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Klaus Philipsen
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From Imperial to Republican
For a long time, the privileged, the rich, and the powerful erected grandiose representational structures. Their architectural intention was a mix of intimidation, serenity, and awe, achieved through palaces, but also churches and temples, and later through banks and corporate headquarters. All these were essentially private spaces. Public affairs, the public realm, or the pursuit of happiness for the general public had no part in them.
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Baroque Palace of the 18th century, Stuttgart, Germany
(Photo Philipsen)
[/td](Photo Philipsen)
Revolutions returned to the ancient notion of the republic, where power is of and for the people, and the people are the sovereign. The fledgling U.S. republic famously enshrined happiness in the Declaration of Independence.
Architecture followed suit. More of it became architecture for the people, to be used by the masses. Soon, opulent market, train, and exhibition halls, palatial department stores, and eventually movie theaters sprang up in the larger cities. But the architectural style remained imperial and royal, even for these more “democratic” structures.
Buildings representing the new republic—statehouses, the Capitol, the White House, and many city halls and courthouses across the country—imitated classical Roman or Greek architecture, harking back to those republics of antiquity. This demonstrated not only historical awareness, but these stylistic concepts of order, authority, and stability also exuded a strong sense of power more than of democracy. Soon, banks, universities, and all kinds of mundane establishments adopted “neoclassical” architecture, often reduced to a row of pompous columns in front of nondescript facades.
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State Parliament Building Brandenburg, (Germany)
Photo: Philipsen
[/td]Photo: Philipsen
Some of the architecture of antiquity was, indeed, for the masses, especially forums, arenas, and amphitheaters. Thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, assembled there to watch the great old stories of humanity performed on stage, often with educational elements. In the later Roman Empire, mass gatherings devolved into bloody spectacles that were entertainment and brutal exhibitions of power at once.
Movie Palaces _ Where the Masses can be Royalty
The age of movie theaters and palaces was more an expression of democracy. Their architecture mixed awe with joyfulness and quite possibly the desire to make everyday people feel special and happy. An article in the Smithsonian, under the title “Movie Palaces Let Everyday Americans Be Royalty,” makes this explicit. Those movie palaces were hardly expressions of power. They were, indeed, made for the masses. The article notes that in 1916 America had no less than 21,000 movie palaces across thousands of cities and towns, where these architecturally ornate theaters were indeed some kind of community centers, in the sense of Hannah Arendt’s insight that humanity needs company.
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Uptown Theater, Chicago (Yves Marchand, Romain Meffre)
[/td]Just like the old Greek open-air theaters, these palaces showed moving stories of humanity made during Hollywood’s Golden Age, such as Gone With the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, Casablanca, and It’s a Wonderful Life.
However, the spectacles in the grand theaters didn’t last. The palaces closed one after the other, first battered by television. Current movie streaming in the privacy of the home, in relative solitude, threatens even smaller movie houses. In an interesting twist, Nolan’s The Odyssey revives Greek mythology for the medium of the movie.
The fascination with U.S. movie palaces continued after they closed. Their “ruin porn” attracted French photographers Romain Meffre and Yves Marchand to compile Theaters, featuring, among many others, the since-reopened and restored Baltimore Parkway Theater.
The movie palace offered entertainment and a shared experience in a place open to anybody who could pay the modest ticket in cities and towns across the republic.
The Rise and Fall of Public Space
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Capitol, DC (Photo Philipsen)
[/td]The rise and fall of public space, whether indoors or outdoors, has been the focus of sociologists (Oldenburg’s “Third Places”), philosophers (Habermas, Lefebvre), and writers such as Hannah Arendt. Television and the Internet are not only technologies maiming the movie theater but the public realm in general, and, if one believes Arendt, also public happiness. Individual, private transportation via the automobile also did a thorough job of isolating us and compromising or eliminating “third places.” I recently covered this topic in the article “The Architecture of Belonging”.
This article is a sequel, focused on buildings and the question of whether there is an adequate architectural expression for a democratic republic in the sense of participation, discourse, and exchange, which Arendt describes as providing “public happiness.” Is architecture capable of boosting public interaction and community and providing “public happiness” by counteracting the trends toward increasing privatization? Should there be modern participation palaces?
Hannah Arendt distinguished between private and public happiness and concluded that the Founding Fathers had cleverly addressed both in order to gain maximal support for their proposed republic. As early as the 1960s, though, she maintained that public happiness had lost out in favor of the individualistic private happiness of consumption and gratification, back then far from reaching the fever pitch of today.
Arendt doesn’t speak about architecture in her writings about the value of public deliberation and participation, even though “she laments the disappearance of spaces where citizens meet, speak, and judge together. Without these spaces, people withdraw from public life and politics shrinks into a contest between party machines and bureaucratic administration. The public realm loses dignity because citizens have no place to appear as political actors.” (Berkowitz). However, many thinkers tried to conceptualize being an individual, but also a group-oriented social being, and what modern science has to say about it.
A wave of Brutalist courthouses (Towson, MD), city halls (Boston, MA), and government buildings (the FBI in Washington, DC) that sprang up after a period of civil unrest are hardly good examples of democratic expression. They are designed as fortresses, guided by fear of the people. People despise these massive concrete structures even more than the politicians and bureaucrats inside them. The postmodern generation of public buildings, such as the Portland Building in Portland, OR, didn’t fare much better.
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City Hall, Boston (Photo Philipsen)
[/td]An entire generation of architects talked about democratic architecture or considered the use of glass and transparency as democratic. Architectural Review has a nice essay about this. (Democratic designs: show me what democracy looks like)
Is our modern society un-representable by architecture?
What could a Modern Architecture for the People and their Public Happiness look like?
