Why Cities Look the Way They Do

September 25, 2019

Why Cities Look the Way They Do

Why Cities Look the Way They Do
Richard J. Williams
Polity, June 2019

We tend to think cities look the way they do because of the conscious work of architects, planners and builders. But what if the look of cities had less to do with design, and more to do with social, cultural, financial and political processes, and the way ordinary citizens interact with them? What if the city is a process as much as a design? Richard J. Williams takes the moment construction is finished as a beginning, tracing the myriad processes that produce the look of the contemporary global city.

This book is the story of dramatic but unforeseen urban sights: how financial capital spawns empty towering skyscrapers and hollowed-out ghettoes; how the zoning of once-illicit sexual practices in marginal areas of the city results in the reinvention of culturally vibrant gay villages; how abandoned factories have been repurposed as creative hubs in a precarious postindustrial economy. It is also the story of how popular urban clichés and the fictional portrayal of cities powerfully shape the way we read and see the bricks, concrete and glass that surround us.

dDAB Commentary:

With its focus on processes and contexts that influence and determine how buildings are created, this book should really have a different name, one less about "looking." Maybe something like Why Are These Buildings in My City? Williams, a professor of visual culture, points the reader to the the way things look but then decides that the people who design and detail those buildings — architects — are just not that important. For an architect like myself it makes for a frustrating read, even though Williams has many good points about how power, money, culture, and other factors drive the development and construction of our cities. But there is a difference — not always dramatic, I'll admit — between the processes that lead to a building and the design that gives it a particular appearance.

Take 432 Park Avenue by Rafael Viñoly, a building Williams discusses in the "Money" chapter. With 85 stories, nearly 1,400 feet to the roof, and only 104 apartments, the tower is a place for people to invest, to park their money in New York City stable real estate market. It's therefore been described as "a safety deposit box in the sky" and in turn Williams sees emptiness (of people, furnishings, etc.) as the tower's most important characteristic. Outside of mentioning the slenderness of the tower and the openings every 14 floors that allow the wind to pass through, Williams does not delve into its appearance, the way it looks. Why a grid? (A mix of inspiration, structural logic, and the importance of views.) How is it so tall and slender? (It's about exit stairs as much as those openings.) Is that an exposed concrete skin? (Yes, a rarity in a luxury tower.) These and other characteristics determine as well how the building looks but are set aside by Williams in favor of other things.

While Williams quotes architecture critics lambasting Viñoly's 20 Fenchurch Street (aka Walkie Talkie) in London in the same chapter, there's little to be quoted about 432 Park Avenue. Why the dearth of architectural criticism over such a prominent building? I think it's because architectural criticism and other features in the United States are done with the involvement of architects and the permission of clients. If those players do not want to be featured then they don't allow access or they convince the publications not to run a story. I can't imagine otherwise why three years after its completion only one critical story exists on 432 Park Avenue: Jacob Moore's 2015 piece in the academic Avery Review. Nothing in Architectural Record, no New York Times (but lots of real estate stories there), an Aaron Betsky piece now five years old in Architect, and nothing in Metropolis. Instead, articles tend to focus on the processes and contexts that led to the existence of this supertall and all the others along Billionaire's Row: the exact things Williams is focused on throughout his book but says is missing from architectural criticism. I'd argue that the processes and contexts of making buildings are discussed plenty, but we still need rigorous, unbiased critiques of the parts of buildings that are designed — or better yet, writing that reveals how architects turned those processes into architecture and that critiques how they could have been done it better. That type of criticism is hard to come by these days.