation of private residential architecture be different from those governing publicly owned architecture? To what extent should the original design and aesthetics of a home be protected against its current occupants? Perhaps more importantly, when should the agency of individual owners be trumped in order to preserve the state of a cultural artefact whose function may invite exactly that type of creative behaviour? But Lafayette Park is a ‘finalized’ masterpiece whose transformation is denied by those who have chosen to live within its well defined perimeter. Here the theories of process and appropriation with roots in the 1950s and 60s meet the reality of actual lived-in Modern architecture at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Lafayette monochrome playground

The undivided backyard between two rows of townhouses is empty, no sign of either spilling out from living rooms or children playing (or having played). There is a common playground in the middle of the complex, with sparse metallic play equipment and painted, without much surprise and to everyone’s ironic delight, black. The only signs of inhabitation from the outside of the townhouses are the interior shading devices for the floor to ceiling windows (vertical blinds and low curtain rods cheekily omitting the original recess-concealed roller blinds) and the owners’ choice of art works for their vestibules. Architects are notorious for omitting the presence of people in the representation of their built projects. In this case people are wilfully removing themselves from the actual ‘living’ project, leaving very few visible traces, hiding most, and finding their agency, it seems, in the freezing of time and space.

Dalgety Bay suburban castle

Now for something a little lighter. A recent trip to Scotland and a wrong turn into a suburb of Edinburgh brought us to this suburban gem,  a heroic reminder that yes, a man’s home is indeed his castle. It reminded me I had once thought of posting photos of two similar meaningful roadside architectural attractions sharing an uncanny relationship. The above is pretty much the clearest go-ahead nudge one could get.

'WE SPEAK', Château Madrid, Rang du Moulin Rouge just off highway 20

Château Madrid (pictured above) is located at what is approximately the geographical centre (measured in highway kms) between Québec City and Montréal, Canada. The roadside attraction was built in the 1960s into a hotel slash restaurant slash service station slash dinosaur and bigfoot fantasy park. The familiar castle-like form of the building, which has now comfortably lodged itself into the collective memory of every motorist travelling that stretch of the Transcanadian Highway, would have originated from the owners’ fascination with castles seen during a trip to Spain. The blatantly symbolic name of the place, now referred to as ‘Le Madrid’ rather than my childhood memory of ‘Château Madrid’, seems to confirm the rather specious connection. This is especially given the reference in a place which otherwise offers a vacuum of hispano-anything. One would be entitled, though, to understand the decision on symbolic geographical terms; Madrid is, after all, the symbolic geographical centre of Spain. But (if we were to take this interpretation seriously) the connection may have more to do with the real relationship between Spain’s highways (especially the national ones radiating from Madrid) and its castles (authentic in this case). Indeed a towering castle is a common sight from the roads to and from the Spanish capital. And in this case (if you compare with similar sights in France, for example) Spanish castles do have a certain ‘castleness’ je ne sais quoi.

But this is all in jest, after all, so why should the appropriation, commodification and consumption of someone else’s culture be one sided? Which brings us to the second attraction, this one from Spain (pictured below), where a genuine piece of architectural heritage has been crossed with the North American motel typology. The tower, which I am told is auténtica, is visible from the highway, and behind it stretches a series of ‘modern stables’: long arcades with generous arches wide enough to park an upgraded rental. To think of authenticity in both these cases (the Scottish example is instrumental, really, and so does not count) is a nice enough way to ponder over dead ends. The question might be: which achieves best what it claims to be, the hotel/motel wanting to be a castle or the castle wanting to be a hotel/motel?

The genuine, albeit lightly modified...

...and its backside car-ports.

It came back to mind after the event concluded because to me it illustrates we might be dealing with two co-existing models of authorship and interpretation. I guess the thought may have been triggered by the question of authorship raised in the comments that followed the last session. Well, that may be how it originated… Or was it from a discussion at the bar or on the inhabitation of Casa Malaparte? Anyway. So on the one hand, we have the post-structural notion of ‘the death of the Author’, i.e.: as we were repeatedly told in architecture school: the work must speak for itself. I think that was actually brought up yesterday as well. And on the other the belief that the truth about a work of art (or research project in this case) must somewhat reside with the author.