Given the brittle state of our public realm and its recognized importance to the fabric of humanity, democracy, and social health, this is not an idle question. Human isolation has reached proportions where it is seen as a health threat. The ongoing privatization of life is threatening Main Streets in towns and cities and the public realm itself.
I searched for an answer in Alain de Botton’s book, promisingly titled The Architecture of Happiness. The book is a quite entertaining approach to the art of architecture, but reflects more on individual happiness and doubts that even for it architecture has much responsibility, thanks to the individual’s frequently irreverent position vis-à-vis beauty and art. De Botton’s at times humorous reflections on how buildings may or may not influence our moods or actions made me doubt even more whether architecture can play a role in stabilizing a functioning humanity.
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Government Quarter, Loebe Haus Berlin
(Photo: Philipsen)
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What if the current populace has become so numbed by the constant aesthetic assault that our usual built environment rains on us, combined with the even more constant escape via social media that allows us to be in other places at any moment, that any attempt to stimulate community through architecture is doomed to fail?
Architectural Crowd Pleasers
People are still drawn to architecture. There is no shortage of examples where grand public architecture is drawing huge crowds simply through its design, without using the language of power to look like old palaces. There are plenty of museums, concert halls, libraries, and even stores that are examples of this, from the Guggenheim (Gehry in Bilbao) to the Louvre Pyramid in Paris (I. M. Pei) to the Elbphilharmonie (Herzog & de Meuron in Hamburg) to Rem Koolhaas’ library in Seattle and Apple’s glass cube in Manhattan.
The Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has even given a waste incinerator a crowd-pleasing element and created an architectural attraction with his Amager Bakke ski slope on the roof. Some of those architectural magnets are explicitly designed as community and art centers, such as the Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center in Athens, Greece, designed by Renzo Piano, which evokes Athens’ Agora of antiquity and was, interestingly, funded by the same foundation that gave money to the restoration of the Parkway movie palace noted above.
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Stavros-Niarchos-Center-Athens (website)
[/td]The attraction of the architectural shell, which draws more people than the actual intended use, does not promote discourse, community building, and probably does little to shore up democracy. But the attraction probably produces happiness in public. It certainly proves that the public still cares about architecture.
Does Deliberation Need Architecture?
We hear that Swiss direct democratic deliberation took place under trees or in town squares. No architecture. The great tradition of people coming together to deliberate about their future - which Arendt so admired in the US- is not dead, at least not on the local level. Developers and any entity that wants to build anything of significance need to provide community participation. I have been in many dozens, if not hundreds, of those meetings. Almost always, they lack architectural grandeur. Participation takes place in church basements, school cafeterias, gymnasiums, and restaurant back rooms. Stackable plastic chairs, folding tables, vinyl floors and fluorescent lights are the predominant ambience.
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Public deliberation: Folding tables and vinyl floors
(Photo Philipsen)
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Citizens come together, debate, sometimes even take pen and paper, mark up maps, and stick dots on their preferred solutions in spite of their crowded schedules, in spite of television, and the Internet. The deliberations concern entire urban quarters or just anoter gas station. However, rarely have I encountered public happiness in these places; more often, frustration, anger, and despair. Participation doesn't always produce happiness; when it does, it is because people having stripped an issue of its superficial solutions to its principles and basic objectives find a consensus that can bridge conflicting interests and a path forward. But this must be the topic of another article.
As far as architecture, participation doesn’t have to happen in dinginess or shabbiness. Good architecture and design can be bestowed on places designed for the community. I have had community meetings in a refurbished former Art Deco movie theater with a new lease on life as a community “Impact Hub.” I held design discourses in a multipurpose artist gallery-cum-bar in which discussion was facilitated by beer and anybody could walk in from the street. I certainly was happier in those spaces. Whether it made others happier or improved the deliberations is hard to say. De Botton is right, many people don't register the absense of daylight, ugly wall paint or ghastly light. Still, it is wortyh pointing out that slowly public deliberations is a recognized feature in architectural programming.
Herzog & de Meuron designed a community art and makerspace in a converted power station in Brooklyn (Powerhouse Arts). Similarly, a smaller but also very bright and friendly public community space is located at a bright and modern Baltimore Makerspace. The City of Baltimore built a new central municipal market with a wonderful community gathering space on the upper level; a shiny new rec center is also sporting a great community room. A socially inclined developer saved a local building and turned it into a "Unity Hall" for the community. All these newer spaces are designed with community meetings in mind, the designated spaces feature more wood than plastic, are well appointed, allow daylight and sometimes a full view of the street in front.
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Powerhouse Brooklyn, Community deliberation
[/td]Every city knows this mix of venues: the shabby church basements and the modern civic spaces often provided by nonprofits, community centers, and public libraries that are well enough designed but far from being destinations for architectural pilgrimage. In most cases, public discourse is an afterthought, not at the core of the program or the design. If a creatively designed building specifically for the purpose of participation, becomes very popular, such as a former political campaign structure in Taiwan designed by BIAS Architects & Associates, originally intended to be temporary, it stands to lose its original function: The structure was saved but became a sort of folly in a new park.
Architecture matters as a condition, not a cause, of public happiness.
All this shows that community deliberation can benefit from architecture's newfound interest in reinventing gathering spaces beyond the "decorated shed". Architecture can attract people, it also can make people feel valued and welcome but it cannot by itself make people engage, deliberate, build trust, transparency, or create public happiness. Thus the quest for an "architecture for democracy" may be a fools errand. The question of what a modern forum for public discourse should look like misses the point.
Discourse and participation are foremost not issues of physical accommodation. Nor are the topics of most discourses merely objects, even if development is discussed. Usually ethical concern with the well-being of individuals is the foundation of the discussion, not the architectural object. Participation requires information, access, and lots of organizing. This can occur almost anywhere. What is required is respect for people, not big, not a showy architectural shell.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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