ACDouglas wrote a pregnant email:
"As you yourself pointed out, your opinions are concerned principally with urban planning -- with "site plans," as you put it -- not with architecture...urban planning ought NOT to be the business of architects. The business of architects is architecture -- i.e., individual buildings or group of buildings, project by project. The business of urban planning should be left to, well, urban planners who have no business messing about with matters of art. That's the business of architects."
Beguiling concept except when you get down to particulars. One minor particular is how/where do you the draw the line between architecture and urban planning?
For example, consider The Three Rules (and please do consider them, either in long form--a 500k PDF or short form--a 45k PDF)...well, are those Rules urban planning rules? or architectural ones? Of course I think that they are both. They operate as architecural constraints for a specific building in order to create a piece of urbanism.
So I question whether there is a reasonable, practical method to separate "architecture" from "urban planning" along the lines suggested above. No?
UPDATE: Murphs weighs in sensibly on Architecture vs. Urban Planning.
I don't want to propose this as a solid line between the two disciplines, but an important distinction I have noticed between architects and urban designers is their consideration of social conditions. Architecture is a technical discipline that sometimes moves into art (in rare cases). Urban design (not planning), is a technical discipline that sometimes moves into social science.
Some of the best architects are able to blur the line. But there are also other great architects who couldn't care less, and design great buildings. I think it is currently trendy (at least in what I pay attention to) for architects to broaden their focus. However, many of them just don't have the skills to do so. Understanding the city as a whole, the economic and social trends, the life of all the people interacting with an urban space is a very different challenge to designing a building for a client (Put on fire suit to prepare for flaming by architects now). I am not sure that urban designers get it right either, as there are very few places to get good training that straddles this line, but I think it is more a central part of an urban designers tool kit. That said, there are still many so-called urban designers who get it totally wrong.
Posted by: Rich | Aug 29, 2003 at 03:36 AM
AC Davis seems to be of the Prometheus Shrugged school: How DARE any layman question the latest opus of one of the GREAT TORTURED MASTERS OF DER BUILDING ART. Just because he or she has to live in it or work in it or see a play or concert in it, this COMMONER should just step back and take it as DER MAESTROS of architecture impose their latest meditations of the deep and profound reality of the cosmos and society on the plebian fools.
I say "Meh" to that.
Posted by: Brian Miller | Aug 29, 2003 at 09:30 AM
Cross-posted from Aaron Haspel's
I think the real issue is actually a bit different. Let's assume for sake of discussion that the notion that "Architecture" is "Art" is true.
I say "so what?"
"Artists" are not exempt from society's laws though they may want to posture as if they can until their work starts selling.
Majority opinion, which in this case happens to be wise, provides no exemption from the law for art or its creators. Traffic laws still apply to even the most exalted artist. Building and zoning do and should as well. The idea that somehow an individual whom someone else has somehow annointed (do you apply for a license?) as an Architect/Artist should be exempt from society's laws is pretty-much something that we, as a society, have consider and rejected as a non-starter.
Even Frank Lloyd Wright has to get a building permit.
Posted by: David Sucher | Aug 30, 2003 at 08:33 AM
The idea that somehow an individual whom someone else has somehow annointed (do you apply for a license?) as an Architect/Artist should be exempt from society's laws is pretty-much something that we, as a society, have consider and rejected as a non-starter.
Society has a law against roofs that leak?
That's rubbish, of course, and as I've pointed out, none of Wright's buildings was by any stretch a danger to its original owner. As for exempting Wright from such bourgeois concerns as leaky roofs, he was exempted -- over and over again -- by his clients, the only ones who count in such matters. No-one other than the client -- and most certainly not that common-man entity, "society" -- has a right to meddle in such business.
ACD
Posted by: acdouglas | Aug 30, 2003 at 10:29 AM
It seems to me the line is clear. The business of urban planners is to lay out the grid, say what sort of activity can go where, prescribe the minimum construction standards for any and all buildings built within that grid, section by section, and then disappear forever in the business of individual building design, that being the exclusive business of individual architects and their clients.
As I said, the line is clear.
ACD
Posted by: acdouglas | Aug 30, 2003 at 10:50 AM