The latter point is the one directly addressed by the question. It seems to me that this one seeks a personal foundation and justification for what is being presented in order to understand the work as a succession of logical steps. In other words, it wants to put the work into a narrative framework. I am wondering how a personal starting point, whatever that may be, might forgive the possible inaccuracies or the relative impact of our research when it is told as a story. After all, should not the argument stand on its own? Or is this just an indication that although we believe the work should stand on its own we still enjoy the comfort of knowing there is a person behind it all? Perhaps there is no contradiction there. But I am also wondering about the relationship between personal narrative frameworks and accounts of subjectivity in our research work. When are they equivalent?

Oh yes, just to clarify, I started writing this post after reading the line ‘In 2001 Jeremy Paxman interviewed Slavoj Zizek on BBC radio.’

The broad topic of his talk was campus architecture and the ‘poverty of student architecture.’ He argued that the current trends of urban segregation and exploitation are most appalling in the student context. Segregation because new campuses and residence projects show a general lack of any architectural sensibility and sensitivity to the city. Exploitation because the student body is sold a prepackaged lifestyle for profit. These trends, he further suggest, exist because they have been encouraged by public policy and quickly draws a line from the previous Conservative government to New Labour and ‘Blairite architecture.’

Jubilee Campus extension, Nottingham, by Make Architects

The first part of his talk focused on the disjunction between campus and town. It started way back with the ‘exclusive’ All Souls at Cambridge and jumped forward to new campuses like the Jubilee Campus at Nottingham by Make Architects. These new campuses, again completely disconnected, are prime examples of what he described as the ‘vacuous optimism’ of Blairite architecture that are turning universities into ‘jolly versions of business parks.’

The proposed Quill student residence at Waterloo was given planning approval last week.

The second part of the talk focused solely on housing. In many English cities, the newest, tallest and possibly worst buildings welcoming you as you arrive are student residences that have little or nothing to do with the place -witness Nido Spittafields or the recently approved ‘Quill’ at Waterloo. They  are the result of speculative property development tapping into the new ‘knowledge economy’ (partly inflated by the recent dependency of universities on overseas fees). Hatherley argued that the new residence projects by developers such as Unite or Nido are versions of gated communities completely disconnected from their surroundings, offering minuscule accommodation at high cost -but each with its own plasma screen. Although it might keep the parents who are paying rents from the thought of their children being unsafe, cold, whatever, these projects stand for a general impoverishment of the public realm (its own and the city’s).

Hatherley was followed by Douglas Murphy who gave a brief overview of Modern architecture, the radical responses of the 1960s and 70s, and the theoretical trends of the last 30 years (developed solely within the field of architecture). If one is to look to affect social change through architecture, as I understood his conclusion, you have to forget the last 30 years and focus on historical precedents, practices from outside the field and to the critical practices of the 60s and 70s because ‘these projects of Modern architecture are still unfinished.’ Will Wiles, senior editor at ICON, closed the session before opening a lengthy discussion and question period.

The discussion that followed was quite animated and raised crucial questions on occupation, education, participation, engagement and alternative means of making architecture. Instead of jumping into a description of the salient points or into my own thoughts right here I will leave these for the comments section below. Please comment, correct and/or criticise generously!

The Scoop at the foot of the GLA City Hall: a 'public space' that is privately owned and managed.

The dichotomy of public and private is something that has long been criticised in social theory. A common strand through Arendt (1956), Habermas (1962, 1992) and Sennett (1974) is that it is impossible, in Modern society, to speak of a clear boundary between the two. This touches on an issue common to all discussions on ‘public space’ in that there is a huge discrepancy between what the term implies and what it is used to describe. The requirements for a space to be public are as numerous as contradictory, and always contingent on a particular point of view.

DeLanda’s theory of assemblage (2006) might be of interest in this discussion because it offers a framework for describing complex and unfixed wholes at various scales. The theoretical premise is to conceive of ‘wholes whose properties emerge from the interaction between parts. (p.5)’ One example is that a particular group of individuals can simultaneously experience ‘territorialising’ and ‘de-territorialising’ forces (DeLanda’s theoretical starting point is the philosophy of Deleuze) that tend to respectively homogenise some of its identity and make some of it more heterogeneous. These forces, as opposed to being fixed aspects or categories, are variables of the group. What I suggest here is to apply similar thoughts to public space and to speak instead of social space with varying degrees of public and private.

My second thought has to do with the fact that assemblage theory, as elaborated by DeLanda, describes both human and material variables of social situations. These situations, whether an inter-personal conversation, a group of residents, a municipal government or even an urban agglomeration, are conceptualised as assemblages of persons and objects (agencements in Deleuze). The important distinction, as quoted above, is that the emphasis of study is on the relations between entities or ‘relations of exteriority’ rather than on the entities themselves. In this case it would seem assemblage theory has something valuable to offer in breaching the social/physical divide in theories of the public realm and public space.

References:
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press: 1958.
Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, Continuum: 2006.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, MIT Press: 1962.
—, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press: 1992.
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Faber: 1974.

Spiralling into Modernism

In the book Participation, Claire Bishop underlines three common aspects of participatory art: the desire to create an active/thinking subject who will be able to formulate their own social/political position from the experience of the work; asserting a socially oriented and egalitarian position for themselves by ceding part of their authorship to participants; and the restoration of a social bond in a community through the collaborative elaboration of meaning.

On a recent visit to Barking I saw “Through the planned cities fire will rage“, an exhibition of participatory art between Laura Oldfield Ford and a group of years 10 and 11 students from local schools. Given that my own research touches on the social interactions that constitute the regeneration project in the particular context of the Barking Town Centre I was interested to see how the principles outlined above applied in this specific case. Here the collaboration happens during the development process, with some of the projects (like Barking Town Square) already completed and others (like most of Barking Riverside) still under development, which gives this type of event a vital importance.

The imagination of the students is fantastic and some of the pieces offer genuine moments of reflection. For example a map of the borough with clearly marked unhappiness right of the centre and the great unknown of Dagenham further east: the recognized political divide of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Another group of drawings questioning the value of change and its ‘façades’ in the town centre. There are also moments of levity: is Barking spiralling into Modernism or is it not? The darkly metaphorical Happy Birthday! comic strip. And moments of downright, well… see drawing of plane flying into One Canada Square below. Certainly, the collaboration has succeeded in engaging students with urban issues by which they are directly affected and that must be commended. The participants are indeed given a better position to formulate their own critique of their local socio-economic and political situation. The whole of the work is clearly and thankfully representative of the ‘fire’ of adolescence. (On a marginally and I’ve-listened-to-it-recently related note, let me plug Robert Harrison’s podcast on Pink Floyd.)

The following quotation is taken from the Council’s website:

Ford’s own work uses the strategy of psychogeography to coax out the hidden narratives in the city and formulate a critique of urbanism. In the case of Barking and Dagenham it is the issue of housing that forms the crux of contention. For this new work she imagines militant groups emerging and the planned uses of the new regeneration schemes radically subverted. Her work references the Blitz, 1973, 1981 and points in the future to set out alternative possibilities.

I want to pick up four elements from this description, because although the work of the students is in many ways engaging, I think the handling of the issues at hand and principles of participation need some criticism. What first struck me is how much of the artist’s own aesthetics seem to come through the students’ work. It appears evident from the artist’s own work that there is a tendency to draw on dichotomies, be it planned/unplanned or construction/destruction. This strong dialectic aspect appears to come through quite clearly in the students’ work. The arrangement is fragmented, relies heavily on contrasts (in both form and content) and is primarily oppositional. This leads to a second point: I question whether the students are exploring their own experiential perception of their city through the loose (and highly subjective) framework of psychogeography or rather through the lens of the organiser’s oppositional stance on planning and private development. This again is not to say that the work itself is without merit, but that the premises posited by the artist are not entirely congruent with the result. And certainly not all the pieces are representative of this point. But these first two points should be weighed against the ‘desire to create a thinking/acting subject’.  ‘Through the planned cities fire will rage’ recalls a critique of Modernist town planning from the mid-twentieth century rather than an accurate critique of contemporary practices. Some images featuring One Canada Square, for example, raise the question of whether the intention is not off the mark. Being explicitly critical of private development and branded commercial hegemonies is excellent, but it becomes a tricky line to follow when urban planning is brought in under the same critique. The absence of government planning often goes, as was evidenced in the late 1980s at Canary Wharf, hand in hand with the market’s desire for deregulation. The last point touches on the ‘alternative possibilities’ that are explored in the work. Because the premises of the critique draw on moments of tension and crisis the ‘collaborative elaboration of meaning’ has a hard time escaping wholesale rejection to look more at positive transformation. Could the ‘radical subversion’ of the built environment be gentle?

Home?

No spirit

Change is overrated

Happy birthday!

Future!!

I love this city

Barking from Without was part of the 2010 Cities Methodologies exhibition and conference organised by the UCL Urban Lab. The exhibition took place at the Slade Research Centre on Woburn Square from 5 to 7 May 2010.

Barking from Without is an interactive installation presenting material from an ongoing case study of the new Barking Town Square in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Part of a broader research project on design in the contemporary public realm, the case study is supported primarily by participant-observer methods that draw as much on ethnographic fieldwork as on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. The research is presented in the form of an open dialogue which visitors are encouraged to join by leaving written comments.

All material from the installation is posted on barking-assemblage.org under the category Barking from Without. Comments are still very much welcome! Please participate by sending your comments to comment@barking-assemblage.org

Art and Answerability, written in 1919, is Mikhail Bakhtin’s first published essay. This early text, written when the author was only 24 years old, is usually recognised as significant for two principal reasons. First because the questions it poses will continue to resonate throughout Bakhtin’s subsequent work. Second because it is part of a series of early texts that were re-discovered following the author’s death in 1975 and whose English translations have only been published between 1990 and 1993. These texts have become highly relevant in establishing the philosophical foundations for Bakhtin’s later work which had by then been absorbed outside of Russia into various disciplines, including, to a very limited extent, architecture and design.

The central thesis of the essay states that “art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability” (Bakhtin “Art and Answerability” 2). What is identified here by Bakhtin is the fundamental split between culture (art and science) and life as it is actually experienced, or in other words, the split between theory and practice. The only possible unification of these two, he argues, occurs in individual responsibility. One must answer to theory for what they have experienced in practice, as one must answer to practice for what they have done in theory. This is what Bakhtin calls “two-sided answerability”. Bakhtin here enters the debate on a contentious issue at the time, namely the debate on “art for art’s sake or art for life’s sake.” Bakhtin explicitly argues for art for life’s sake, saying that art for the sake of art squarely falls into the realm of “theorism” since it negates the actual and real experience of life from which it has inescapably drawn. Indeed, in Bakhtin’s Neo-Kantian critique, there is no pure vantage point within the mind of an individual from which one is able to understand and create. There is rather an “impure” vantage point that is invariably defined by the experience of being and the experience of the other (Bakhtin “Author and Hero”).

As Clark and Holquist have noted, Bakhtin will throughout his lifetime continue to address the same issues as set in his early work (Clark and Holquist “Bakhtin”). His position may vary and be refined over time, but the questions themselves remain constant. His better known concepts of dialogism, carnivalesque, and heteroglossia are all, in a way, derivatives of his early work on ethics, aesthetics, and the architectonics of the act.

Most references to Bakhtin’s thought in architectural studies have drawn mostly on the carnivalesque and also to a smaller extent on his theory of dialogism. These have been relevant in addressing social issues related to space, for example in theorising the subversive act in public spaces (Shields “Places on the Margin”) or in seeing how a construction process involving multiple designers may be negotiated through dialogue (La Marche “Surrealism’s unexplored possibilities”). Still, Bakhtinian concepts, as far as I understand it, have yet to be introduced significantly into architectural theory and practice. Reading Bakhtin’s early texts allows us to address this issue by understanding the ethical and aesthetic philosophical foundations of his later, more well known theories. This may well offer an approach to social issues in the built environment that is more familiar and more relevant to architectural discourse as it may also shed new light on current discussion on the relation between practice and theory in architectural research.

***

References:

Bakhtin, M. M. “Art and Answerability.”  Art and Answerability : Early Philosophical Essays. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

—. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.”  Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984.

La Marche, Jean. “Surrealism’s Unexplored Possibilities in Architecture.”  Surrealism and Architecture. Ed. Thomas Mical. New York ; London: Routledge, 2005. 273-89.

Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin : Alternative Geographies of Modernity. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge, 1991.

***

See also:

Bakhtin, M. M., Michael Holquist, and Vadim Liapunov. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. 1st ed. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Çaliskan, Sevda. “Ethical Aesthetics / Aesthetic Ethics: The Case of Bakhtin.” Journal of Arts and Sciences (2006).

Habermas, Jürgen, Nick Crossley, and John M. Roberts. After Habermas : New Perspectives on the Public Sphere. Sociological Review Monographs. Oxford, UK ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing : Sociological Review, 2004.

Haynes, Deborah J. Bakhtin and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Nollan, Valerie Z. Bakhtin : Ethics and Mechanics. Rethinking Theory. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin : The Dialogical Principle. Theory and History of Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Dundas Square, November 2004

Paper presented at the 2009 Anglo-American Conference of Historians “Cities” in London.
You can download the full paper with images here.

INTRODUCTION
What we will look at in the next twenty minutes is a study of three iconic projects in Toronto that were all planned and built between the years 1955 and 2005: City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square, the Eaton Centre, and Dundas Square. I argue that the three adjacent projects parallel a development in the design and representation of public space in the city starting with an idealised projection of the public realm and ending with its commodification and transformation into spectacle.

The research has focused primarily on the play between the official description of the projects by the authorities and their reception by the public as represented in the local and national media. The goal was to collect an “assembly” of participating voices in the dialogue surrounding the creation of each project and allow the argument to surface organically from the fragments. In parallel to this, each site was “read” through the theories of three different thinkers. City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square with Hannah Arendt, Eaton Centre with Jean Baudrillard and Dundas Square with Guy Debord. What I would like to present here are some of the themes that emerged during the process.

CITY HALL & NATHAN PHILLIPS SQUARE
On September 26th, 1958, Finnish architect Viljo Revell was announced as winner of the international competition to design the new Toronto City Hall. The competition attracted 530 entries from 42 different countries, making it the largest international competition ever held anywhere. Mayor Nathan Phillips had pushed the competition forward when a prior proposal, unveiled in 1955 and described as a “drab filing cabinet”, fell through for lack of public support. Significantly, the competition brief reserved half the allocated downtown land for a civic square.

Revell’s controversial design (for Canada in the 1950s) might be considered a very late (almost anachronistic) example of “heroic” modernism founded on explicit political ideals. The main building is divided into three parts, the twin towers, the circular council chamber and the podium. The civic square, marked primarily by a large reflecting pool, is framed by an elevated walkway devised to give the otherwise open space a sense of enclosure. The building was officially opened in September 1965.
A wish-image of idealised public space

What I would like to discuss here is the idea of Toronto City Hall as a symbol of civic authority and a wish-image of idealised public space. Reading from the competition brief: “In the eighteenth century, the cathedral and the town hall frequently dominated the urban scene both physically and spiritually. The City Hall in Toronto is largely overshadowed physically, but it still dominates by its presence.”

At the onset, designers are asked to design a symbol of civic authority that may still dominate the financial and commercial downtown. Not only a symbol of authority but one that draws on nostalgic references –turning Toronto City Hall, one can argue, into a representation of something “that it is not”.

As one critic put it, the project fits more in the realm of “architectural fiction” than the realm of architecture.  The project indeed finds its way quite quickly into popular science fiction lore –more often than not acting as the seat of a strange and possibly harmful alien power (Star Trek) or an evil pharmaceutical corporation (Resident Evil).

City Hall represents, to some extent, a form of heroic act of place making, the reification of a momentous political ideal in the history of the city. Yet, we may also argue, reading from Arendt, that the imposing City Hall, as a representation of the political realm, is in opposition to the larger realm of the social where such representation is inevitably problematic. The extensive and grand civic space of Toronto City Hall might be wishful thinking for a society where the public and private realms constantly flow into each other and “behaviour has replaced action as the foremost mode of human interaction.”

From its opening, the authorities are faced with the problem that incentives have to be put in place for people to use the building and Square at all. A Globe & Mail editorial of 1965 reads:
“We are delighted that the new City Council has so quickly grasped the lively possibilities of Nathan Phillips Square, as already demonstrated by the skaters who never seem to vacate the place. Art exhibits […] square dances, and Shakespeare programs are also under consideration by subcommittees of the Parks and Recreation Committee. This is splendid. Let us have them all, plus a hot-dog stand, flower barrows, chestnut wagons and someday, -not too far away- a sidewalk café.”

“Only the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.”

In 1998, when the City of Toronto and its surrounding wards amalgamated into the Greater Toronto Area, the new council, led by Mayor Mel Lastman, almost decided against retaining the building as its headquarters. Abandoning Revell’s building would have proven right some critics who thought that the “idea of a city hall as a physical symbol is ridiculous.”  One can only imagine the difficulty of re-interpreting and occupying a building built as its own symbolic representation and appropriated as such by the City.

But Arendt warns that this idea, the disregard for permanence, is present in the very rise of modern society, in which private property seems to be sacrificed (through expropriation, for example) whenever it comes into conflict with the accumulation of wealth.  A conflict that was soon played out over the fate of Toronto’s old city hall.

EATON CENTRE
Three days after the official inauguration of City Hall, the Eaton Company with the City of Toronto announced plans to build a large retail and business centre on the site adjacent to the new City Hall. The project aimed at bringing back some of the vitality to the downtown commercial core that had been sucked out by suburban shopping centres.

Although the 22-acre project called for the destruction of the old City Hall, the City gave the Eaton Company a green light (planning to sell the old city hall for $8-million). Mayor Philip Givens commented: “We would be stupid to reject the first overtures of such a gigantic proposal. I am certain any plan they present will exceed, if not rival, Rockefeller Centre.”  But public opinion and activism by John Sewell, future mayor of Toronto (1978-1980), the OAA, the AIA, and local historical societies helped stop the heritage building’s destruction. Eaton finally abandoned the plan as Toronto’s assessment commissioner mourned a “$14-million a year realty and business tax loss.”  The project was shelved for almost ten years until the early 1970s when a new developer, Cadillac Fairview, picked up the project hiring local architect Eb Zeidler as designer. Learning from Eaton’s mistakes, the developer kept the new design away from the eyes of the public.

Phase I of the Eaton Centre, encountering only mild opposition, opened in February 1977. It comprised the iconic galleria stretching 900ft between Queen Street and Dundas Street, and paralleling Yonge Street, Toronto’s main commercial artery. Without much exaggeration, the headlines clamoured that the opening was the “biggest game in town.” As an enthusiastic reporter wrote: “Lieutenant-Governor Pauline McGibbon came gracefully down one immobilized staircase. John Craig Eaton came down the one at her side, and the crowd cheered in time to the pipes. People made speeches about how wonderful it all was.”

This last scene goes a long way to justify the presence of the Eaton Centre in this study. Although the project never claimed to be public space, it nevertheless may well be a better reflexion or representation of actual public space. Here the boundary between public and private seems to become irrelevant, as is the case in Arendt’s description of the rise of the social. The transition into a society where, as Baudrillard argues, consumption has acquired the force of a common sense, should not come as a surprise.  The “common sense” is strong enough that, as opposed to Nathan Phillips Square, no other incentive is needed for the public to occupy the space of the Eaton Centre.

The Eaton Centre commodified public space into a controlled environment. It treated it as a marketable product to which qualities of exchange value and usefulness could be attributed. The fundamentally social and “collective” project of a shopping mall was thus presented as the inevitable and indispensable product of our society’s progress (think of the tax loss comment). As a Globe & Mail article attested: “What can be established, on the evidence from the section now in use, is that the idea of the centre as an enclosed village is both innovative and socially responsible.”

But once it is seen as a commodity, public space can be dangerously approached as a tempting perfection. It is redesigned, reconstructed, climatised, homogenized into a condensation of its socially acceptable qualities. The unacceptable usually remains, but elsewhere. The galleria of the Eaton Centre aggrandized the public space of the street into a fetish. It not only paralleled the main commercial street of Toronto, but perfected it. With time, the “perfection” worked too well. The galleria sucked the life from Yonge Street, slowly changing it into what Mayor Mel Lastman once described as an “eyesore”: a stretch of discount stores, run-down buildings and businesses of questionable reputation.

DUNDAS SQUARE
“This is going to be the first public space created in the new [amalgamated] city and it’s vitally important that we get it right. It will set the standard for all public space in the future.”

In 1996, the City of Toronto officially undertook the project of redeveloping the corner of Yonge and Dundas Street. The plan included as its major contribution a new open public square on the southeast corner of the intersection: the “largest creation of open, hard space in Toronto since the opening of nearby Nathan Phillips Square in 1965.”  The national competition for the square was officially opened in September 1998 announcing that the “design should reflect the metropolitan image, energy and excitement characteristic of such places in the great cities of the world.”  Following the expropriation of a series of shops along Yonge Street that cleared the way for the development, the empty site for the new square got to be described as the “most important piece of real-estate in Canada.”

In December of 1998, Browne & Storey Architects of Toronto were announced as winners. Architectural critics were enthusiastic and the project received design awards –before construction even started. A major reason for the project’s success at this stage was that it promised a relatively calm design in contrast to the chaotic intersection that was soon to be associated with places like Times Square and Piccadilly Circus.

While Dundas Square was presented by the authorities as the next model for public space in the city, the reality was far from being so clear. At its inception, the Square was imagined as a hybrid of private and public control. As opposed to more traditional open spaces, it falls under the category of a City owned building that may be leased to potential users for a profit. In the words of Kyle Rae, the councillor responsible for the project, “the Square is City property, not public property.”
In 2002, the City created the Yonge-Dundas Square Board of Management and approved an amendment to the Toronto Municipal Code that “allows for the maintenance, operation and control of the Square to be exercised by the Board and sets out the Board’s powers and duties regarding the operation and fiscal management of the Square. The by-law establishes the Board’s goal of achieving financial self-sufficiency for the Square by 2005 and allows the Board to establish booking policies for the Square, retain staff and consultants, issue permits for activities on the Square, and to enter into contracts for services as may be required in connection with its role of managing the Square.”

Even councillor Rae admits, in 2001, that although the Square will serve as both a commercial and a public space, it will be “used heavily for commercial events.”  Indeed, the rental schedule for the Square was set, in 2003, so that the City would retain only 70 days for not-for-profit events, leasing the space the rest of the time for a profit. Not being able to afford leaving the “most important piece of real estate in Canada” as non-revenue generating open space the City is forced to turn it into profitable real-estate. And here lies the paradox between people’s expectancy of the space and its reality: on the one hand the City presents the Square as public space while on the other it is forced to put mechanisms in place for its strict control.

As a 2002 City of Toronto staff report reads: “What takes place on the public sidewalk surrounding the Square will impact on the Square’s success in meeting its objective of becoming a vibrant, safe and active focal point and economic catalyst. The [Yonge-Dundas] Board has expressed concern respecting the possible impacts of activities such as sidewalk busking and vending, postering and sidewalk maintenance, and with security issues such as panhandling.” Most activities that are in a sense truly public are judged inadmissible at Dundas Square. The Square is monitored 24/7 by a third-party security firm and the City approved the use of CCTV cameras (something obviously not shocking for London, but very much so for Canada in 2003). Yet, and almost without a hint of irony, the director of the Board ends up lamenting that “people don’t seem to know what to do with the space.”  A view echoed in councillor Rae’s comments when he states: “We would like to see many more spontaneous things happen here at Dundas Square. There has been one anti-war rally and we want more things like that.” An optimistic view moderated, to say the least, by Toronto’s Chief of Police at the time when he reminds us: “A problem is now arising where portions of the public believe that Dundas Square is a public space. […] Anti-war demonstrators in the first quarter of 2003 utilized the square as a meeting point without proper authorization.”

Regardless of inherent contradictions, Dundas Square is presented as something enormously and unquestionably positive. It is then no wonder that the official City rhetoric about the “publicness” of the Square can be taken as a case in point example of spectacular discourse. A discourse that says, to paraphrase Debord, “that which appears is public space.”  It seems that under these conditions, the space of Dundas Square has indeed reached the “fragile perfection” of the spectacle.  Perfect, because it is presented as the positive, inevitable, and indisputable product of society’s progress, and fragile, because this perfected representation must be defended and closed to criticism, being indisputable.

CONCLUSION
The three discussed projects illustrate just how difficult, not to say impossible, any attempt at defining public space in the city may be. Inherent to all three is the representation of a form of authority (civic, commercial, hybrid) that constitutes the basis of the designed “projection”. The people pushing these representations forward (whether politicians, businessmen, or even architects) seem to react to a fragmented public realm by wanting to project an idealised and homogeneous vision. In juxtaposing the official representation of the projects with their actual reception in the public realm, this study has attempted to show that these idealised projections, when confronted to the heterogeneity of the everyday public realm, inevitably face their own spectacular state as “fragile perfections”.

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Urban Research and Architecture: Beyond Henri Lefebvre

The interdisciplinary conference Urban Research and Architecture: Beyond Henri Lefebvre brings together recent applications of Lefebvre’s theory in order to develop new concepts for the analysis of contemporary processes of urbanization and to suggest new design tools for architecture and urbanism.

Rediscovered in the 1990’s, Lefebvre’s theory opened up new ways of understanding of processes of urbanization, their conditions and consequences at any scale of social reality: from the practices of everyday life, through the urban scale, to the global flows of people, capital, information and ideas. At the same time, this theory has the potential to relate urban research and design practices because of its programmatic questioning of the links between urban analysis, the critique of urbanism, and the vision of a new type of social space in the contemporary city.

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